Harreld Hire Impropriety Update

At the end of last week two critical pieces of information were revealed regarding the hiring of J. Bruce Harreld to be the next president of the University of Iowa. First, on Thursday, it was disclosed that Harreld met privately, just prior to the deadline for declaring his candidacy, with four members of the nine-member Board of Regents that would unanimously elect him to office one month later. While that meeting was not attended by Regents President Bruce Rastetter, the meeting took place at Summit Agricultural Group, in Ames, Iowa, which is owned by Rastetter.

The day before applications were due for the vacant University of Iowa presidency, J. Bruce Harreld met with four members of the Board of Regents and had dinner with Iowa State University President Steven Leath.

These meetings occurred just weeks after Harreld — eventually chosen to become UI’s 21st president — first visited the UI campus July 8 to speak with UI Health Care leaders and meet with heads of the institution and the Board of Regents.

According to emails obtained by The Gazette on Thursday and a statement from Board of Regents President Bruce Rastetter, Harreld participated in several meetings in Ames on July 30 “as part of the recruiting process for the position of president at the University of Iowa.”

One involved regent President Pro Tem Katie Mulholland and regent Milt Dakovich, and a second involved regents Mary Andringa and Larry McKibben. Harreld requested the meetings, and although Rastetter didn’t attend any of the gatherings, he did help coordinate them.

On Friday, in pushing back against the growing body of evidence that Harreld did indeed receive preferential treatment during the hiring process, several members of the Board of Regents not only failed to resolve the appearance of impropriety, by their own words they confessed to impropriety.

Regents Milt Dakovich and Katie Mulholland, who both served on the search committee along with Rasetter, also met Harreld on July 30 — the same day as a telephonic meeting of the search committee, and the day before committee members were to receive access to the application materials of the official candidates for the job.

Dakovich said the conversation with Harreld went on for more than an hour and included questions and answers from both sides.

“He definitely had some things that he was interested in, but it went both ways,” Dakovich said.

McKibben, Dakovich and Mulholland each said Friday that they maintained an open mind throughout the final stages of the search — not making up their minds until after closed-session interviews with the four finalists Sept. 3.

“I don’t think that we knew any more about (Harreld) based on (those meetings) than we did about the other candidates based on their curriculum vitae, which were extensive,” Mulholland said.

Prior to declaring his candidacy, not only did J. Bruce Harreld receive and accept a special invitation to speak on July 8th at the University of Iowa from Jean Robillard, who was the head of the presidential search committee and remains the acting president at Iowa — an offer that no other candidate received, which resulted in a presentation that was attended by Regents President Rastetter — but on July 30th Harreld also had face-to-face meetings with four other voting members of the nine-member board, which none of the other candidates, including the other three finalists for the position, were invited to attend. In now attempting to explain why none of that was improper, Regent Katie Mulholland actually proves impropriety by equating face-to-face meetings with documentation [bold mine].

“I don’t think that we knew any more about (Harreld) based on (those meetings) than we did about the other candidates based on their curriculum vitae, which were extensive,” Mulholland said.

This statement is so jaw-droppingly antithetical to integrity and fairness in any hiring process that I can’t figure out whether it represents genuine naiveté or conspiratorial panic. The question is not — as the regents appear to believe, based on their Friday pushback — whether the regents themselves view the hiring process as fair, but whether it was objectively fair. And by their own serial admissions over the past month it clearly was not. By their own admissions the hiring of J. Bruce Harreld to be president of the University of Iowa was, undeniably, improper at best.

Granted, impropriety can be a little hard to get your mind around when you’ve got four white male eggheads vying for a job, so let’s change things up a bit. We’ll keep the circumstances of the hire the same, and the job the same, but this time Harreld will be the lone white male egghead, while the other three finalists will be women or persons of color. Does that make the impropriety clear?

The whole point of making sure that all candidates for an open position get the same amount of face time is not simply to cover your ass when you finally get around to making a predetermined decision, it’s to make sure, if you’re not crooked, that the hiring process itself doesn’t produce skewed results. Meaning specifically the exact results you would expect in the case of the Harreld hire, where the candidate who got the most face time and the most opportunities to present himself ended up being chosen.

Even assuming this wasn’t a done deal, which we will probably never know unless the feds get involved, the mere fact that Harreld had so much more time to present himself to the regents, including imprinting on them at brain level in all kinds of sensory and intuitive ways, to say nothing of cognitively, by presenting ideas and responding personally and professionally, means that all of the other candidates were denied those same opportunities. And it’s at the level of opportunity that questions of fairness and propriety are determined in the hiring process.

The Rooney Rule
In the National Football League it used to be the case that all of the head coaches were white even though the majority of the players were African-American. This calcified inequity persisted for so long that it became another one of the league’s self-inflicted wounds. The problem was not that there weren’t enough African-American coaching candidates, the problem was that those candidates were never given an opportunity to interview, so they never had the opportunity to present themselves. That entrenched inequity ultimately led the league to adopt what is now known as the Rooney Rule.

The Rooney Rule requires National Football League teams to interview minority candidates for head coaching and senior football operation jobs. It is sometimes cited as an example of affirmative action, though there is no quota or preference given to minorities in the hiring of candidates. It was established in 2003.

The entire point of the Rooney Rule is that there is a fundamental difference between an applicant’s resume and an applicant’s ability to make an impression during face-to-face meetings with decision makers. Paperwork does not smile or engage in witty repartee. Paperwork does not sympathize about a meaningful shared life experience in a momentary aside. Paperwork does not surprise with an insightful reply. Every minute that an applicant spends with the people who will decide that applicant’s fate is precious, which is why the total amount of time must always be equal among candidates. And that’s not only true for women and people of color, it’s true for white male eggheads. If you do not provide candidates with a level playing field, then your hiring process is, by definition, corrupt.

