A couple of points which I couldn’t quite jam into last week’s blog on University Presidents:

1) Where are the foreigners?   Why do we assume that only Canadians can run Canadian universities?  It’s fairly obvious from their actions that university Boards of Governors assume this.  And when we do want a “foreign” perspective, all we seem to do is repatriate Canadians (e.g.: Robert Birgenau at Toronto, Roseann Runte at Carleton, Doyle Anderson at FNU, etc.).

That’s a pretty poor showing for a set of institutions which claims pretensions to being world-class.  Granted, every institution has a local community to satisfy, but it’s not as though our universities are so peculiar as to be impenetrable to outsiders.  If central banking has become a sufficiently technocratic profession that someone can swap Ottawa for London with relatively little difficulty, why should university leadership be any different?   American universities aren’t shy about this: Runte’s passport didn’t cause a stir when she was at Old Dominion; even Oxford has appointed foreigners to the Vice-chancellorship (John Hood was a kiwi).

Forgive me for banging this drum again, but why exactly, if we want to be taken seriously in the internationalization department, are we not aggressively hiring foreign senior administrative staff who might actually give us a leg up in this area?  Why haven’t one or two universities poached an Australian or a Brit to run their operations?  They’d certainly have more experience than almost any domestic candidate in terms of running universities on a shoestring, and attracting foreign students.

It’s a mystery to me.

2) Are there better ways to choose Presidents?  A couple of people wrote to me last week to ask whether there wasn’t a better way to select Presidents than the current method – having a dozen people go into secret conclave with a headhunter and emerge 8 months later with a name.

In much of the world – including some Quebec institutions –  the model is a democratic one.  Put simply, faculty vote for their Presidents.  This tends to favour insiders (though Francois Tavenas was elected at Laval, while still employed at McGill), which isn’t always a good thing, since a lot of back-room deals can be made on the way to building a winning electoral coalition.  An in-between solution is to present a number of candidates to the university community in a town hall setting, prior to making a final decision.  It’s more open and democratic than the current system, but if you require job candidates to announce to the world that they’re open to leaving their present job, you deter a lot of good candidates who already hold important positions.

So, no, I’m not sure there is a better method to be honest.  Sorry.