Wednesday, May 3, 2006 | 7:39 a.m.
Imagine applying for a job elsewhere - and not only does your boss immediately learn of it, but everything you say, and is said about you, during the interview process is made public.
Every tidbit will be publicly preserved on the Internet - and possibly haunt you years from now during your next job search.
Would you still apply?
That's the reality that faced the top 10 candidates for the UNLV presidency. And the public process will become even more intense starting today when the final three candidates are grilled during 90 minutes of rapid-fire questioning.
Because of its open meeting and open records laws, Nevada is second only to Florida in subjecting university president candidates to such public scrutiny.
And it can have a chilling effect on the recruiting process, according to search consultants and national higher education officials. Fear of public exposure deterred many qualified candidates from applying for the presidencies of UNR and UNLV, consultants for both universities said, including every female who indicated an initial interest in the UNLV job.
"The risk to the candidates is really rather significant," said Alberto Pimentel, vice president for education for A.T. Kearney Inc., the firm that is finishing the UNR search. Publicly releasing the names of job candidates "is going to limit the size of your pool and the experience those individuals might have. The first group to go is always going to be the sitting presidents because they are the ones most at risk."
Candidates may jeopardize their standing at their current universities if word gets out they even are just sniffing around for other possible jobs, Pimentel and higher education officials said. The candidate's current board members don't know whether to trust him, and donors are more hesitant to give money.
Candidates can't be sure they would even be considered for a post until they make contact with the Nevada university - and at that very moment, their names are publicly released.
"The best candidates, almost always, have a good job somewhere else," said Nick Estes, former general counsel for the University of New Mexico, who has extensively studied the issue nationwide. "And they don't want to screw that up ... by appearing too eager to leave."
The lack of female candidates in the UNLV search raised concerns among committee members. Last Friday they asked Nevada System of Higher Education lawyers to study how to protect candidates' privacy.
Businessman Mike Sloan, a member of the search advisory committee, said Nevada's strict open meeting law may be "doing a disservice to the university system and all state agencies."
"It's a good goal, but maybe it's gone too far."
At issue is how to balance the confidentiality needs of the candidates with the public's interest in having input into the decision.
If the quality of the presidential candidate pool for the state's major universities is being affected by the current level of openness, it may be time for a change, said Regent Steve Sisolak, chairman of the regent search committee for UNLV.
"This has got to be affecting other agencies," Sisolak said, because they are bound by the same disclosure laws.
Most public universities across the country have found ways to keep the recruiting process private until the final round of screening, Estes found in his 2000 study. In about 30 percent of all nationwide searches, including all University of California system chancellor openings, the public only learns of the winning candidate.
Nevada and Florida are the only states that conduct the interview process entirely in public.
The process is open to public scrutiny, open meeting law advocates say, because at stake is the hiring of executives who will control millions of dollars in state money.
"It's a big decision of who is going to run the university," said Barry Smith, executive director for the Nevada Press Association. "The more information the public gets about those people early enough that they can have some input on the choice, is a good thing for the taxpayers."
By the time a search committee has met with candidates and narrowed the pool to the top three, the committee's final choice is usually a "foregone conclusion," Smith said.
Open meeting and open records laws are also designed to make sure the process is fair, inclusive of minorities and women, and is not corrupted by an "old boys network" that plays favorites, said Richard Novak, vice president for public programs at Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.
But if UNLV's open process is deterring women because they may not feel secure in their current positions, that needs to be re-evaluated, Novak said.
"You have to balance the public's right to know with the public good, and those two are not always synonymous," Novak said.
Nevada's open meeting and open records law has grown stronger over the years in response to lawsuits, particularly against the Board of Regents.
After a 2003 fiasco in which regents illegally deliberated in closed session to fire the Community College of Southern Nevada president, the 2005 Nevada Legislature changed the open meeting law to define university and college presidents as public officials.
That means that anyone applying for the $250,000-a-year job is fair game for public scrutiny, as are current presidents, system lawyer Bart Patterson said. All presidential evaluations are now considered public record.
Previously, regents generally opened the interview process, but learned personal information behind closed doors. The Las Vegas Review-Journal unsuccessfully sued in 2001 to open those closed sessions during the search for a new CCSN president, but regents decided to err on the side of making the process more open.
The state university system relies on search consultants to at least partially shield the candidates, and has worked in recent years to expedite the interview and campus visitation process to minimize the candidate's exposure.
UNLV's search is expected to wrap up within two weeks with the naming of the 10 finalists.
But candidates who make the final 10 argue that it's too soon to publicly reveal their names, Pimentel, Ann Die Hasselmo and Jamie Ferrare, consultants for the UNLV search, said.
The two consultant services said candidates would sometimes drop out of competition at the 11th hour, for fear of being publicly identified.
A female candidate in the UNLV search withdrew the day before her name was to become public, said Hasselmo, managing director of Academic Search Consultation Service.
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