By Emily Bruzzo, Staff Writer

Published in print Mar. 17, 2015

At a March 2 meeting, UNC-Greensboro’s chancellor search committee finally settled on the specifics regarding the expanded confidential small group that will be allowed to meet semi-finalist chancellor candidates.

The small group will consist of five community members who represent UNCG’s various constituencies. There will be one undergraduate student, one graduate student, one faculty member, one staff member and an alumnus.

The five group members will be bound by the same confidentiality agreement governing the search committee.

Campus community members can sign up to participate on the chancellor website and the five members will be selected via a random lottery.

At some point in the process, the members’ names will be made public and they will be required to provide written feedback to the search committee about the candidates.

The search committee may have been able to reach a final agreement on how the small group will be formed; however, the decision wasn’t made without argument and a degree of tension.

Many members of the search committee felt there was no need for a constituencies group in the first place, arguing that the 24-member search committee was large enough to represent community concerns.

Others felt there was nothing wrong with an expanded confidential group as long as the group was limited to a small number of people— something that became an issue when several committee members complained that the expanded group should consist of administrators, faculty, staff and student leadership, as well as general members of said constituencies.

Committee members were concerned about confidentiality and the group was pretty evenly split on how many people could be allowed to meet the semi-finalists before leaks started to become inevitable.

Susan Safran, head of the search committee as well as head of UNCG’s Board of Trustees, read an email in response to the plans for the expanded group from the UNC system’s General Administration’s liaison to the committee, Anne Lemmon.

Lemmon wrote that it was important to keep the expanded group small and to remember that priority should be given to allowing the candidates to meet with administration.

She argued in the email that bringing the candidates to campus was just as much an opportunity for them to interview the administrators with whom they would be working, as it is a chance for community members to interview the candidates.

However, many of the faculty representatives on the search committee felt that it was expected leadership should meet with the candidates and that the real focus should be on giving a chance to meet the candidates to as many community members as possible.

“These are not normal times at UNCG; these are not normal times in the UNC system,” Anne Wallace, professor of English and chair-elect to the faculty senate, said to a committee member who questioned her when she suggested the process had to be more transparent.

Wallace later circulated an email around faculty senate vocalizing her concerns.

“I am dismayed and troubled by this decision of the committee,” Wallace said.

“At the beginning of the search it seemed to me that we were making some progress toward better communication and understanding,” she continued, “faculty representation on the committee, the forums, the website feedback and even the choice of “expanded confidentiality” over a closed search offered some hope of this better situation.”

“But now,” she said, “repeated decisions that dilute or set aside faculty— and staff, and some alums— calls for greater openness and input have undermined those promising early efforts, I feel.”

Wallace continued, saying, “I do not understand how adding 5 people “expands” the campus interview process in any meaningful or helpful way.”

“I will of course carry on with the committee’s work…but I find it difficult to know how our campus community can make much progress in the immediate future,” she said.

“There is much work to be done to bring us back together into communication and trust, and it appears we cannot make as strong a beginning through the search itself as I, at least, had hoped,” Wallace concluded.

The next chancellor search committee meeting will be on March 24 at the Center for Creative Leadership from 8:00 a.m.- 1:00 p.m.  The meeting will begin in open session and immediately go into closed session.