Members of the Kansas Board of Regents conduct annual performance evaluations of the chancellor and presidents of the six state universities. In past years, this evaluation exercise has been relatively superficial, and regents have not been aware of many troubling situations or problems on the various campuses.

Last year, the regents decided a more thorough examination was needed of how the chancellor and presidents were carrying out their responsibilities. They realized it is not enough to rely on the chancellor, presidents and provosts to come clean and tell the regents everything they should know. In past years, the administrators were, in effect, giving their own self-serving scorecard to the regents.

A new “360” process now is in operation at the state universities where regents ask about 150 individuals from each school to evaluate how their chancellor or president is carrying out his or her responsibilities.

Within the past few days, members of the Kansas University Alumni Association, the KU Endowment Association, some off-campus Lawrence residents, alumni living elsewhere and others received an e-mail from regents Chairman Gary Sherrer inviting them to participate in a “performance evaluation” of Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little.

It is voluntary, no names will be used, and individual responses will not be identified.

According to Sherrer’s message, Gray-Little “will not receive the raw data from the survey, but rather a summary report, which she can then use in developing her self-assessment.”

The big question, however, is what the regents will do with the information gathered in the survey. In past years, they were told of serious shortcomings of a chancellor or president, but there is little evidence they did much about it.

If there are numerous negative reports about a chancellor or president, will the regents’ reaction be something like “We’ll give ‘X’ another year to see whether he or she can improve the situation, and then we’ll consider what action we should take”? Why wait?

How long has it been since the regents fired a chancellor or president? Sure, behind the scenes, they may have encouraged someone to “retire,” but at least in one case, such action was delayed far too long and wasn’t taken until there was intense pressure to show some leadership.

It would be interesting to learn the results of the surveys focused on the six university executives. Which ones came up with the best report card from their constituents, and will strong corrective actions taken by the regents?

Chances are, there will be a press release from the regents office saying “the surveys were very informative and helpful and noted weaknesses, as well as strengths, and, overall, Kansans have every right to be extremely pleased with the manner in which university leaders are carrying out their responsibilities.”

Hopefully, the regents plan to share the findings with Gov. Brownback. He appoints the regents and should be privy to the various evaluations. Granted, it is a “personnel matter,” which usually means all results will be discussed or studied behind closed doors. However, the performance of a university chancellor or president is extremely important, in numerous ways, to the entire state. The regents system consumes millions of taxpayer dollars every year.

The public should have the right to know just how good a job these university administrators are doing. Likewise, the regents should have the backbone and courage to take corrective actions if they are necessary. Unfortunately, history has seen regents stalling and putting off action with the hope that some way or another, time will take care of the matter or some other group of regents will have to decide how to deal with a chancellor or president who is not measuring up.

In addition to what the survey reveals, another important question is how the list of survey recipients was put together. Who determined who would be the most knowledgeable, objective and honest people to participate in the process to judge the effectiveness of the university leaders?

The survey is long overdue for all of the state universities, and the regents are to be applauded for initiating this exercise.

The national competition among state-assisted universities is intense, and Kansas can’t afford to not have the best people in university leadership positions.

Our universities need and deserve strong, articulate, visionary and stimulating leaders, individuals with high marketability. To settle for less is a major disservice to the state.