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Brian Morelli, Board Didn't Adjourn for a Week

Rob Daniel, Legislators: Search Should be More Open

[Note: This material is copyright by the Press-Citizen, and is reproduced here as a matter of "fair use" for non-commercial, educational purposes only. Any other use may require the prior approval of the Iowa City Press-Citizen.]

The regents' move is the latest in a series of decisions involving the presidential search that has inflamed the UI community. Faculty and staff leaders now plan a no-confidence vote on the Board of Regents and say they will not participate in the next search.

The regents discussed the vote in closed session on a conference call and made the formal vote in open session. During the call, Regent Amir Arbisser made the motion to reject the search committee's four recommended candidates and called to dissolve the search committee.

Regent president pro-tem and search committee chairwoman Teresa Wahlert seconded the motion. With a 6-2 vote, with one member abstaining, the motion passed without discussion.

In a prepared statement, Regent president Michael Gartner said, "the regents felt that while these candidates were wonderfully accomplished people, the regents needed candidates who had more experience as leaders who oversaw complex health-sciences operations as well as the myriad of other academic and non-academic operations of a large university."

UI staff council president and search committee member Mary Greer disagreed with Gartner's statement.

Greer said three medical experts were on the committee and recommended the candidates. She said those members had a higher level of knowledge about hospital administration than the regents, except Arbisser, who is a doctor and endorsed the candidates.

Greer was dismayed with Friday's outcome and what she considered an insult by the regents.

"I hope the staff can contribute again in a search for the president, but it will not occur with this board, ever," she said.

UI faculty, staff and student leaders, who gathered along with members of the media, monitored the call in Jessup Hall on UI campus and were not pleased with the decision.

UI faculty member Katherine Tachau, who served as vice chairwoman on the search committee, said she suspected that the search was terminated because a candidate Gartner supported did not make the list of finalists.

"The Board of Regents' decision is the final betrayal of a process that has been marked at every stage by hostility on the part of the board leadership for the University of Iowa and the Iowa City community," Tachau said. "This reflects a mutual loss of confidence that will be very difficult to restore."

Sheldon Kurtz, president of the UI Faculty Senate, said the regents now are likely on their own when it comes to finding a new president.

"We assume that a search will continue in the future at some time. I do not expect that it will have the support of any member -- staff, student or faculty -- from this university," Kurtz said. "They will probably have to search on their own."

Search committee vice chairman Francois Abboud, a physician in the internal medicine department in the Carver College of Medicine, gave his full support to the four candidates, who have not been identified.

"I am amazed that every member of the Board of Regents who were at the interview session had expressed great enthusiasm about the excellence of the candidates" yet voted to reject them, Abboud said. "To come to this kind of resolution is just unbelievable. We've got to consider this an insult to the constituency of the university and to everything we stand for at this university."

Peter McElligott, President of the UI Student Government and also a search committee member, echoed concerns expressed by UI faculty and staff.

"It's an insult to us. It's an insult to the candidates we looked at," McElligott, said. "We're at a loss as to how to proceed from here."

Faculty and staff leaders plan to pursue votes of no confidence in the regents via the Faculty Council and Staff Council.

Wahlert said faculty and staff could do what they like regarding the "no-confidence" scenario and said faculty had "complete and utter input" in the search process.

Current interim president Gary Fethke, who will continue to stay on until a new president is named, said in an e-mail that he was surprised by the decision.

"I believe that everyone should focus their efforts on helping the UI to succeed and in finding a great leader for the institution," he said.

The search process has been contentious from the beginning. Shortly after David Skorton announced this year he was leaving UI to take over as president of Cornell University, the regents ruffled faculty feathers when they formed a search committee that was led not by UI faculty but by regent Teresa Wahlert. In the recent past, UI faculty have been in charge of identifying finalists for the president's job although the regents always have the final say in who is ultimately hired.

When the search committee was formed, it had Wahlert as the chairwoman and Tachau and Abboud as vice chairs. This summer, UI formed its own presidential advisory committee. Tachau and Abboud appointed the 11 members -- all UI faculty and staff. The committee reported to Tachau and Abboud and was charged with identifying candidates, developing criteria for a new president and participating in interviews of semifinalists and finalists. It isn't clear if that involvement will ever become reality.

Arbisser said that despite tensions and discontent his decision came down to choosing the right candidate, which he did not feel the committee had found.

"They are angry. I know they are, and they have a right to be," Arbisser said. "I know that I will not be a popular person. At the end of the day, when people really introspect, they want a great leader they can get behind.

Arbisser said the next process would look different.

The board was divided on whether to terminate the search. Gartner, Wahlert, Arbisser, Ruth Harkin, Tom Bedell and Mary Ellen Becker voted to reject the candidates. Regents Bob Downer of Iowa City and Rose Vasquez opposed, and student regent Jenny Connolly abstained.

The search committee, which included Gartner, Wahlert, Arbisser and Harkin, was nearly unanimous in its support of the four finalists.

