University of Minnesota President Rebecca Cunningham is facing controversy among staff and faculty after she announced her selection for the university’s new provost, pending the Board of Regents’ approval.
In a systemwide email on May 20, Cunningham announced Syracuse University’s Gretchen Ritter as the university’s search committee’s selection for executive vice president and provost. This selection brought backlash, as some faculty questioned the nature of the selection and pointed out Ritter’s previous controversies.
The most commonly cited controversy among faculty comes from Ritter’s time as a dean at the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University, where she was involved in a Title IX lawsuit with physics professor Mukund Vengalattore, after he was denied tenure. Because of this lawsuit, many members of the University community express concerns surrounding faculty trust and freedom.
University administrators are hired by university search committees, who gauge the competence of candidates through public or private, also known as closed, searches.
Some search committees in higher education believe closed searches yield more candidates of a higher caliber. According to Regent James T. Farnsworth, closed searches do not require search committees to publicize their decision-making process, which can help find candidates who are still serving active roles at their universities.
“There’s a belief that in order to get top candidates for positions, candidates for these level positions in higher education don’t want to put their current jobs at risk by going through public searches, especially as they’re not selected,” Farnsworth said.
Former Regent Michael Hsu said that it worries him that they chose a candidate involved in numerous controversies, including a lawsuit.
“They didn’t get someone from a higher-profile school to become our new provost,” Hsu said. “We didn’t get that.”
Hsu said Ritter’s nomination was unusual. The University is an R-1 land-grant public institution, so core decisions about university leadership and framework are traditionally publicized to promote transparency and trust between leaders and the community.
“In this case, for whatever reason, the regents of the president and the search committee decided to do everything kind of in secret,” Hsu said. “All of a sudden, someone gets sprung on, and my concern in the Ritter situation was simply that she has a history, she has a past, she has a resume.”
Farnsworth said the current process the university uses to hire leadership is somewhat unconventional, and it can apply pressure to regents to vote one way or another.
“Something strange that the University does is, there’s hiring announcements and all that, but then it’s pending Board of Regents approval,” Farnsworth said. “We often get put in these situations where we have positions that are delegated to the president to hire, but then they’re approved by way of employment agreements by the board, so it kind of puts the board into a position to have to say yes.”
Along with a lawsuit during her time at Cornell, Ritter also faced backlash during her time with Syracuse University. After protests arose surrounding the Israel-Palestine War, Ritter and Senior Vice President Allen Grove released a statement that was met with criticism, according to the Daily Orange.
“This kind of reprehensible behavior put a group of our students on their identity, at risk of harassment, retaliation and potential violence,” the statement said.
The statement was met with backlash among students and members of Syracuse’s community. According to the Daily Orange, protestors at the pro-Palestine protests criticized the joint statement, saying that the actions Syracuse’s administration has taken have limited student speech.
“This university does not acknowledge the genocide,” the protester said according to the article. “They blatantly silence the voices of Palestinians and subvert free speech and academic freedom surrounding this issue.”
Matthew Huber, a geography and environment professor at Syracuse University, said the statement from Ritter is potentially harmful to students’ freedom, according to the Daily Orange.
“This sort of blanket concern about students feeling unsafe really seems like restrictions and threats to our academic freedom as faculty to teach and cover in the classroom what we think is most important,” Hubber said in the article.
Hsu said many issues arise when people don’t realize that the University is a public institution.
“Let’s just be clear that we are not a private school, although a lot of people want to pretend that we are a private school, and that’s kind of where the problem starts,” Hsu said. “There needs to be more transparency because we are taxpayer-funded.”
On March 14, the Board of Regents said that university departments cannot publicly make a statement relating to public concerns without administrative approval, which led to controversies within the faculty.
Even still, staff continue to speak out individually.
At a Board of Regents meeting on June 13, Sima Shakhsari, an associate professor of gender, women and sexuality studies at the University and a member of Educators for Justice in Palestine, said she spoke against the nomination of Gretchen Ritter at the meeting.
“I tried to make the connection why budget is cut from academic programs, why tuition hikes are happening,” Shakhsari said. “We are hiring a fascist for our vice president.”