FROM THE PUBLISHER | Find someone capable of making change

The state Board of Regents last week approved the job description for the president’s role. It says, among other things, that the incoming president should have comparable experience, leading an institution of similar size and complexity. That doesn’t mean the next president has to already have experience as a university president, but it is sort of a step in that direction.

What the statement did not say was that the person needs to be capable of shaking things up. Right now, K-State is a well-run place with good people in positions of leadership. But it has been enduring enrollment decline for several years, to the point that it’s a trend that is feeding on itself. Something needs to change, and that change is going to have to come from the top. Hopefully, in the process of finding and vetting candidates, the people in charge can make good judgments.

As I say, we can only hope. The search process is closed, which means we will all learn about the new hire once it is already made. The search committee and the Regents themselves will be the only people who know.

That has its advantages, since presumably candidates who otherwise have good jobs wouldn’t want to apply if it got out that they were job-hunting. It also has substantial risk, since open discussion usually leads to better decisions.

Speaking of which, I have to seriously question the Regents’ excuses for failing to make their meeting accessible to the public. The meeting I’m referring to was the one where they approved the new job description for the K-State president.

The meeting was conducted by Zoom, but the public could not access the video feed of the meeting. They said that was because they could not provide closed-captioning of the video, as required by law. And they said that people could have gone to the Regents headquarters in Topeka to watch the meeting.

Uhhh….OK. Let’s concede that they probably didn’t technically violate the state’s open meetings law, and let’s concede that the meeting was fairly perfunctory, and let’s concede that closed-captioning probably complicated matters.

But, come on, the idea is that government meetings are supposed to be accessible to the public. The Regents need to do better than that.