If Mississippi Valley State University’s acting president, Dr. Jerryl Briggs, decides he would like the job permanently, it is going to create a predicament for the College Board’s dubiously secret process of filling these presidential openings.
The College Board got into a huff earlier this year when word leaked as to who were some of the finalists for the president’s job at Jackson State University, and that the candidate who eventually was selected, former MVSU President William Bynum, was not initially one of the finalists.
The higher-ups in higher ed didn’t take kindly to having their cover blown. Instead of recognizing that the secret process should be dumped, however, they have acted as if they might double-down on it and further restrict the number of persons allowed to be included in the closed-door process.
In Briggs’ case, though, there won’t have to be any leaks. It will be obvious what his intentions are when the College Board announces next month who the interim president at MVSU is going to be.
If it’s Briggs, then he will not be a candidate for the permanent job, as College Board policy prevents interim presidents from being in the mix. If someone else is appointed as the interim, then that would be an almost certain signal that Briggs is pursuing the permanent position.
Maybe the College Board could try to get around this by leaving Briggs as the acting president and just not appoint an interim president. It’s done that before. But if it does, it will be going back on how it said the process would operate when the vacancy was created by Bynum’s promotion to the larger sister institution in Jackson.
If the College Board keeps its word, however, and if Briggs is not the interim president, that means he will be the only candidate — unless there are leaks as there were at Jackson State — whose interest is publicly known.
Whether that would put him at an advantage or disadvantage in getting the job is hard to say, but it certainly wouldn’t be fair to somebody — either him or the other candidates who apply.
It’s just one more scenario that begs for the College Board to drop this curtain they keep trying to put up, and instead adopt the process that many states use and this one used to.
Let the initial pool of candidates be confidential, but when the process is winnowed down to the final three, announce their names, let them come to campus for interviews, and let the media and the rest of the public help in vetting them.
That would make the process transparent, be fair to the candidates and improve the odds that the College Board makes a good pick.
