On Saturday, the Editorial LiveJournalists offered their insight on academic governance to TSU.
Today, the Editorial LiveJournalists moved on to UH, presenting their candidate for UH’s open position of chancellor/president:
With the unexpected resignation of Jay Gouge in March to take the helm of his alma mater, Auburn University, the University of Houston again finds itself in search of a leader who can chart the course of the four-campus system.
The outcome of UH’s headhunting could decide whether the city’s flagship of public higher education achieves ambitious goals or stagnates in mediocrity. With UH aspiring to the status of a top-tier Texas research campus, portents point in both directions.
[snip]
Members of the search committee have been issued guidelines. Mostly predictable, these call for a person with vision and leadership skills, political savvy and fund-raising expertise, a respected educator with integrity, common sense and a sense of humor.
The guidelines do not put a premium on a leader with Texas or Houston roots, despite UH’s chronic problems amassing support in local communities and competing with other state universities in Austin for state dollars. A UH rival, Texas Tech, chose a former Texas politician from that area, Kent Hance, as its top executive.
[Search committee head Leroy] Hermes says a person with homegrown credentials, Houston connections and the savvy to run an academic institution would be the ideal candidate. Unfortunately, he said, “the likelihood of our being able to find that person is pretty far-fetched.”
UH’s main campus has had only one woman or minority as president in its 80-year history in the person of Marguerite Barnett, an African-American whose tenure was cut short by a fatal brain tumor. Hermes said no preference is being given to gender or minority status, and he has notified members of the search committee that he would remove anyone who used those categories as criteria for the selection.
That shouldn’t be a problem, because the Chronicle’s editorial board, which includes four UH alumni, thinks the best qualified potential candidate is a University of Houston graduate, as well as the highest ranking federal education official. She is Margaret Spellings, the Bush administration’s secretary of education and the architect of the president’s No Child Left Behind Act. She also helped to make the landmark public school reforms in Texas during the Bush governorship.
Apparently, the four UH alumni among the Editorial LiveJournalists are so plugged in to the goings on at their alma mater that they got the name of former chancellor Jay Gogue wrong in a Sunday editorial. That’s impressive.
Unfortunately, much of the Chronicle‘s coverage of UH has failed to appreciate the impact of Gogue in his short time heading up the University of Houston (although most, but not all, of the Chron‘s reporting has at least managed to get his name right). Under Gogue — someone not from the Houston area, we might add — the university developed and published its detailed Master Plan, highlighting a vision to upgrade the institution from one regarded even by many here in town as a second-tier commuter school to one of the nation’s premier urban research institutions (replete with a significant campus residential community).
Dr. Gogue seemed committed to implementing that vision, which is why his departure for Auburn (his alma mater) was so untimely.
Rather than recommend any single candidate to the UH Board of Regents, we would suggest to them that they and Dr. Gogue were on exactly the right track with the UH Master Plan. Their priority should be continuing to fill in the details of the UH Master Plan, and to find a highly qualified candidate who will commit to implementing that plan, and possesses the appropriate skills to do so. That leader could be a local person (perhaps even Margaret Spellings) with political skills, but it might just as well be a visionary outsider with proven academic-governance skills — like Dr. Gogue — who is willing to see UH as it might be, instead of as it always has been.
We hope that the search committee, under the capable leadership of Leroy Hermes, gets this important decision right. As the Editorial LiveJournalists rightly point out, it comes at a critical time for UH.
