Daily Columnist Justin Horvath

Regents Skirted Open Meeting Law in choosing one presidential candidate.


From the Daily:

The Board of Regents’ decision to name only one finalist to succeed Bob Bruininks as president of the University of Minnesota left a lot of journalism-nerd types, myself included, huffing that the 12-member body had dodged Minnesota’s Open Meeting Law.

Still laboring through the two-hour production — by most accounts, regents meetings are nothing but fronts of unity put on by the board — my phone lit up with text messages full of ire, much of which about Regent David Larson for this comment:

“I believe the Open Meeting Law has made this more difficult,” Larson said of the presidential search process. He referred to the law, which stipulates regents must interview presidential finalists in public meetings if they meet with more than three members, as an “obstacle.”

The Open Meeting Law certainly was a costly obstacle for University, having eventually lost a Minnesota Supreme Court decision for violating it in the 2002 presidential search process. But this time, by naming only one finalist for the public interview phase, the regents got around the court case the Minnesota Daily and other media outlets brought against it. Now the Stony Brook University provost Eric Kaler will be the only candidate students, faculty and staff of this public University — along with the taxpayers who fund it — will get to screen. We might never know who the presidential search committee recommended to the Board of Regents, which has the final say in choosing the president. Kaler may not be it if Regents don’t think he passes muster.

Regent Larson is an executive vice president of Cargill, Inc. When I called him at his house Saturday afternoon to clarify his Friday comment, he asked me whether I’d want my name in a public recruiting pool from a competing organization. That’s the argument many universities make — that they cannot find the very best candidates because they bow out for fear of harming their reputations if they’re not chosen — and I told him it’s a reasonable one.

“As a general statement, you know, we’re an autonomous body. But the Supreme Court ruled against us, in spite of the fact that the University was formed before the state was,” Larson said. “And we’re an autonomous body, and therefore, if more than three regents talk to any particular candidate it becomes public, which makes it extremely difficult to recruit people who are currently holding substantial positions.”

That’s the we-were-here-first argument the University made unsuccessfully in court. I then asked Larson if he thinks the public interviews are important and why.

“To me, I think the reason they’re important because first of all, that’s the law and we have to abide by that and we intend to abide by that,” he replied. "And secondly, being that it is the law, and we also do have a shared governance system within the University, I think it’s important that professors and students and the public in general, for that matter, gets a chance to get to know these people."

Regents made laudatory speeches about candidate “C.” Chairman Clyde Allen, who earlier had said that the law “required” the regents to respect the candidates’ privacy, submitted the motion to invite “C” — Kaler — to campus. As they almost always do when motions come to a vote, the regents bellowed a resounding “Aye!”

“Most of their debate goes on behind closed doors because they don’t want to tarnish the reputation of the University by having any kind of diversity of opinion. And they don’t want to appear to undercut the president,” DFL Sen. Sandy Pappas, who has chaired the Higher Education Committee, said of the regents.

Imagine reputations more valuable than transparency and public knowledge of our state institutions.