Texas Southern University's President Crawford Outlines AD & Coach Search Process

I am here with Chairman James Benham as well as the President of Texas Southern University, James W. Crawford III. Gentlemen, thank you. Nice to meet you. Pleasure to be here. I appreciate your time. This whole process has been well publicized lately, of course, but President, why was it so critical for you to have your hands in the selection process from start to finish? Well, what I would say is my hands haven't been in the selection process from start to finish other than starting it, giving direction of how it should proceed, and then allowing it to proceed. At any process, whether it's this process or whether it's for important roles like deans or vice presidents, other vice presidents, my role is to set the vision of what we want candidates to look like and why. And then ensure that we follow the Texas law, follow our own policy, as well as board policy. And that's my role. So this process was conducted as any other process in the university. The first thing that happened was there was a solicitation done by the procurement department to solicit, to advertise a solicit for an appropriate executive search firm. Because positions like these, you want to ensure you have professionals that are steeped in the subject matter, that understand the subject matter. The firm that was selected, they've got former ADs, former head football coaches, former head basketball coaches, those who have been involved in other aspects of professional and college athletics. They have done work with ACC and the Big Ten, for example. So you want to ensure you have an organization that has a depth of experience. I had nothing to do with selecting them. My job was to ensure that the process was followed. Once they were selected, then I met with them to outline the vision of what we wanted here at Texas Southern University. And that started and ended with integrity. And then from that process, and we issued public notices throughout this process of what was happening. We issued a public notice that we were going to sleek, seek a public, an executive search firm. We issued a public notice that we identified the search firm. And along the way, we issued public notices to keep the public informed, to be as transparent as possible. As you know, this is a confidential process, because we're dealing with the individuals, their personal information, and current employment. Some of them might have been currently employed, which would jeopardize that. So you have to be protective of those things. But everything that could be publicized, we did that. From identifying the search firm, the next process was to ensure we identified an advisory committee for me. So it wasn't just my eyes that looked at these candidates. There were 70 candidates applied for the basketball coach position. There were 46 that applied for the AD position. That's just a reflection of their prestige that working at Texas Southern has. So I had a coach from the university, a dean from the university, and I had a sitting AD from a different institution outside of the SWAC, so that we could have a broad perspective.