Downer said he learned of the boards intentions Wednesday night.

"I'm extremely disappointed in the action taken by the regents," Downer said. "I don't understand why the majority took this action. It is unfortunate and ill-advised."

Iowa City Mayor Ross Wilburn served on the committee and was disappointed by the outcome. He also said he didn't think this was the regents' only option.

The regents' next meeting will be Dec. 11 and 12 in Iowa City.
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Press-Citizen reporters Rob Daniel and Kathryn Fiegen contributed to this story.

The Iowa state Board of Regents never adjourned from the end of its Nov. 9 meeting in Ames to Friday's telephonic meeting, and they held several meetings in that period.

The regents provided no public notice of time, date, place and a tentative agenda, which Iowa Code requires. It is unclear if they broke any laws.

"The Iowa Supreme Court will not hold public bodies to a strict interpretation of the law. That might be the latitude the Board of Regents is using," said Herb Strentz, the former executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, from his home in Des Moines on Friday evening.

"Ideally, what you'd do is announce you are going into closed session, then come out and adjourn."

Although Strentz thinks the regents are within the letter of law, he said he thought they "made shambles" of the spirit of the law.

"It does injury to laws that emphasis public access. The notion of having an unending meeting, each closed session is supposed to be tape recoded and minutes kept. If they didn't adjourn the meeting, did they keep a tape recorder running some place for 72 hours?" he said.

Regent President Michael Gartner and regent director Gary Steinke did not return phone calls on the topic Friday.

The nine-member board convened at least twice in person and other times by phone before opening in closed session Friday for a telephonic interview. They adjourned following Friday's meeting in which a split board voted to reject four candidates for University of Iowa president and dissolve the Presidential Search Committee that recommended them.

"It was curious to us that at the end of the regent meeting on (Nov. 9) they were going to go into closed executive session," UI staff council president and search committee member Mary Greer said. "They never said where that session would be."

Before candidate interviews that took place Nov. 11 in Des Moines, which were moved at the last minute from Chicago, Regent President Michael Gartner announced that they were in executive session of the Board of Regents, Greer said.

At the end of the day, Gartner said the board was going into recess. The same scenario occurred the following day for a second day of interviews, ending in recess.

All nine regents, including the four on the search committee, participated in person in the interviews, along with members of the 19-person presidential search committee and the UI advisory committee, Regent Amir Arbisser said.

"At that meeting, our chair (Wahlert) informed us that she had invited the entire Board of Regents to the interview," Greer said. "That was done, she said, for expediency purposes. She said we had to hurry this process up."

Arbisser, who served on the search committee, said the Regents had met at least three times between the Ames meeting and Friday. Those were mostly telephone discussions, he said.

"It was really a continuation of the same discussion, whether it happened once or twice, we were discussing the same topic," Arbisser said.

The process to select the new president of the University of Iowa should have been more open and public, area legislators said Friday.

The comments come after the Iowa state Board of Regents voted to temporarily end its search for a UI president and to dissolve the 19-member search committee. The process has been a source of controversy as the Regents kept the identities of candidates secret and did not give its intentions before it announced the decision at an open session conference call.

Rep. Mary Mascher, D-Iowa City, said she did not know why the Regents opted for the confidentiality rather than open up the process as in previous searches. Community members, UI faculty and students met with candidates Mary Sue Coleman and David Skorton before they were selected as president in 1995 and 2003, respectively, she said.

"I was hoping the process would be more open ... things that have worked in the past," Mascher said. "I don't know the rationale behind (the confidentiality)."

Rep. David Jacoby, D-Coralville, said he thinks the Regents might be trying to protect the candidates by not revealing their identities. However, he said candidates could learn more about the job by meeting with community members.

"The cornerstone of our area is the university," he said. "It's good for the candidates to get a feel for the community."

The requirements for the position should have been made more clear, Jacoby said. The candidates were rejected because the Regents said they needed candidates who had more experience overseeing hospital operations and research, according to a Regents statement.

"It certainly seems to me that they would have defined that requirement in the beginning," Jacoby said. "That indeed determines your applicant pool. If it's not announced, then you have applicants and you're wasting your time and their time."

Mascher and Jacoby said they were confident Gov.-elect Chet Culver would make good on a campaign pledge to do a review of the Board of Regents.

Jacoby said the Regents should meet with Culver and key legislators to discuss the search process. He said it did not look good that UI did not have a new president 10 months after Skorton announced his resignation when it took two weeks to select Benjamin Allen as the new president at the University of Northern Iowa last year.

"That doesn't instill confidence in students, employees or faculty," Jacoby said.

Phone calls to Culver's office as well as Gov. Tom Vilsack's office were not returned.

Sen. Robert Dvorsky, D-Coralville, said the Regents' decision to end the search for now could be a chance to start anew.

"I think this might open up the search to more people on campus," he said. "It gives them an opportunity to get a little more involvement from the campus and community on the search committee. You need to do things more publicly and get more people involved in the process. You want to get it right."