• Advocate Opinion page staff
• Published: May 23, 2008 - Page: 8B - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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In picking their top management, LSU officials are establishing a regrettable tradition of take it or leave it.

Sean O’Keefe, the former chancellor of the Baton Rouge campus, was hired quickly, apparently with no serious thought given to other candidates. We believe the circumstances of O’Keefe’s hiring compromised his credibility with the campus community and played a role in his eventual exit.

After a long and largely secretive search, a search committee unveiled John Lombardi as the sole finalist for the system presidency, although LSU officials had promoted the secrecy of the search as the best way to encourage a wide field of candidates.

And now, after a search process also marked by secrecy, New Mexico State University President Michael V. Martin could be formally recommended by a search committee today as its choice for the chancellor’s job vacated by O’Keefe. As in the previous searches that led to the hiring of O’Keefe and Lombardi, the public doesn’t have a clear idea of who else was considered for the job. 

But once again, we’re being asked to assume that one publicly named finalist is the best fit for a position of great importance not only to LSU, but the rest of the state.

As usual, some defenders of this process are  saying that a limited pool of national talent is the reason that a search has yielded only one finalist. Yet other higher education institutions have managed to produce a public list of more than one finalist for their leadership posts.

We believe the secretive nature of these LSU searches isn’t so much about some enlightened sense of best practices, but  a culture of insularity at LSU that, at times, seems hostile to the ideals of transparency and accountability.

Manship School of Mass Communication Dean Jack Hamilton, who heads the search committee, said that Lombardi and a few other search committee and LSU Board of Supervisors members met with “seven or eight” chancellor prospects in Dallas and New Orleans. Such sneaking around to do off-the-record interviews with job prospects who are not official applicants runs counter to the spirit if not the letter of state sunshine laws.

The situation is even more troubling since the search committee was headed by the person who runs the journalism program. What sort of lesson about government in the sunshine does that set for student journalists?

Hamilton said Martin was the only prospect from these interviews who met LSU’s expectations and was willing to apply publicly. Hamilton refused to name the others interviewed.

The whole process makes us wonder what’s so bad at LSU that the top job doesn’t attract more than a single quality applicant.

Martin, who once worked for Lombardi at the University of Florida, has said he sees Lombardi as a mentor, and he started talking to Lombardi about LSU in November, though Martin emphasized the talk was never about him replacing O’Keefe as chancellor. Martin denies any suggestion that the search process was rigged in his favor.

Rightly or wrongly, some observers will assume Martin was fast-tracked through the search process because of his connection with Lombardi.