Consultant warns of ‘political interference’ in Iowa State presidential search

IOWA CITY — Like with its last three presidential searches, the Board of Regents has chosen Washington, D.C.-based AGB Search to help find its 17th Iowa State University president.

The board will pay AGB — founded by the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges in 2010 — a fee equal to 25 percent of the annual base salary of the candidate hired to succeed outgoing ISU President Wendy Wintersteen.

If the new president earns the same base wage as Wintersteen’s $710,000, that fee would be $177,500. If they make more — on par with University of Iowa President Barbara Wilson’s $760,000 base wage — the fee could be upward of $190,000.

The board paid AGB $90,000 to help with the UI search that landed Wilson in 2020; it paid the firm $110,000 to help with the ISU search that hired Wintersteen in 2017; and it paid AGB $85,000 for UNI’s 2016 search that found Mark Nook.

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On Tuesday, in one of its first moves for Iowa State’s new search, AGB Managing Principal Roderick J. McDavis gave regents a presentation on current best practices for presidential searches, pitfalls to watch out for, and the odds for a strong applicant pool.

“I will tell you that even in challenging times — and we wondered about that post COVID, whether or not there were going to be high-quality people who were still going to be interested in serving as a president or chancellor — the resounding answer to that is yes,” McDavis said. “There are many, many people across the country that want to be a president, that want to be a chancellor. We call it the next generation of leaders.”

They won’t look like those serving atop colleges and universities today, he said.

“This current generation of leaders is kind of stepping to the sideline, and there's a new generation of leaders that are stepping forward,” he said, pointing to first-time presidents, provosts, and highly-ranked deans waiting in the wings.

“These are people that will look at institutions like Iowa State and will take a very serious interest in them,” he said. “So I can assure you that there will be many many people who will be interested in the presidency of Iowa State, and we are excited about the prospect that there are so many good people across the United States that are interested in being a president.”

‘Non-traditional candidates’

Board of Regents Executive Director Mark Braun asked McDavis to speak about whether “non-traditional candidates” are becoming more common in college and university president pools nationally.

“We are finding more and more that non-traditional candidates are becoming engaged,” McDavis said, referencing a current search he’s involved with where a board specifically requested non-traditional candidates. “So we found folks that have a military background; we found folks that have a government background, either state or federal; we found folks in the business community.”

And those hires can be just as successful as presidents who came up through the traditional academic ranks.

Referencing businessman Bruce Harreld’s tumultuous hire as UI president in 2015 despite widespread opposition from faculty, staff, and students, regent David Barker on Tuesday asked McDavis whether reception to presidents from outside academia has softened in today’s higher education landscape.

“We had a non-traditional president that had kind of a rocky start,” Barker said. “Do you think that over the last 10 years, non-traditional presidents are better accepted than they were?”

“I was not going to bring that up, but I read about that,” McDavis said. “And I know exactly the person you're talking about. I did a lot of study on that. And here's the deal. Non-traditional presidents oftentimes have a rocky tenure, very much like traditional presidents have. The difference is, when someone's been a traditional president, people don't often talk about it … But the people who come from outside of the academy, when they have a rocky road, it's just lifted up that much more.”

One lesson AGB and other search firms have learned about non-traditional candidates, he said, is to “do a little bit more due diligence on some of these folks that are non-traditional.”

“Let's really kind of investigate where they're coming from, how they got the position that they're in today, and whether or not this person would be the right individual to lead the institution,” he said, clarifying that there are “significant differences” between the two types of applicants.

Where traditional academics understand the import of shared governance — involving faculty, staff, and students in campus decisions — those from other sectors might not, McDavis said.

“They don’t understand why something has to go through 16 committees before it can be approved,” he said. “Well, in higher education, oftentimes we feel like not only 16, but we think 20 committees might be important for something to go through.”

‘Political interference’

When asked about potential pitfalls that result in failed searches, McDavis highlighted “political interference“ among them.

“The other thing that hurts, and I know this won't happen in the good state of Iowa, but sometimes that's political interference,” he said. "I have to be blunt about that.“

McDavis said he’s seen searches where everything is running smoothly and everyone is on the same page, “but there's an elected official who says, ‘You know what, this is all well and good, but there's somebody out there we want to be the president of the institution. And we want that person to be a candidate, we don't care about what the qualifications are. We want that person to be a semifinalist, and we actually want that person to be considered as a finalist’.”

“If you get political interference, there can be some real serious issues,” he said.

Searches also can run into problems when governing board members change job qualifications at the last minute.

“Where I have seen searches go off the tracks is when you’re at the end of the process and all of a sudden either someone on the search committee or someone on the board wants to introduce another set of criteria,” he said. “That is to say that what was written is no longer the primary criteria, but something else becomes the primary criteria.”

After McDavis talked of the differences between public and private searches — and the disclosure of candidate names — Board of Regents Executive Director Braun confirmed that applicant and semifinalist names won’t be made public in the Iowa State search, but finalist names will be.

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com