Yes, in the case of the Harreld hire the other white-male-egghead finalists were allowed the same official opportunities to present themselves, but what of the unofficial opportunities that involved the regents, who were the only people in the entire hiring process with an actual vote? While Harreld and the other finalists each spoke at an open forum in front of faculty, staff and interested stakeholders at the University of Iowa, by the regents own actions those forums were not simply discounted, they seem to have provided an incentive to vote against all of the other candidates simply because the university community supported them by a wide margin.

Critics maintain that since the regents were aware at the time they appointed Harreld that approximately 97 percent of the faculty and staff judged him to be unqualified for the job and that faculty and staff evaluations of the qualifications of the other three finalists were overwhelmingly positive (ranging from 85 percent to 90 percent), the Regents’ decision to choose Harreld was a direct and deliberate slap in the face of the long standing tradition of shared governance and an act of disrespect for the UI faculty and staff. They are correct about that.

Again, look at the problem from the point of view of protected classes. If there’s a job opening and all of the women and people of color are given a chance to interview, but the job goes to the white male who went fishing with the boss, who also spent an hour with four other people voting on the matter — at the boss’s place of business no less — is anyone confused about what just happened? Because that’s exactly what just happened with J. Bruce Harreld.

The Definition of Impropriety
Businesses have been abusing hiring protocols forever in order to hire the person they want, but we’re not just talking about a business here, we’re talking about a public institution. Assuming for the moment — and it is a big assumption — that nothing corrupt happened in the entire hiring process, and particularly that Rastetter himself was not the agent of any malfeasance, the only conclusion anyone can reach after Friday’s admissions by sitting members of the Board of Regents is that the Harreld hire was improper. It may not have been illegal, or at least provably illegal, but anyone even remotely versed in hiring practices knows that you do not conduct a search the way that presidential search was conducted. Not because it appears improper, but because it is improper.

And this is not just me saying this. The press has been talking about this for weeks, and they’re becoming increasingly agitated about the obviousness of the impropriety. Two weeks ago, a staff editorial for the Gazette asked the regents to show their work.

Unanswered questions abound. How did the search committee, including Regents President Bruce Rastetter, learn about Harreld before choosing to recruit him? He has no apparent ties to the university or the state of Iowa. What role was played by Gov. Terry Branstad, who spoke with Harreld in August, in a call made possible by Rastetter? Harreld is the lone candidate who spoke with the governor.

Rastetter and others insist Harreld’s hiring was not a done deal masquerading as a true search process. But the troubling signs and public perceptions of a behind-the-scenes push persist.

Now, two weeks later, on the heels of last week’s disclosures on Thursday and Friday, an editorial from the Quad City Times is demanding that the regents ‘come clean‘ on the hiring process that led to the selection of J. Bruce Harreld.

Just last week, we said the Iowa Regents did incoming University of Iowa President Bruce Harreld no favors during the search process.

Now, there’s another revelation, and if the Regents don’t act quickly to clear the air surrounding Harreld’s appointment, his entire tenure could be hampered.

Total transparency is required; instead, what the university community and the rest of Iowa is getting is one disclosure after another, with each giving the appearance that the Regents favored Harreld, a former IBM executive with no background in academic leadership.

The latest news: Harreld met with Regents Katie Mulholland, Milt Dakovich, Mary Andringa and Larry McKibben on July 30 in Ames, a meeting arranged by Regents President Bruce Rastetter and held at Rastetter’s office. It also occurred before the application process for the position closed the next day.

Rastetter wasn’t able to attend that meeting, but in a previous disclosure, the Regents leader did have a meeting with Harreld on July 8 in Iowa City. That occurred when Harreld was invited to lecture at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, an offer that wasn’t afforded to the three other job finalists.

In the initial post about the Harreld hire I said this:

In questioning the mechanics of how Harreld was hired, a crime is being alleged. It may be that an actual crime took place, having to do with hiring practices and government regulations and things I know nothing about, or that the crime was metaphorical. It is frustrating that we will probably never have access to the information that would allow us to determine who, specifically, engineered such a crime, but we don’t have to know whodunnit to know that a crime took place.

As it stands now, the Board of Regents is fortunate that none of the other three finalists for the position — Michael Bernstein, Joseph Steinmetz and Marvin Krislov — appear to be members of a protected class, or the board would clearly be vulnerable to litigation. Then again, if any of the other nine semi-finalists, who participated in what may have also been illegal airport interviews, were members of a protected class, that threat may still be on the table.

To again underscore the importance of face time versus being represented by a lifeless resume, let’s take one more look at the statement from Regent Mulholland:

“I don’t think that we knew any more about (Harreld) based on (those meetings) than we did about the other candidates based on their curriculum vitae, which were extensive,” Mulholland said.

In giving Harreld additional opportunities to present himself in person, the regents also gave him opportunities to overcome the demonstrable abomination that was his resume. (We’ll assume for the moment that the regents actually received, and had the opportunity to read and vet, Harreld’s resume.) If the opportunity to speak to a private gathering on campus, which included at least one voting regent in the person of President Bruce Rastetter, and the extra face time that Harreld received with four other regents at a place of business owned by Regents President Rastetter, was enough to convince those member to vote for Harreld despite his utter lack of qualifications for the position and his demonstrably false, misleading and typo-riddled c.v., then the mind boggles at the positive impression which any of the other three eminently qualified finalists — who, also by the admission of the regents, had ‘extensive’ c.v.’s — would have been able to make if given equal opportunity.

— Mark Barrett