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[Note: This material is copyright by the Des Moines Register, 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 Des Moines Register.]

Monday's meeting does not bode well for the presidential-search process being open to the public. Though disappointing, that comes as little surprise, given that the regents mostly shut out the public in the previous go-around, and members of the board have indicated the door will be closed even tighter this time. Even on-campus visits with finalists are likely to be closed.

This is disturbing on a number of counts.

First, it is regrettable that a nine-member board appointed by the governor to oversee the state universities will set a new and distressingly low standard for all other government bodies in Iowa to follow in hiring public officials. The public will be less informed, and the public process will be diminished as a result.

Second, in addition to drawing a veil of secrecy around the presidential-search process, the regents have adopted a style of meeting that makes public participation extremely unlikely, if not impossible. Since the board scuttled the last search process in late November, its "meetings" have often involved conference calls. Meanwhile, it was obvious to anyone who listened in on the telephone conference call Monday afternoon that the board members had been exchanging what regent Rose Vasquez called a "barrage" of e-mails in which they articulated their views and straw polls were taken on specific questions.

This is a clear violation of the intent of the public-meetings law. If elected or appointed officials can do all of their business via e-mail and the telephone and then simply hold a conference call to ratify decisions that have been thoroughly discussed and agreed upon in secret, how on Earth can the public ever be expected to observe how public policy is made, let alone participate in the process?

The Iowa Legislature, in creating the open-meetings law, stated in the first sentence the "Intent - declaration of policy": The purpose of the law is to "assure, through a requirement of open meetings of governmental bodies, that the basis and rationale of government decisions, as well as those decisions themselves, are easily accessible to the people."

The Iowa Board of Regents, in its actions of late, has come nowhere near meeting that intent.