Months ago, at a party, someone asked me if the Whitewater Schools would conduct a genuine search for a high school principal. I said no: they’d take the interim principal, insist he was the only candidate, and make him the permanent high school principal.
(That’s exactly what happened Monday night, 2.27.12. There are many times that one would rather be wrong than be right about something.)
How would that be possible, I was then asked? Isn’t a search process supposed to have at least two candidates, so that the district would have a choice among possibilities? Well, of course it is, I replied, but there will be some sort of rationalization about having only one candidate.
And so there has been a rationalization, in the form of a new search standard: if there’s only one internal candidate, and the committees interviewing him don’t reject him, then he gets the job.
Very few people – especially on committees that insiders’ carefully select – are prepared to fight against complacency, even if that fight involves asking merely for two candidates from whom to choose.
Under the new standard, so as long as a sole candidate doesn’t start twitching uncontrollably, or begin barking like a dog, he’s sure to get the job.
There’s something funny about the insistence that three committees approved this single-candidate process, as though repetition could possibly be to the district’s credit.
On the contrary, the repetition three times of the same single-candidate process is evidence of how mediocre is the district’s approach, and how cloudy its board’s thinking.
It’s even more embarrassing that the district and its cheering section think that the board’s unanimous approval of a third-tier approach somehow absolves — anoints really — a single-candidate process.
Who thinks this way? People who think that if an authority puts its stamp on something, then it must be right.
If three hospitals insisted upon the benefits of bleeding with leeches, and the American Medical Association endorsed the practice, it would still be unsound.
This was an indolent process, in the place of a true, dedicated search.