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At the time of Sean O’Keefe’s expedited hire as LSU chancellor a little more than three years ago, lots of people were talking about a “nontraditional” campus leader who was the way of the future—more CEO, less academician, in other words.

He wasn’t a CEO, but O’Keefe had headed NASA and served as Secretary of the Navy. He rubbed elbows with politicians in Washington D.C., and corporate mandarins in New York. Surely a guy with such connections could rock LSU’s flagship agenda.

Or not, depending on who you talk to. What’s certain is O’Keefe is gone, and history has junked another shard of conventional wisdom—that people with little or no academic background make dandy choices to lead major universities. Former U.S. Sen. David Boren’s successful tenure at the University of Oklahoma is a rare exception, says Jan Greenwood, a veteran search consultant with Florida-based Greenwood & Associates.

“David Boren has probably done better than anyone else in the country,” she says.

Greenwood, the consultant who found O’Keefe’s predecessor, Mark Emmert, in 1999, says the much–heralded ascendancy of the “CEO college president” was a fantasy. As numerous examples have shown more often than not, the tenures of nontraditional university presidents have come apart at the seams following “dramatic missteps” on the part of the chief executive, she says.

Post-O’Keefe, people such as LSU Board of Supervisors chairman-elect Jim Roy are calling for the next chancellor to be “strong academically” and have “leadership characteristics and experience across a broad spectrum of university life.”

“Which includes of course fundraising,” Roy says. “It includes community involvement.”

He says a search committee should be named by the end of February and a new chancellor hired before the start of the next school year—ideally.

“I recognize that there are many searches going on around the country,” Roy says. “That being said, LSU A&M is a very unique campus with a long and rich tradition of success and a positive story in many respects. While it will be a competitive search, LSU has so much to offer candidates for chancellor that we are going to get a high-quality pool of applicants.”

Board member Hank Gowen, a vocal O’Keefe supporter, says he hopes LSU finds someone at least as good as the former chancellor at shaking the money tree—more and more an all-consuming aspect of the job.

“I just hope we can get somebody as good or better than Sean O’Keefe,” Gowen says. “That’ll be a challenge.”

LSU Board Chairman Jerry Shea identifies fundraising, an academic background—O’Keefe’s lack of a doctoral degree made for a rough start at LSU—and a willingness to work within the system as a “team player” as the requisite qualities in whoever is LSU’s next chancellor.

Kevin Cope, an LSU English professor and chairman of the Faculty Senate, says LSU’s next chancellor needs not only fundraising acumen and solid academic credentials—Cope was one of O’Keefe’s early critics over the credentials issue—but someone with a vision for moving the institution in a specific direction.

“We talk about seeking quality,” Cope says. “That’s very abstract. We need someone who can articulate a national agenda that is LSU-specific.”

He thinks the next chancellor should try to advance the entire university rather than focusing on a few individual departments or programs. Focusing on specific programs is essentially the aim of LSU’s Foundations of Excellence initiative, which pours more money into disciplines where LSU might be able to distinguish itself nationally.

Finally, Cope hopes the next chancellor can erase what he calls an “unfortunate adversarial relationship” between faculty and administration.

“One greatly underestimated deterrent to the advancement of LSU is a sense that the administration is self-interested or not humane,” he says. “I don’t believe that to be the case. There are many fine people in administration. But for some reason, this has never been communicated.”

As far as how the chancellor search is conducted, it’s not likely to be as open a process as many, including Cope, believe it should be. He doesn’t buy arguments that only a confidential search can guarantee the highest quality applicants apply to the position. He thinks a secret search might enhance the likelihood of landing a clunker.

The search that led to Mark Emmert’s hiring as LSU chancellor in 1999 was a public search, Greenwood says. Though Emmert turned out to be a popular chancellor and today is the highest-paid public university executive in the nation, at the time of the LSU search neither he nor his co-finalists had ever held the top job at a major university. Emmert, for instance, was No. 2 at the University of Connecticut.

“They got very good visibility being associated with the search at LSU, but really they had nothing to lose,” Greenwood says.

But things have changed a lot since the Emmert search, she says. Greenwood compares the results of executive searches her firm did for two separate clients, both major research universities, one search totally open and the other confidential. Both were aimed at capturing a sitting president at one of the 60 elite schools belonging to the Association of American Universities, in which membership is by vote only.

In the confidential search, no sitting president the search panel approached refused to at least talk about the job. The open search was a different story, Greenwood says.

“That institution did not get to speak with any president they wanted to talk with, because they refused to be part of an open process,” she says.

Greenwood has seen sitting presidents—when they let it be known they’re looking at another university—either get fired, have major donors pull their gifts from the university or legislatures decide to snap shut the purse until a new leader comes along.

With a confidential search, LSU might very well attract the attention of a sitting AAU president, she says. If the search is open, the candidates likely will be from “smaller, less complex universities,” but not from AAU schools, Greenwood says.

The most reliable predictor of who will be an effective leader for your university, meanwhile, is to get someone who’s done comparable work in the past and was good at it—somebody with a presidential record that can be examined.

“That doesn’t mean LSU won’t have a great pool of candidates,” Greenwood says. “It means that process will impact the type of candidates. The process is driving the pool. That’s the reality.”

THE RIGHT STUFF

A few of the qualities LSU’s next chancellor should possess, according to various constituencies.

VISION An ability to move the university forward according to an LSU-specific national agenda and generate more research dollars.

TEAM PLAYER LSU’s eighth chancellor should not clash with LSU System officials too often over policy issues.

FUNDRAISER One of the most important parts of this or any university chief executive’s job these days. LSU’s next chancellor must be adept at shaking the money tree.

UNITER An ability to heal what some perceive as a rift between LSU’s faculty and administration.

ACADEMIC CREDENTIALS A doctoral degree and a background in higher education—preferably leading a top research university.