Carol Folt’s leadership must be defined by transparency

When Chancellor Holden Thorp announced his resignation last September, he did so as the University dealt with academic and athletic scandals unprecedented in both their number and seriousness.

Somehow, between then and now, those scandals have multiplied and deepened with the University’s failure to competently handle sexual assault, drawing national ire and sowing distrust between students and the administration.

Come July 1, Carol Folt will become chancellor and take up the task of solving the problems that Thorp’s administration has attempted to fix with varying levels of success.

Doubtless, Chancellor-elect Folt will pledge to pursue the same sort of goals that Thorp and those who came before him have extolled: affordable tuition, academic success, faculty retention and so on.

All of those goals are worthy and precisely what any chancellor should strive to achieve. Where Folt can distinguish herself and her administration is by how she achieves those objectives.

Folt must place a premium on transparency. So many of the issues that marred Thorp’s time in office were exacerbated by closed doors and waiting until it was too late to be open and clear.

Closed systems — like the University’s process for handling sexual assault cases that provoked complaints to the Department of Education — are the ones that often stoke the most public anger and require significant action on the part of third parties for resolution.

The Folt administration must operate within an air of transparency that permeates all of its actions. Obfuscation and deflection hurt the University and will make for a short chancellorship

Hiding behind the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act to keep private what should be public information doesn’t just impede progress on important issues, it flies in the face of what makes a public university public.

It’s imperative that Folt understands and internalizes the public nature of the University. While Folt’s experience as president of Dartmouth College — a private institution — will be helpful in many respects, her new office comes with new responsibilities.

Folt needs to be able to relate to and work with the manifold stakeholders of the University, from the system’s Board of Governors to alumni to housekeepers.

The office of the chancellor is a highly public one, and rightly so. Folt must recognize that she has a responsibility to the people of the state as a whole.

That responsibility means being held to the same standard of openness that comes with holding any other public office.

Approachability and affordability are all important to the success of the University and its students. But if Folt wants to succeed where Thorp has failed, she needs to maintain a level of transparency and openness that her predecessor has lacked.