Faculty Senate: No Secret Searches for UA President

By Lizzy Hahn

The University of Alaska Fairbanks Faculty Senate is pushing back on what it sees as a lack of transparency in the search for the university system’s next president.

The Faculty Senate on Monday unanimously passed a resolution opposing the Board of Regents decision to conduct the search according to a new method that reduces the amount of openness that has traditionally defined the process.

According to a Feb. 16 email sent out to the UA community, Board of Regents Chair Scott Jepsen, who is also heading the presidential search committee, said presidential search committees in the past would conduct fully public finalist interviews and forums for senior leadership positions. 

However, for the current search, Jepsen said the regents asked the committee to use a new technique called the “representative model” in the interest of balancing transparency with “candidate confidentiality.”

The search committee will vet candidates and forward the top three to five unranked finalists to the Board of Regents. Finalist candidates will visit each main university campus. While on campus, they will meet with the chancellor and a subset of the chancellor’s management team, as well as representatives from the Faculty Councils, according to Jepsen’s email.

The candidates may also meet with community leaders from the various main campus communities. While in Fairbanks, the candidates will meet with the senior system office leadership as well as the full Board of Regents.

During their visits, finalists will have the opportunity to ask questions, tour the main campuses, and see the communities where they are located.

Everyone involved in the candidate selection process must sign non-disclosure agreements “to protect the identity of each candidate and any potentially personally identifiable information about them.”

The Faculty Senate resolution says this method of vetting and choosing the next UA president is wrongheaded because it lacks transparency.  The process must not only be open and transparent but be “mutually respectful” and have an “inclusive framework.”

“The proposed secretive and non-transparent process is anti-ethical to the principles of shared governance and a process that allows faculty to weigh in in transparent ways,” the resolution states.

The resolution says a non-disclosure agreement “significantly inhibits” the committee's ability to get feedback from students, faculty, staff and community members on presidential candidates.

The Faculty Senate stressed the importance of hearing from the broader UA community about candidates. By holding public interviews and forums, candidates can better learn “about who we are and help them determine whether this is a community they would fit well within,” according to the resolution. The other positive of holding these forums, according to the resolution, is that the committee can witness which candidate is “best suited” to be the UA president based on their responses to questions asked by the public.

The Faculty Senate isn’t the only entity that opposes the new search method. Veteran Fairbanks columnist Dermot Cole also criticized the lack of transparency in a recent column in his Reporting from Alaska blog. Read it here.