West Virginia Campus Workers are concerned that the Presidential Search process will be hidden from public view and deeply undermine shared governance at our university. At this time, the Board of Governors (BOG) has made no commitment to publicly announcing presidential finalists to the campus community, has announced no plans for these finalists to publicly visit the campus, and retains the right to accept, reject, or make additions to the Search Committees recommendations for finalist selection. .

True shared governance is at the heart of healthy universities. As the Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities of 1966 outlines “Joint effort of a most critical kind must be taken when an institution chooses a new president. The selection of a chief administrative officer should follow upon a cooperative search by the governing board and the faculty”— to which we would also include staff and students. The American Association of University Professors further declared in a 1981 statement on Faculty participation in Selection, Evaluation, and Retention of Administrators “numbers from each constituency should reflect both…faculty concern and the range of other groups, including students, that have a legitimate claim to some involvement.”

Forgoing publicly announcing finalists’ names and not scheduling official public campus visits for them would be behavior more characteristic of a private corporation than a public, land grant university. Secret searches lead to a lack of confidence in the outcome on the part of the university community and public. Public visits not only give the university and West Virginia community an insight into finalists’ knowledge of the campus and demeanor, but also their ability to unify and lead the students, faculty, staff, and administration. These visits also give finalists important understanding into the university community they aspire to lead. For these reasons, we call on the BOG to publicly commit to sharing all the finalists names with the campus community upon their selection, and to immediately announce plans for the finalists to publicly visit WVU.

Even more importantly, we call on the BOG to publicly commit to respect and adhere to the recommendations made by the Search Committee. This body is the only representative of the campus community involved in this process, and the prospect of the Board rejecting its recommendations or injecting a last minute candidate is unconscionable. Such action would be a deep betrayal of the principles of shared governance, and any president selected under these circumstances would immediately struggle to win the trust of the campus community.

We raise these concerns because we want the future president of WVU to have the full confidence of the campus community, so that we can all move forward together. A transparent search process, conducted under the principles of shared governance, is crucial to ensuring that confidence, and to ensure the success of any future WVU President.