Vote on UT candidates taken without discussion
NASHVILLE (AP) — The group charged with winnowing candidates for University of Tennessee president did not conduct in-depth background checks before picking 12 finalists, a UT trustee said Thursday.
The Monday vote also came without any discussion among committee members of information obtained on each candidate, Presidential Search Advisory Council leader and trustee Jim Murphy said.
Instead, a “media review” of news articles was undertaken for each candidate. Council members also individually reviewed candidate resumes and checked references supplied by the hopefuls, Murphy said.
“We made a conscious decision that we weren’t going to do detailed checks on candidates prior to that meeting,” Murphy said in a teleconference with reporters. “… (But) if something came out about a candidate that we’d believed immediately disqualified them, we would have talked about it.
“We just didn’t believe there was anything.”
UT’s last two permanent presidents resigned amid scandals, prompting the Board of Trustees to use an unusually open process to find the next leader for the five-campus system.
But questions about the reliability of that process arose this week after news reports revealed information about two candidates that wasn’t presented publicly to the search panel.
Finalist Karen Hitchcock stepped down as president of State University of New York at Albany last fall after failing to land the University of Florida presidency and amid reports of discord between her and SUNY Chancellor Robert King.
All hired search consultant Gary Daugherty told the UT search committee was that she had resigned her post effective next month.
Daugherty also didn’t tell the council that University System of Georgia chancellor Thomas Meredith had been named in a sex and age discrimination lawsuit in 2002 over his actions as chancellor of the University of Alabama system.
Daugherty has since said he knew about both issues but believed they weren’t “relevant.”
What he did say at Monday’s meeting was that his consulting firm, Atlanta-based Baker Parker and Associates, had taken “extraordinary measures to ensure all of us know as much as we possibly can about each of the candidates.”
He also said he and members of his firm — which is being paid about $80,000 for its services — had “direct, candid” conversations with all of the candidates.
“Each assured us there is nothing there that will cause us, their current institution or the University of Tennessee any embarrassment,” he said then.
Murphy said he was informed about both candidates’ pasts but didn’t share it during a council meeting.
“The reason we didn’t release that information at that point is we didn’t feel we’d done enough investigation to comment in one way or another,” Murphy said. “… We’re not trying to play character assassins here, we’re trying to evaluate all of this in a fair and impartial manner. Part of this is looking at both sides of the story.”
He said news stories aren’t always “absolutely true. Reporters don’t always have the full story.”
Murphy said the council and its consultant have begun criminal, credit and motor vehicle checks and educational degree verification of the candidates. Site visits and in-depth interviews with each candidate are planned before cutting the list to six late next week.
“You’re acting as if the process was supposed to end the other day. It’s not,” he told reporters.
“The fact that incomplete information wasn’t released or utilized is not a flawed process. It’s exactly what we intended.”
Murphy also said he personally spoke to Meredith about issues raised this week, and that others participating in the search spoke with Hitchcock.
Sen. Randy McNally, who has criticized the search process, said Thursday that more in-depth initial screenings should have been done on all of the 47 candidates who qualified for the job.
“And it should have been done publicly rather than by people talking among themselves about some of the issues,” he said. “What we’ve ended up with is a mixed bag. Some are very qualified while some there are a number of questions about.
“I would have though they’d have dealt more in-depth with it. In some cases it was sort of swept under the rug.”