The News
Texas A&M University System’s chancellor, John Sharp, announced on Monday that he would recommend to the system’s Board of Regents that Gen. Mark A. Welsh III, the flagship’s interim president, serve as the permanent president. If the Board of Regents accepts the nomination, the embattled institution in College Station would forgo a national search despite concerns about the hiring process that have been raised by faculty members in recent weeks.
The Details
At a meeting on Monday with members of the Faculty Senate’s executive committee, Sharp confirmed that he would endorse Welsh as the sole finalist in Texas A&M’s presidential search. Sharp spoke soon after The Texas Tribune broke the news about the anticipated announcement.
Welsh, who previously served as dean of the campus’s Bush School of Government and Public Service and is retired from the U.S. Air Force, took over as interim president in July after M. Katherine Banks resigned amid a flurry of controversy arising from the derailed hiring of Kathleen O. McElroy. Welsh was also a finalist for the presidency in the nationwide search that ended with Banks’s hiring.
In a written statement, Sharp noted an “urgency” to select a president to “bring further stability” to the university. “Like many of you, I am pleased with the direction of Texas A&M under General Welsh’s leadership,” Sharp said. “He is moving decisively to advance the university’s mission, and he is doing it while ensuring that faculty, staff, and others are properly informed and included.”
The Board of Regents scheduled a special meeting for this Friday to consider Sharp’s recommendation. If it’s accepted, faculty members would have 21 days to offer input before the board makes a final decision.
In late October, Tracy A. Hammond, the Faculty Senate’s speaker, implored Sharp on behalf of its executive committee to pursue an open search or vetting process led by faculty members. Hammond wrote that such a process would “enhance the reputation” of the system and “validate the appointment of a new president” following the challenges the university faced last summer.
Sharp said he agreed. He responded to Hammond the same day and charged the Faculty Senate with “assessing the opinion of the Texas A&M University community” on whether Welsh should become the permanent president. Last Friday, Hammond released an update from the Faculty Senate’s informational meetings on such an assessment, noting that faculty members had expressed “a general sentiment that General Welsh is doing a good job,” while also observing that, as a participant in the previous search, he’d been fully vetted by a search committee that included seven faculty members.
Hammond outlined her vision for what a Faculty Senate-led vetting process could look like and further proposed an in-depth review of the system’s policy on presidential searches, which she said had “decayed over the past 20 years” and diminished faculty involvement. She added that Sharp had said no decision would be made, either nominating Welsh or conducting a national search, until faculty members had provided input. It remains unclear if that happened before the announcement on Monday; Hammond said at a Faculty Senate meeting on Monday night that Sharp and the Board of Regents supported a comprehensive review of the presidential-search process — excluding the current effort.
Concerns about process notwithstanding, a majority of the faculty at Monday’s meeting seemed to favor keeping Welsh on as president to help stabilize the institution, said Jorge L. Alvarado, a faculty senator. “Having an open search is ideal,” he said, “but it might be difficult to recruit a top candidate at this juncture.”
The Backdrop
The debate over transparent procedures and including faculty voices is the latest in a series of conversations on the College Station campus since its summer of scandals.
Shortly after the news about McElroy’s botched hiring came out and Banks resigned, The Texas Tribune reported that Joy Alonzo, a nontenured professor who studies opioids, had been placed on paid leave following a guest lecture at the University of Texas Medical Branch. The leave was the result of a complaint, lodged by the daughter of a politician, about a comment the professor had made in the lecture about Texas’ lieutenant governor.
Following the two incidents, many faculty members raised concerns about the diminished state of shared governance and a “top-down” leadership structure that had dominated the university for years. At the start of the fall semester, faculty members told The Chronicle that changes made under Welsh had given them hope for the direction of Texas A&M. Welsh started his tenure by announcing broad goals to improve communication and transparency in decision making. He also formed a task force to protect academic freedom and ordered a reassessment of Banks’s major academic-restructuring plan, which had proceeded despite faculty dissent. As a result of that reassessment, Welsh decided to change some of Banks’s plans and forge ahead with others.
Welsh declined The Chronicle’s request for comment until after the Board of Regents meeting on Friday. He previously told The Chronicle that his main goal as interim president was improving shared governance and encouraging faculty input. “The first order of business is to make sure that we get back to what is clearly the most successful model of governance for a university, which is shared governance,” he said in September.
The Stakes
Texas A&M is one of several prominent institutions to struggle recently with how to navigate the presidential-search process following high-profile controversies, at a time when the appeal of being a college president is shrinking. A Chronicle report that analyzed the last five years of presidential departures found that disputes surrounding investigations and controversial actions or remarks were the most common factors preceding a departure. Hiring problems, like the one that preceded Banks’s departure, were relatively rare factors.
James H. Finkelstein, a professor emeritus at George Mason University who studies presidential searches, views Texas A&M as part of a pattern of diminishing faculty involvement in searches, especially at institutions embroiled in controversy.
“I think you will see more and more governing boards saying, ‘Why are we searching? Why can’t we just appoint whoever we want?’” Finkelstein said. “This is going to help reinforce that point of view with other governing boards.”
For Texas A&M specifically, faculty members raised concerns that neglecting an open search would only worsen their institution’s reputational woes and the challenge of recruiting high-quality candidates. For example, a recent search for a dean of the College of Arts and Sciences yielded no external candidates in the final applicant pool. However, Hammond noted in the Faculty Senate meeting on Monday that external candidates had expressed an unwillingness to move to the institution without knowing who its next leader would be.
Finkelstein noted that the direction Texas A&M takes could also have consequences for how effectively its next president can lead. “It is, at the end of the day, the violation of the most fundamental principles of shared governance. And I think that’s the real danger here,” he said. “That the disconnect between governing boards and the faculty is growing, so there’s distrust, and it sets up the precedent for having to find ways to build bridges that they shouldn’t need to have to build. They [presidents] start out at a disadvantage that’s not of their own making.”
