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.