U Wisc-Parkside President says Felner Search Flawed

This from Trading Markets.com:

Parkside chancellor search was flawed, Reilly says

The people involved in the failed search for a chancellor at UW-Parkside could have done a better job of sharing information about the top candidate, University of Wisconsin System President Kevin Reilly said Friday.

Reilly commissioned a review of the search process used to choose chancellors at all System schools after Robert Felner, who was hired as chancellor of UW-Parkside last spring, resigned amid a federal criminal investigation in Kentucky.

Suggested changes in the report, released Friday, included visiting the home campus of all lead candidates and clearly delineating the roles and responsibilities of the search firm.

It also included simple suggestions like running Google searches on candidates to find articles that could reveal controversies.

...Reilly said "information flow" was lacking in the Parkside search. For instance, some search committee members who chose Felner knew of a no-confidence vote by faculty at the University of Louisville but failed to pass on that information on to others....

UW System to review botched chancellor search

This from H-L:

MADISON, Wis. --Insufficient reference checks and a compressed timeline may have hampered the process used to search for a new University of Wisconsin-Parkside chancellor, officials said Tuesday.

University of Louisville Dean Robert Felner was supposed to start leading UW-Parkside in Kenosha on Tuesday. He resigned the job last month after his lawyer disclosed he is at the center of a federal investigation into whether $500,000 in grant money was mishandled.

UW System President Kevin Reilly said Tuesday he would hire an independent consultant to study the failed search and make recommendations for improvements by mid-August.

He said the lessons learned will be used during pending searches for chancellors at UW-Green Bay and UW-River Falls, along with a second search for a UW-Parkside chief.

The consultant will review whether reference checks on Felner were insufficient, whether the three-month timeline for the search was too quick and whether the guidelines for vetting candidates are unclear, Reilly said.

The number and type of references interviewed by a campus search committee and an outside search firm may have led to an overly positive picture of Felner's performance at Louisville and the University of Rhode Island, he said...