It shocked the Cal State Long Beach community when news first started to trickle out that President F. King Alexander had been selected as the sole candidate to be the next president of the Louisiana State University system.
CSULB students and faculty were more concerned about losing Alexander than the search process that yielded him for the LSU position.
The search for the next president had been taking place for quite some time and had actually become quite controversial.
Up until Alexander’s selection, The Advocate, a newspaper in Baton Rouge, La., and The Daily Revelle, LSU’s campus newspaper, had been trying to acquire the names of the candidates considered for the position.
However, when the newspapers requested the names of the applicants, their requests were denied.
According to Louisiana’s Public Records Law, “the name of each applicant for a public position of authority or … with policymaking duties … shall be available for public inspection, examination, copying, or reproduction.”
But, since a private firm was engaged to pool potential candidates for the LSU president position, these documents were not made available to the public, which is why both newspapers are suing the LSU Board of Supervisors.
By placing the search in the hands of a private firm, the Board allegedly could have been trying to circumvent releasing the names.
In the eyes of the Board and the applicants, this would make sense. In order to gather qualified candidates for the position, many of the applicants would want to be ensured that the selection process would remain private.
This is to guarantee that candidates avoid losing support – or even worse, their jobs – in the case that they’re not selected for the new position they applied for. It is likely that many potential candidates for the position are current university presidents throughout the country. Alexander himself said he would not have applied for the position if his name had been released.
We understand the Board was trying to protect the candidates for the position; however, for a job as important as the president of a university system, the public needs to know who could take on the job.
Students and faculty of both LSU and CSULB should know the status of their school’s leaders. If not, this is a blatant lack of transparency.
The newspapers are not suing because they don’t like the Board’s choice of Alexander but rather to make a point that the public has a right to know who could lead them in the future. We share this opinion as a fellow newspaper that requests public records.
Obviously, these lawsuits will not reverse the decision on Alexander’s selection, but hopefully it will get a point across to the LSU Board and other colleges throughout the nation that this approach isn’t right.
Whoever is in charge of finding Alexander’s successor at CSULB better not pull of the same shenanigans.
We’re always watching.