Praise for UT president search comes with warning
NASHVILLE (AP) — Lawmakers complimented the University of Tennessee on the unprecedented openness of its search for a new president Monday, but warned there is no room for error as the process reaches its climax this week.
Search leaders Andrea Loughry and Jim Murphy, both UT trustees, testified before the Legislature’s Fiscal Review Committee one day before returning to Knoxville for two final rounds of interviews.
The six remaining candidates will be narrowed to at least three Tuesday, with a new president named Wednesday afternoon.
“We’re excited about our process at this point,” Loughry said. “We didn’t have a road map to follow — there hasn’t been one done this way ever in the United States — but we’ve learned a lot as we’ve gone on.”
The aim of UT’s search for the 23rd president in the 210-year history of the five-campus, 42,000-student university is simple: avoid the scandals that ended Tennessee’s most recent presidencies. Lavish spending forced out John Shumaker in August, and J. Wade Gilley left in 2001 amid allegations of a relationship with a subordinate.
Lawmakers asked the trustees for assurance that similar scandals won’t happen again.
“We have a small window of opportunity left. Do you and your teammates feel we’ve done everything possible, turned over every stone possible, to make sure we’re not in the same situation in a couple months?” Rep. Donna Rowland, R-Murfreesboro, asked Loughry.
“I can’t be responsible for human frailty, … I can’t guarantee six months from now a human being won’t make a wrong decision,” Loughry responded. “But as far as the process itself to produce the right person, I feel like we’ve done everything we can at this point.”
Loughry detailed to the committee the search process so far, which included the narrowing of 47 initial applicants to the current six through a series of interviews, visits to the candidates’ homes, reference calls, resume reviews and background checks by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.
“We followed up on any (news) stories that raised questions on whether a candidate might have problems similar to those we’ve seen in the past,” Murphy said. “We didn’t just take the story, we went behind the story to find out what really happened.”
Committee member Sen. Steve Cohen, D-Memphis, questioned the low number of contenders that are currently sitting presidents at other schools. Only one of the final six candidates serves in the top leadership role at his school.
“Do you think if we’d had a more private search we would have gotten more people from that level?” Cohen asked.
Murphy said that was possible, adding it was “very difficult” to recruit women and minorities to participate in an open search.
“They said they didn’t want to take the grief an open search would cause,” he said. “One of the things an open search does … is it exposes these people to intense scrutiny for a period of time.
“… But we felt like we had to have that scrutiny in light of the problems we had with the previous (two presidents).”
Murphy also said that a sitting president is “not always an answer to your prayers.”
“We’ve already had two previous presidents who were sitting presidents” before coming to UT, he said.
Despite any initial worries that UT wouldn’t get the most exceptional candidates, university officials said any of the narrowed list of presidential hopefuls would be a good fit for Tennessee.
“These people we’re looking at are superstars,” said search committee executive director Margaret Perry, who also testified before the committee. “Some of them have not yet been in presidencies, but they’re all being sought after.
“I think we have some really fine candidates.”
The candidates are:
— Jack Burns, 51, vice president for the University of Colorado system.
— Brady Deaton, 61, provost for the University of Missouri at Columbia, and a former UT-Knoxville professor of agricultural economics.
— Kermit Hall, 59, president and history professor at Utah State University.
— Kenneth Olden, 65, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Science in Research Triangle Park, N.C.
— John Petersen, 56, provost of the University of Connecticut.
— Bill Stacy, 65, chancellor of UT-Chattanooga.
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To read biographical summaries of each of the candidates, visit http://pr.tennessee.edu/presidentialsearch