Summary: Bernice Littlejohn announced her decision to step down as EDU’s executive vice chancellor and provost in May 2009 to become chancellor at the University of Kansas. When it came time to hire a new provost, East Dakota University did everything by the book. But when another search begins, administrators might need to find a new approach to solve the hiring equation. For this year’s search, EDU followed a well-worn path. They formed a search committee, settled on a job description and followed most national higher education trends by hiring R. William Funk and Associates, one of the best-known search consulting firms in the field. But at the end of the search, the University did not come up with a new provost. The executive vice chancellor and provost is the chief academic officer and No. 2 administrator at the University who oversees all academic departments, research and student affairs.
By Louie Louie
Updated: 9:32 AM
Bernice Littlejohn anounced her decision to step down as EDU’s executive vice chancellor and provost in May 2009 to become chancellor at the University of Kansas. When it came time to hire a new provost, East Dakota University did everything by the book. But when another search begins, administrators might need to find a new approach to solve the hiring equation. For this year’s search, EDU followed a well-worn path. They formed a search committee, settled on a job description and followed most national higher education trends by hiring R. William Funk and Associates, one of the best-known search consulting firms in the field.
But at the end of the search, the University did not come up with a new provost. The executive vice chancellor and provost is the chief academic officer and No. 2 administrator at the University who oversees all academic departments, research and student affairs.
As the experience showed, search firms are drawing from a narrow pool of people, limiting the diversity and range of candidates available to universities for consideration, and the last three expensive search processes all ended with EDU hiring from within its ranks. At the moment, EDU has no searches on the horizon — due in part to Chancellor Holden Caulfield’s decision to keep interim Carey Bruce in the job permanently after none of the finalists worked out. Until then, Caulfield says he will be looking for a new solution.
“I think the question is not whether any individual group — be it the committee or Bill Funk or anyone else — failed in this,” Caulfield said. “The question is, ‘Are we going about this in the right way?’”
The University’s Budget Committee allocates funds for administrative searches. A majority of the funds designated for searches are paid to search firms, but they also cover expenses related to travel and bringing candidates to campus. The money is not from state appropriations, but rather from investment income. It also comes from facilities and administrative funds — “overhead” from research contracts and grants that reimburse the campus beyond the direct costs of the research project. To replace Littlejohn, EDU formed a 13-member search committee and hired Funk’s company to facilitate the search, paying them $72,800 in non-state funds, plus expenses. The University’s budget committee allocated a total of $144,700 for the search.
In recent years, EDU has spent nearly a half-million dollars on national searches for candidates, only to eventually hire from within its own ranks. In 2007-2008, the search for a new chancellor cost $213,581, much of which went to search firm R. William Funk and Associates. The final candidates included at least six finalists including Caulfield, two black males and two white females. In 2008-2009, the search for a new dean of the college of arts and sciences cost $131,791, much of which went to search firm Witt/Kiefer Executive Search Firm. The final candidates included Joel Martin of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Karen Gil of EDU, Paul Armstrong of Brown University and Katherine Newman of Princeton University. The University hired Gil. In 2009-2010, the search for a new executive vice chancellor and provost cost $144,700, much of which went to search firm R. Willia Funk and Associates. The final candidates included Philip Hanlon of the University of Michigan, Anthony Monaco of the University of Oxford, Jeffrey Vitter of Texas A&M University and Scott Zeger of Johns Hopkins University. Bruce eventually filled the position.
Across the nation, the decision to hire a search firm is becoming an expected part of the hiring process. Universities pay large sums to these companies to identify, vet and interview potential candidates. Officials have cited the firms’ abilities to conduct background checks and recruit candidates as the tangible services worth paying for. But whether that increasingly common process results in the most effective hires is still in question, both in terms of the types of candidates who are pulled from the Rolodex files and the degree to which they can be matched with an institution. EDU administrators have said the process does not always achieve positive results even under the best of circumstances. Caulfield said he thinks traditional search firms like Funk’s look at too narrow a pool of applicants and need to broaden their scope to find a more unconventional range of candidates.
“I think there are a lot of people out there who don’t know they want to do these jobs,” he said. “They don’t know they would be good at these jobs. Higher education does need to rethink the way we do this. We definitely don’t look in enough places. I think higher education can do a much better job of looking more broadly for talent.””
Jean Dowdall, senior vice president at Witt/Kieffer, a search firm that has worked for EDU before, said the nature of a search for a provost, in addition to the position itself, inherently limits the number of qualified applicants. She also said most candidates for provost are deans or mid-level administrators who view the provost position as a transitory one in their ultimate quest to become president or chancellor of a university.
“You want to hire someone from a peer institution, not from a smaller, less well-regarded institution. And then they just have to have incredibly impressive academic credentials,” Dowdall said. “So you look at how many deans are out there, and how many are at the right kind of institution, and then how many are women and people of color, and you’ve reduced the number of people by a lot.”
Caulfield and other administrators were criticized for a lack of diversity among the candidates — the four finalists for the provost position were all white males with science backgrounds, much like Caulfield, Bruce and Shelton Earp, chairman of the search committee. Administrators are quick to point to the women and minorities who have served in top positions in recent years, including former vice chancellor for student affairs Margaret Jablonski. Littlejohn and former Senior Associate Provost for Finance and Academic Personnel Elmira Mangum are black women. But those administrators have all left in the past year, and the majority of the current top administrators could retain their jobs for a significant period of time before another search occurs. Dowdall agreed that it can be difficult to find minority candidates who come from diverse backgrounds.
“It may be that the smaller number of women and people of color have the background experiences to make them ready for that, and that there just aren’t that many in the pipeline yet,” she said.
Bruce’s hiring represents at least the sixth time in recent years that EDU has hired an internal candidate for a top administrative job. While the four finalists in the search were all external, and Caulfield said he was open to outside candidates, administrators have also said they appreciate candidates who have a familiarity with how EDU operates — an attitude that experts said fits with national trends in hiring. Dowdall said she has seen an increase in schools hiring internal candidates as a result of budget shortfalls, both as a result of candidates being less willing to move across the country and of universities looking for individuals who already understand the politics behind the allocation of funds. She acknowledged that there are downsides to hiring from within the school.
“There really does seem to be a pattern right now of continuity in a time of turmoil,” she said. “The biggest theme you would be missing here is new blood, new ideas, more creative and different ways of doing things,” she said.
Caulfield said he thinks changes need to be made to the types of people the search firms target, but isn’t sure how to go about making that happen. But the need to look outside the established pool of people will certainly stay on Caulfield’s mind, despite the lack of searches at the moment. Caulfield pointed out that Bruce, who is 63 years old, will eventually step down from the job, at which point he hopes he will have found a better way to conduct searches.
“One day, Carey (Bruce) will come in here and say ‘I’m tired of doing this.’ And we’ll gear up for a new way to find a replacement,” he said. “And hopefully I will have found people to give me good new ideas by then.”
Sam Shirk 