I saw on Romenesko that some very important people are upset about the Harvard Crimson’s printing the names of presidential candidates currently under consideration. Read Student Paper Prints List of Prospective Candidates for Harvard’s Presidency.

I understand why the people under consideration would be upset, especially if, as the article points out, they were not actively seeking the position and instead were being tapped as a potential candidate for consideration. However, as the veteran (wow, it’s hard to think that, at 21, I could be a veteran of anything) of one very tight-lipped, closed presidential search, I have to side with the student newspaper here. I think university presidential searches should be open. Without an open and ongoing dialogue about what the university stakeholders (including students, faculty, donors, alums, parents, etc.) want in a president and without face time with the potential candidates, how can a good fit be assured? Also, if you have a strong enough interest and real desire to lead an institution, then you should be willing to come forth and say so and not hide behind the cloak of a closed search.

Perhaps the Crimson did jump the gun a little soon and should have waited until the list had been narrowed to a smaller set of finalists. However, if they knew from past searches that the committee charged with producing such a list wouldn’t produce it for them, then where would they be? Plus, what if Harvard decided to be difficult and produce only one such finalist for consideration? (Hey, it’s happened.)

I don’t know or care enough about Harvard and it’s presidential search to look this up in more detail, but given the whole exam-week annoucement debacle here last spring, I thought this was something worth thinking about. Had the Stater been handed a list of such finalists last spring I can say with almost certainty that we would have published the list. In fact, I’d still like to know what the other names on KSU’s preliminary lists were.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 7th, 2006 at 2:04 am and is filed under College, Commentary, Journalism, News, Offline. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.