UI professors creating feedback tool for presidential candidates

IOWA CITY - The University of Iowa chapter of the American Association of University Professors has created a survey tool for collecting feedback on each UI presidential candidate - supplementing a process set up by the Board of Regents and the search firm it hired.

Parker Executive Search has set up separate websites for each of four presidential finalists as a way of collecting feedback from the campus community and general public and providing it to the board.

For example, the website created for Marvin Krislov - identified Wednesday as the first candidate to visit campus - provides five boxes for public feedback: one optional space for a commenter's name, one to identify whether he or she is faculty, staff, student, administration or other, and then spaces asking for candidate strengths, weaknesses, and additional comments.

Some faculty members have expressed concern that those comments are going to the board through Parker - as opposed to the 21-member search committee. Unlike with previous presidential searches at UI, Iowa State University, and University of Northern Iowa, this year's search committee was dismissed after recommending the finalists' names to the Board of Regents - meaning it will not have any official role in communicating campus feedback on each candidate.

In addition to the Parker website, the Faculty Council - an executive body for the UI Faculty Senate - is amassing feedback from the faculty at large in hopes of providing a report to the Board of Regents. The Council plans to collect faculty feedback through a variety of methods - phone calls, face-to-face conversations, email, and written comments.

'Faculty Council will continue to collect feedback from faculty until we need to send in our report to the regents at around 2 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 2,” according to an email sent to faculty members.

Council members will draft the report.

'All faculty feedback received by Faculty Council will be fully and fairly represented in the report,” according to the email.

But UI history professor Katherine Tachau said that feedback still is coming in as a summary of subjective comments, not objective data, and many faculty members want a more quantifiable method for measuring public opinion about each candidate.

To that end, faculty members put together a survey of 15 questions - plus an open space for additional comments - that they've made available in time for each finalists' public forum.

Some questions ask respondents to mark on a scale from 'strongly disagree” to 'strongly agree” whether each candidate would 'excel at articulating the university's vision, mission, and values to both internal and external stakeholders” and 'has the skill set to oversee a $3.5 billion institutional budget,” for example.

Tachau said it's 'primarily quantifiable with questions geared toward the qualifications listed in the job description and digging deeper into some of the things that concern the faculty at this university.”

Board of Regents spokesman Josh Lehman told The Gazette the new way of collecting feedback - through a website created by the search firm - 'was an opportunity to take advantage of technology in the search process.”

'The board was looking to be as effective and efficient as possible in gathering feedback on finalists,” he said.

When asked why the board is using open-ended evaluation questions for each candidate, Lehman said the board heard from constituents the desire to give 'very specific, unfiltered feedback on candidates.”

'Open-ended questions allow for people to highlight anything they want to about any candidate,” he said. 'It allows constituents to not be limited in what they can say or the topics they can address.”