College president searches in N.D. may become less secretive

The North Dakota Board of Higher Education requested that the names of applicants for university presidencies and higher education system chancellor not be released until the semifinalist phase. However, a new amendment to the Senate bill would up the release date to two weeks after the initial cut of applicants.

A legislative committee this afternoon amended a bill that relates to open records and the applications of university presidents.

The bill, with an amendment introduced by Sen. John Andrist, R-Crosby, would provide more openness than what the state Board of Higher Education had requested.

Andrist, who spent his career as owner and editor of a weekly newspaper in Crosby, told the Senate Education Committee he thought the original bill went too far.

More here.

Meetings in Restaurants: Quit It Already!

Two directors of North Dakota's workers compensation agency broke the state's open meetings law by meeting in a restaurant to discuss business without public notice, Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem said.

Stenehjem, in a legal opinion Monday, said the Workforce Safety and Insurance agency must draft minutes of the illegal meeting and provide a free copy to anyone who asks. Former WSI executive Jim Long, who filed a complaint with Stenehjem about the meeting, must receive a free copy, the opinion says.

Workforce Safety's operations are supervised by an 11-member board of directors. The board also has smaller subcommittees, which report to the full board.

Meetings of the smaller groups and the full board both require public notice under North Dakota's sunshine law, which is triggered if enough committee members show up to allow their respective boards to take votes and make decisions.

Stenehjem said the open meetings law was violated May 21 when Mark Gjovig, the chairman of the full board, and board member Mark Jackson met at a Bismarck restaurant the night before a scheduled meeting of the full board.

More here.

What We're Up Against...

The outgoing president of the University of North Dakota -- who I am quite sure is a swell guy and I mean him no disrespect at all -- represents the state-of-the-art in thinking about university presidential searches: the more secrecy the better the process....


I'll give you a few of the highlights and then you can go read the whole editorial here, but:

That said, I believe our open records and meetings laws served to curtail the number of candidates. These laws in no small way were responsible for the fact that only one candidate was presented to the State Board of Higher Education and were thus responsible for some of the negative “stuff” that went on at the conclusion of the search.

Now, this is an interesting point, and one that could tested by an academic, but to simply assume that one candidate came forward because of openness? I can't say it did not any more than this chap can say it did. It's what we academics call a "testable hypothesis," but it sure isn't fact. Trusim, perhaps....

First of all, any would-be candidate who happened to be a sitting president would have been loathe to submit his or her name and endure the inevitable criticism “back home” with what should and could have been a 1 in 100 chance of ultimately being selected. Most presidents would find these odds not worth it. The result was no sitting presidents in the pool and relatively few provosts.

Ah, the Gold Standard: the other kids won't play because of the openness. This, of course, is belied by the fact that there are dozens of presidential searches, year after year, held in complete openness, and guess what? People apply for them. They fight for them. Why? They pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year...

Given the downsides, is there really a significant public interest in knowing all of the candidates early in a search when there may be 80 to 100 candidates? I don’t think so. North Dakota is one of a small number of states in which university officials are required to disclose all names and documents as soon as applications are filed. Likewise, North Dakota is among a small minority of states that do not permit at least some closed search committee meetings early in the search process.

Why yes, there are several great reasons. Cronyism, nepotism, the old-boy network...the fact is, the more open these searches are, the less the likelihood of such large decisions being made exclusively by small groups of extremely powerful people.

If a group of good people are selected to serve on a search committee and they have to operate in plain sight of one another, this is enough to make sure the search will be conducted in accordance with fairness and the law.

In other words, trust us. Nah....history is replete with examples where that burned the public.

South Dakota to join the reform party?

Governor Rounds says he wants to be careful about changing state laws that determine which state and local government records are open to the public.

Rounds says that before changes are made he wants to know what information is involved and what people might be hurt by its release. The Republican governor says he would prefer to specifically designate what would be open.

Democratic lawmakers on the other hand say they want to rewrite the law to presume that state and local government records would be open. They then would list the kinds of documents that would be kept confidential such as personal information and business secrets.

More here.