JONESBORO — The search advisory committee seeking a new president for the Arkansas University System destroyed notes taken during a meeting while they reviewed applicants’ resumes, officials acknowledged Friday.
The notes, taken in a closed session, were discarded to prevent the public from ever seeing them, they said.
Originally, the ASU System had pledged to run a completely open search. Since Thursday, however, it has taken steps to conceal parts of it.
“We are trying to be open, but there has got to be some place where we can discuss applicants candidly,” said Robert L. Potts, ASU System interim president.
Several people contacted by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on Friday said job searches for public employees should be conducted in an open manner consistent with the law.
Gov. Mike Beebe said through a spokesman that “openness needs to be the rule.” The governor’s office spoke about such searches in general, but did not specifically address the particulars of the current ASU System presidential search.
Tres Williams, director of communications with the Arkansas Press Association, said he thinks the ASU System has violated the law.
John Tull, an attorney who represents the Arkansas Press Association, saidthe notes should have been available publicly and the committee should never have met privately.
The ASU board of trustees is looking for a new president. The board asked the Arkansas State University Foundation to hire Tom Meredith of Effective Leadership LLC in Flowood, Miss., to lead the search.
At the beginning of the search, the ASU System created a special website tracking the progress of the search. The website included news releases about applicants, names of the 15-member search advisory committee and qualifications sought in the next president.
When the committee met Thursday at the ASU System office in Jonesboro, after a brief opening, committee Chairman Florine T. Milligan of Forrest City asked members to go into “private” session to review the resumes and supporting materials sent by presidential candidates. Milligan is chairman of the ASU board of trustees.
After about an hour and 45 minutes, the committee reconvened in public. Milligan said “some” applicants were being invited to Jonesboro for interviews later this month. She would not say who was chosen or how many because she wanted to contact the applicants and see if they were still interested. She deflected questions about why they were selected.
Later Thursday afternoon, ASU released the names of two applicants - William B. Richardson Jr. of Baton Rouge and Richard Federinko of Dadeville, Ala. - as the ones invited for interviews.
Richardson is chancellor of the Louisiana State University Agricultural Center, and Federinko is senior vice chancellor for student services and administration at Troy University in Alabama.
Members of the search committee took notes during their session Thursday, but those notes were gathered and shredded, Meredith said Friday. He added that he told the members to destroy their notes.
“It’s standard practice,” he said. “We shredded them all. You don’t want that kind of stuff getting into the public if someone gets way out there. It could be libelous.”
He said that if committee members wrote something disparaging about a candidate’s age, race or background, the candidate could end up suing the university system or committee if those notes were made public.
Tull, the attorney who represents the Arkansas Press Association, said the notes should have never been destroyed.
“It’s disappointing that our public officials and public institutions don’t adhere to the rules,” Tull said. “The most frustrating thing to the protectors of the Freedom of Information [Act] is when someone makes a clearly concentrated effort to take steps to avoid the public fromknowing what’s going on.”
Williams, with the Arkansas Press Association, said that the destruction of notes taken during the meeting was wrong.
“They wouldn’t be able to argue successfully to exempt them,” Williams said. “It seems to me that they would be public notes.”
At Thursday’s meeting, the search committee kept the public out during the part in which members discussed the applicants. ASU System officials said the meetings are not subject to provisions of the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act.
A 2006 attorney general’s opinion says that whether search committees are subject to the Freedom of Information Act depends on the decision-making power of the committee and its role in the selection process. Beebe, then the attorney general, wrote that if a search committee is purely advisory, it is not subject to the open-records law. But if it makes decisions, such as screening applicants, then it is.
Attorney general’s office opinions are nonbinding.
Potts of the ASU System maintains that the committee is advisory and is not screening applicants. He said the other applicants remain in the running for the job. No one, he said, has been eliminated from contention.
A Beebe spokesman said the governor stands by the 2006 attorney general’s opinion because “it lays out pretty clearly” how search committees must operate.
Williams said the ASU System committee should be held to the same Freedom of Information Act laws applicable to governing bodies. The search committee helped reach a decision on which applicants to bring in, he said.
“I don’t think they were entitled to go into private session at all,” Williams said. “And if they did, they’d still have to come out and ratify what they did in public session.”
Williams said that because the committee receives public funding, uses public facilities for its meetings and is closely entwined with another public organization - the ASU System - it should be held to the law’s standards.
Meredith said he didn’t see committee members’ notes Thursday.
“I don’t know what they wrote,” he said. “I can’t address that.
“If the law considers them public notes, and they should have been kept, then I guess they should have been kept.”
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 10/02/2010