OUR VIEW: The students deserve a fair and open search to ensure that our next president is a good fit and has our best interests at heart.

Selecting a new president is one of the most critical times for a university as the decision will make a huge impact on students, faculty and the community.

University officials have already done a good job of complying with the Open Meetings Act to keep board meetings as transparent and accessible as possible, and that level of openness needs to extend to the presidential search to ensure we all get the president we deserve.

Using a process similar to the one administrators use for hiring new deans and faculty, the presidential finalists should be brought to the university to see it for themselves and to meet with students, faculty and administrators. Finalists should teach a class or run a meeting, again similar to the dean selection process, so they can be evaluated in a setting they may find themselves in next August.

This also lets the students decide on our own which finalist is most qualified.

In closed searches a final candidate is announced without any indication of who else was considered for the job. This happened just last year at Louisiana State University, prompting the media to file suit, seeking the names of the other candidates. An open search avoids tainting the whole process and its outcome with legal action and negative publicity as it happened at LSU.

Student focus groups will help administrators and the search committee understand the university’s needs from the ground level, from the people who may well be the most affected by the search’s outcome.

Student input is critical in any university-wide decision. Including only the student body president, a junior who ran unopposed and has been in office for fewer than four months, is not sufficient student involvement. Through no fault of her own, one student simply cannot advocate for the other nearly 6,000 students as part of a decision-making process that will influence the direction of the university for years to come.

In about one year this will be the new president’s job, but to paraphrase our school’s slogan as seen on billboards across the state: it’s our university.

VIEW INTERVIEW with Debbie Barrow regarding search.