Our Views: Process not transparent
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Southern University System President Ralph Slaughter promised an open search for the next chancellor of Southern’s Baton Rouge campus.
A recent series of closed-door meetings of the chancellor search committee, which Slaughter heads, is not in keeping with the goal of an open search.
Slaughter argued the search is transparent because interviews of the 16 semifinalists chosen during the closed-door meetings would be public.
Slaughter said the committee is not a public body and does not have to follow open-meeting laws. If the Southern University Board of Supervisors had appointed the committee, then it would be public, Slaughter said.
Slaughter could be correct on that point of law, though Jim Brandt, executive director of the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana, disagrees. “It’s still a public entity doing public business,” said Brandt, regardless of who appointed it.
Regardless of who is correct on this point of law, true transparency comes in embracing the spirit, and not the mere letter, of laws designed to give the public a seat at important deliberations concerning public institutions.
The interests of the taxpayers who help foot the bill for the Southern University System were not served by these closed-door meetings. When decisions of this nature are made behind closed doors, public confidence in the result is compromised.
Slaughter and the search committee’s co-chairman, Matthew Butler of The Shaw Group, refused to explain the scoring process used to select the semifinalists, except to say that the scoring process compared aspects such as administrative experience, scholarly publishing and fundraising.
The semifinalists selected for consideration to lead Southern University’s main campus have been chosen behind closed doors, and through a process that is, at best, very vague.
Whatever you call this way of doing things, it’s not transparent.
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