After constant reiteration from UT Interim President Jan Simek that he will not stay on as system president past his two-year stint, the university is now on the road to finding a permanent replacement.
Gov. Phil Bredesen challenged the UT Board of Trustees at the board’s June meeting to improve the vetting process of candidates.
“I have been here through two (presidents) and various interim owners of that position, one of whom I asked to leave and as some of you may remember, another of whom I was frankly sorry to see leave,” Bredesen said.
He said the situations could have been avoided with a deeper background check into the candidates.
“In the case of both of the presidents that have left while I’ve been here, there have been issues surrounding what they brought to the university in terms of history and some issues,” he said. “It is striking to me that in both cases there was no lack of knowledge in other places about any of these particular issues that we were currently unable to discern in the process.”
Bredesen encouraged an independent way of verifying facts outside of the search firm hired, who he said would have a bias for getting the search over and done with.
“I think that clearly the process in vetting the candidates, we have come up a little short,” he said.
He said he knew the job was difficult because laws dictate that the search must be transparent and public, but the presidency is a well-paid job at an important institution. And the search must be perfected in order to correct past mistakes.
“(The university) has been slowed up and damaged in some ways by what has happened with a couple of the presidents we’ve had here,” he said.
Despite his suggestion, Bredesen assured that he would not get personally involved in the search.
“Once again, I am not going to stick my finger in that process in any way,” he said. “If there’s any responsibility that any Board of Trustees has, picking the CEO has to be at the top of the list always.”
The UT Board of Trustees approved at their June meeting compensation for the next president, including a base salary of $420,000 to $450,000, a housing allowance of $20,000 and an expense allowance between $12,000 and $16,000.
At the Executive and Compensation Committee meeting on June 23, members disagreed over whether it was good to define the salary before the search.
One member said setting the salary before the search handcuffs the university, discouraging star candidates from applying and narrowing the search’s scope.
But it was also said at the meeting that a consultant said the president’s recommended compensation package had an adequate range and it’s better to put “all the cards on the table at the front.” Plus the cost of living in the state of Tennessee, when compared to other states, is lower, so lower salaries than for the same position in universities in other regions would be acceptable.
At the UT Presidential Search Committee and Search Advisory Council’s first meeting on June 28, committee chair James Murphy outlined the timeline for the search.
The next step is a July 8 meeting in Nashville where the committee will approve specifications of the position of the presidency and suggest the number of candidates to consider. This all leads up to the projected goal of naming a new system president in October.
Murphy encouraged members to use faculty as it was a “rich resource” in the past when conducting searches, since faculty members work with people all across the country in academia.
In addition, he said it was important to verify everything that members hear about candidates and to look past bias, as some will have negative comments for one candidate because of a bias to see another candidate gain the position.
Search firm Witt/Keiffer’s Dennis Barden said it was vital also to analyze negative comments about candidates and look at all sides of past decisions they made in other capacities.
“One of the things that these two committees is going to be faced with is figuring out what is actually a negative comment, and what is actually an explication of leadership,” he said. “Because people who are leaders have to make difficult decisions, and those difficult decisions inevitably anger people whose oxen are gored.”
Simek said a sign of the university’s instability in the president’s office is that he’s been with the university for 26 years and been through at least six different presidents, including himself.
“This is, on the one hand, a momentous decision that we are beginning a process to make for our university,” Simek said. “Even a little bit of luck, at this point, I think will set us on a course for the next decade.”
Even with past setbacks, Simek said the university was in prime position now.
“We have resolved a number of issues that have plagued the institution the past four or five years: questions of authority, questions of responsibility, at all levels, not just at the president’s level but in how the president relates to the campuses, how campus officers operate and how they relate to the president’s office and the system,” he said. “I think we’ve come a long ways toward understanding the relationships and because of that, I think we have a great chance of success here.”
