One perennial skirmish in Canadian higher education is the question of whether or not candidates for senior administration—in particular the presidency—should have to be publicly identified at the shortlist stage and (preferably) make themselves available for public questioning. Specifically what people want is, in the words of the Memorial University Faculty Association (MUNFA), which is currently having such a skirmish as the university forms the search committee to replace Vianne Timmons, is the following:

“…the ultimate short-list of candidates should be announced to the university community, with each making a public presentation on their vision for the university and answering questions about how they propose to take us there. Members of the University community should then be given a chance to share their assessments of the final candidates with the search committee.”

And the rationale for this, effectively, is:

“We deserve the opportunity to hear from presidential aspirants about their vision for our future, how they will take us there, and why they are qualified to do so. How (well) do they understand our university and province? How do they handle a public presentation? How do they engage with faculty, students, staff and community members? How do they handle challenging questions? In other words—and it would benefit the search committee to see this in action too—what is their presidential style?

(Just to be clear here, this post isn’t specifically about MUNFA and Memorial: I think pretty much any CAUT member-union would write something similar, it’s pretty much a go-to union demand these days. I’m just using this as a handy example to discuss the wider issue. And please do read the whole document I linked to above).

So, what to think of this?

There’s an unstated assumption here that Presidential search committees do not look for clues about things like style, how candidates handle challenging questions, etc., and that only a public process can bring these elements into play. This is possible, and I am quite sure that the attention paid to these questions is going to vary from one committee (or one search consultant) to another. But I doubt it’s universal. If your counterfactual is a bad search committee, then this critique carries a lot of force; but if it’s a good search committee, then much less so.

But then there is the counterargument: that “open” hiring has an obvious potential to deter candidates from other institutions from applying. If you’re in a position of authority at a university, that position in practice is to some extent tied to longevity and permanence. It is, as Brian Rosenberg has noted all too easy for permanently-tenured staff up to about the decanal level to “wait out” managers. There’s basically no faster way for a Provost or a President to lose all authority than for it to be known that they are looking for a move away from their university. Think about how much less likely people would be if, every time a President or Provost let their name go forward at another university (or even if it was only released at the shortlist stage) all their colleagues would automatically hear about it because of an “open process” policy. An open process is therefore one which is likely to result in fewer applications and less inter-institutional mobility (more on the latter in a second). It means smaller talent pools from which to hire—it would certainly tilt things heavily in the direction of internal candidates. And if you want more talent on your campus, that’s presumably a bad thing.

Now, unions understand this drawback perfectly well. In fact, the MUNFA letter suggests keeping the process confidential until the final round for precisely that reason. But at the same time, it tries to counter the argument about smaller talent pools by arguing—nonsensically—that there is no “proof” that open processes result in worse hires. This is true but meaningless because you can’t test the counterfactual. It’s very much like arguing there is no proof that you’ll have a worse meal if you restrict your search to restaurants within 500 metres of your house: it might be true, and there’s no way to tell for sure, but come on. The odds are pretty clear.

I can’t imagine that faculty unions don’t understand the weakness of this argument. So I think it’s fair to infer that unions would prefer that universities hire from within. Possibly this is because they think institutional management does not matter that much, and one manager is as good as the next. Or possibly it is because they think senior managers who are of long tenure in an institution are less likely to come up with disruptive, status quo-altering ideas.

To my mind, this is a counterproductive stance. Management does matter, and every institution should have the ability to try to have as broad a selection pool as possible. The issues about a candidate’s style and temperament raised by MUNFA in its letter are important, but as noted above, an open process isn’t the only way to get at these things. All it takes is a selection committee with an appropriately balanced membership, including a couple of respected senior academic staff, combined with a search process incorporating public input on the qualities and priorities for an incoming hire, and giving committee members the chance to ask the kinds of important questions that the MUNFA letter right thinks should be asked.

Much of this is fairly de rigeur in Presidential searches, particularly in larger institutions. And if it’s not already the case at your institution, it absolutely should be. That way, institutions can get all the putative benefits of an open process without reducing the available talent pool. Win-win.