The University of Maine will turn to a consultant to oversee the search for a new athletic director, even though the university system has blamed its overreliance on an outside firm for bungling the search for a new president of the University of Maine at Augusta.
UMaine on Monday said it’s looking for a vendor to lead the search for a new person to oversee the state’s only Division I sports program. The current athletic director, Ken Ralph, said last week that he’s leaving Orono at the end of the month to become the athletic director at Southwestern University in Texas.
The university published a notice Monday seeking “individuals and firms” qualified in executive searches to take the lead in finding Ralph’s replacement.
The notice comes about three months after a consultant-led search for a new president of the University of Maine at Augusta resulted in the man chosen for the job withdrawing after it came to light that he had been the subject of no-confidence votes from faculty and students at his previous institution.
The Bangor Daily News reported that the search committee chair was aware of the votes but didn’t share the information with fellow search committee members. The university system said the chair, university system trustee Sven Bartholomew, was acting on guidance from the firm hired to carry out the search.
“The overreliance on an outside search consultant led to bad decision-making,” Chancellor Dannel Malloy told state lawmakers in June.
The firm, Storbeck Search, has denied giving the university system that guidance, saying it was up to university officials to share information about the no-confidence votes with search committee members.
Although Michael Laliberte backed out of serving as UMA’s president before starting the job, the university system will be on the hook to ensure he’s paid at least $235,000 annually — his $205,000 salary plus a $30,000 housing allowance — over the three-year life of his contract.
A UMaine spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment Monday on why the university will rely on a search firm to look for Ralph’s replacement.
It has become standard practice for public universities to rely on search firms to recruit candidates for top positions, according to Judith Wilde, a researcher at George Mason University who has examined the role of search firms in public university presidential searches. Wilde told the BDN in May that universities should take greater control of such searches, including by writing their contracts with search firms rather than the other way around.
Following the bungled UMA president search, Malloy ordered a review of all active employment searches at the state’s universities and the university system’s employment search policies.
That review resulted in a handful of recommendations for hiring policy changes, which Malloy shared with system trustees at their meeting in July.
The recommendations included proposals that the system’s human resources office be involved with employment searches, that the names of finalists become public, and that candidates for president and provost positions disclose whether they’ve ever been the subject of a no-confidence vote.
The University of Maine System has used an outside search consultant or firm to fill executive positions — including campus president roles and system office positions — at least 13 times since 2010, paying those entities $1.1 million, according to system records the BDN requested under the Maine Freedom of Access Act.
In addition to finding the next UMA president, Storbeck Search was also charged this year with finding the next dean of a new statewide engineering, computing and information science college and UMaine’s next vice president for finance and administration.
The system has used Storbeck at least five other times since 2010, including in the 2017 search for the next president of the University of Maine that resulted in the selection of the current president, Joan Ferrini-Mundy.
The system has also used the executive search firms Archer-Martin Associates and Academic Search. Additionally, the system has hired Terrance McTaggart, a former two-time UMaine System chancellor, at least four times since 2010 to find top executives for the system.
