As the Board of Higher Education prepares to hire new presidents at UND, Bismarck State College and Dickinson State University, a board committee is wrestling with new language for a president’s initial contract.
The Board’s Governance Committee looked at a new contract draft, after some were concerned that the initial proposal had a lot of “sticks,” but not a lot of “carrots.”
"I think there's been a well-intentioned attempt to provide some 'carrots' with the 'sticks,'" said NDSU President Dean Bresciani. "But I don't know that, as framed currently, they're attractive carrots."
Bresciani also said one of the proposed “carrots” – that is, new presidents could receive up to a 25 percent bonus for meeting or exceeding set goals – is, in his experience, “extraordinary.”
"I think you are probably going to get a lot of questions about that and how you qualify for it," Bresciani said. "Given the egos, if you will, of most presidential candidates, I suspect most of them are going to assume they're going to get that 25 percent. There's also a downstream problem in explaining why they didn't get the 25 percent.
Committee member Nick Hacker moved to reduce that number to 15 percent – but that failed for a lack of a second.
The Board’s legal counsel will be working on some suggested changes – and the proposed initial contract could be on the agenda for Thursday’s special board meeting.
