The candidate, a sitting university president, certainly had interest in the Rutgers University job — and in making an in-person visit to discuss the job.
The logistics behind such a meeting were incredibly difficult.
It wasn’t just the standard desire to protect the relationship the person had with their current employer, it was their fear of being caught looking elsewhere at a time when higher education was under a seemingly unprecedented attack from the federal government.
“In the middle of everything going on, how I am going to tell the board chair I’m taking two personal days and not tell them where I’m going,” a potential candidate asked those involved in the search.
Rutgers found a way — because it found a way to keep the most public of searches incredibly private.
Simply put, the school managed to put a gag order on all involved — starting with the 20-person Search Committee that was co-chaired by Amy Towers, the chair of the Board of Governors, and Alberto Cuitiño, the dean of the Rutgers School of Engineering.
Anyone who had an inkling of the process — including some members of the Board of Governors, Board of Trustees and the Rutgers University Foundation — was sworn to secrecy.
“If this search wasn’t completely confidential, we certainly would have lost some top candidates,” one person familiar with the search said.
That’s why, when Louisiana State University President William Tate IV was presented for a formal vote early Monday morning, some of the more than 40-member Board of Trustees were learning about Tate for the first time. The same was true for other high-ranking members of the university’s administration.
Here’s a look into the process — a story BINJE put together after conversations with numerous people involved in the process, all of whom supplied information but deferred to Towers on public comments.
Ironically, Rutgers’ search for a new president began in the most public of ways.
Last fall, Rutgers went on an unprecedented listening tour — through public meetings and Zooms — hearing from anyone and everyone associated with the state university and those who simply had an interest in the school.
The best estimate is that the Search Committee met with or listened to well over 500 people, making the search very inclusive, one person said. The Search Committee updated its website regularly, too.
The tenor of the search began to change after President Donald Trump was inaugurated Jan. 20 — and almost immediately began taking exception to how higher education institutions were run.
“We published the position profile right before the academic break in December, but we didn’t launch a formal search until everybody got back in January,” Towers said.
“We were all excited. Then we had the inauguration, and then we had a wild flurry of executive activity out of the White House, which created an incredibly difficult environment for higher ed.
“It was an incredibly difficult time to attract people into the search.”
This obstacle had a silver lining, Towers said.
“The process didn’t get harder because people weren’t interested, but because any good sitting president or provost is very much committed to working through the challenges and issues facing their own university — and those are the very kind of quality, committed people that we’re looking for,” she said. “Many felt, ‘This is not the right time for me to be looking, or even to be seen to be looking.’
“It got a little complicated.”
That led to increased calls for confidentiality.
Towers gave a tip of the hat to WittKieffer, the firm hired to help with the search.
“I give them a ton of credit for their ability to reach out to candidates, to cultivate candidates and to stay in touch with them the entire time, especially at the beginning of the year, when it was really difficult,” she said.
Not that the spring was much better.
The committee realized on-campus visits would be impossible to schedule. That’s why, when a handful of finalists came in during the first week of May for in-person interviews, they were held away from campus.
The in-person interviews were limited to the entire Board of Governors and Board of Trustees Chair Amy Mansue, marking the first time the trustees chair was included in a key hiring.
Rutgers quickly zeroed in on Tate — and contract negotiations started.
One key issue quickly came up: Both sides did not want to make the decision public until after both schools held their graduation ceremonies — more than two weeks after the decision was made.
Amazingly, word of the selection did not leak out.
There was still one last hurdle.
Last Saturday, Rutgers put out the required notice of the meeting to be held Monday. After months of searching in secret, the group had to keep things quiet for two more days.
It wasn’t easy. And there was no way to prevent speculation from picking up.
One news site listed more than a dozen key provosts and top leaders that would make sense — none of them was a finalist.
Others speculated that it was University of Alabama President Stuart Bell, who had announced his retirement from the school but had recently interviewed for another job (right conference, right job — wrong school).
Rutgers got a reprieve when media attention turned to the New Jersey Transit strike — and then the settlement of the NJ Transit strike.
“Everyone was talking Transit,” one person said. “That was great.”
Incredibly, word of the selection of Tate never got out.
Towers said the private nature of the process will help Rutgers immediately.
As the school finalizes its searches for three key positions — chancellor at Rutgers University – Newark, as well as athletic director at Rutgers-New Brunswick and general counsel for the entire system — it will do so with a proven ability to keep names out of the news.
Rutgers has shown future candidates that it can keep a secret.
Towers said that was one of her favorite parts of the process.
“One of my greatest badges of honor was on Saturday, when a news outlet published an article with the headline, ‘The secretive search,’” she said. “That was incredible.
“We had the most extensive and inclusive search ever, and it still was the most confidential. That speaks to the integrity of our Search Committee.”
