Next president of WVU

There's some political infighting going on in Charleston that's spilling out into the public. It does not paint a good picture of higher education in West Virginia.

West Virginia University has long advertised itself as the state’s flagship university, where the best in educational opportunities for the best students are available. WVU is bigger and better than anything else in the state, and a lot of its graduates refer to it as "the university," even though there are several others in the state now.

WVU needs a new president. The leading candidate is someone more skilled in politics than anything else. This is good?

The person in question is Mike Garrison, a former cabinet secretary and chief of staff to former Gov. Bob Wise. Garrison, 38, is the youngest of the three finalist candidates and is the only one not holding an administrative-level position at a university. Garrison was chairman of the state Higher Education Policy Commission, before resigning a day before being named a finalist.

According to the Associated Press, since 2003, Garrison has been a lobbyist with one of the largest clienteles at the Legislature. As a lobbyist and a lawyer, he has represented the interests of several board and search committee members.

The possibility of Garrison’s being the next WVU president was the stuff of insider gossip and bickering until last week. Charleston media and bloggers were all over it. But it became more newsworthy when Judge Robert B. King of the 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals and a WVU graduate, wrote to the WVU Board of Governors about the presidential search process.

According to the AP, King’s letter said a number of people perceive the search process to be “preordained” in Garrison’s favor.

Several members of the search committee, including chairman Steve Goodwin, said they were disappointed with and insulted by King’s letter. Imagine that.

The search process has political fingerprints all over it. Garrison was a person from the Wise admininstration, and Wise kept a flock of Goodwin family people on the state payroll.

A couple of years ago, Marshall's Board of Governors had a choice of an academic or a connected person who desperately wanted the job. It went with the academic. Stephen J. Kopp appears to have done a good job so far. In conversations that have not become public yet, he talks as someone who knows what it takes to start programs from scratch. He knows the market that universities are in for students.

It's an interesting choice the WVU selection committee has, especially now that their hand has been exposed.

This won't be the first time a top job at an institution of higher education in West Virginia would go to a political person. Current WVU President David Hardesty has the same background, I believe. And at least one community college head got the job in part by being married to a high-ranking state official.

But do we want the top job at the state's "flagship" university to be as much a patronage job as a highway department truck driver? The WVU Board of Governors will have to answer that one.