The board poised to pick the next University of Arizona president will consider a short list of hopefuls Tuesday, Feb. 28, but officials arenβt saying who is in the running.
The news blackout on candidate names has prompted criticism that the Arizona Board of Regents isnβt meeting the disclosure requirements of state law.
Freedom of information experts within the UAβs own ranks say the regents are ignoring a landmark court ruling that gives the public the right to know who is βseriously being consideredβ for a university presidentβs job.
Prospects are deemed under serious consideration once they are interviewed, and at that point their identities must be disclosed, the ruling said.
Those on the current UA short list were interviewed Feb. 16 and 17 at a resort about 10 miles south of the Phoenix airport. A new president is expected to be announced by mid-March.
Regents Chair Greg Patterson disputed criticisms of the search in a news release Friday, calling the process βopen, inclusive and transparent.β
Regent Bill Ridenour, who is leading the search effort, said keeping names confidential until late in the process helps to attract higher-quality presidential candidates who might face retribution from current employers if word got out they were job-hunting.
Ridenour said itβs βunlikelyβ competing finalists will be invited to campus to meet with the UA community prior to a final hiring decision. Such visits were a tradition at the UA until 2012, when the regents hired UA President Ann Weaver Hart without announcing any other finalists for the position.
Some UA faculty members say the regents are legally obliged to identify those on the current short list.
βI am disappointed that my home institution is taking a cavalier attitude toward transparency obligations and choosing to err on the side of secrecy,β Jane Yakowitz Bambauer, an associate professor who teaches First Amendment law at the UA, wrote Friday on the InfoLaw legal blog hosted by Harvard Law School.
Her blog post is headlined, βThe Arizona Board of Regents Gets an F in FOIA Law,β using an acronym to describe the Freedom of Information Act and other public-access laws.
UA journalism school director David Cuillier, who has twice testified before Congress about access to information, said a 1991 Arizona Supreme Court ruling still in effect requires the regents to publicly identify anyone who is interviewed for a university presidentβs job.
An interview marks the point at which a prospect turns into a presidential candidate whose name and rΓ©sumΓ© are subject to disclosure, the Supreme Court found.
βIn my expert opinion, the Regents are breaking state law if they refuse to disclose the candidatesβ names and CVs (rΓ©sumΓ©s),β Cuillier wrote in a recent email to regents headquarters.
Regents spokeswoman Sarah Harper says a paragraph at the end of the Supreme Court ruling gives regents discretion to adopt procedural rules for presidential searches.
The rules regents developed for the current search say presidential hopefuls will not be publicly identified unless they agree to be named as candidates β wording that is in direct conflict with βthe language and reasoningβ of the 1991 court ruling, Bambauer said.
Those taking part in the search effort describe it as highly successful.
βThe prospects we interviewed last week were all outstanding,β search committee member Lynn Nadel, chair of the UA faculty, wrote Monday in an email update to faculty.
βI am confident that whoever is chosen to be our next president will be someone we can be proud of and expect great things from,β he wrote.
Hart announced last year that she would not seek a contract extension when her current contract ends in mid-2018.
