Eight days ago at 3:30 p.m., in a hotel room in Long Beach, Calif., Robert L. Caret got a phone call and knew the ordeal was over.
He'd been chosen president of San Jose State University.
The call came from the California State University Board of Trustees. Dr. Caret, the 47-year-old provost of Towson State University, and three other finalists for the job had been interviewed earlier that day by the full board, including the chancellor of the 22-campus system.
"The first thing they asked was whether I still wanted the job," Dr. Caret said. "That's when I knew I had it."
Dr. Caret celebrated over dinner, took the red-eye back to Baltimore and was at a meeting at Towson State at 8 the next morning. He had played the University Presidential Game -- and won.
It started for Dr. Caret more than two years ago when he let it be known he was available. Then in his 19th year at Towson and fifth as provost, Dr. Caret knew it was time to move up "while I still had the energy for a seven-day-a-week job."
Rule No. 1 of the game is that everyone is nominated and no one applies. Candidates get others to nominate them; after the higher education fraternity realizes that desirable candidates want to advance, they can be nominated by total strangers.
"People ask me all the time to nominate them," said Thomas Scheye, provost (chief academic officer) at Loyola College who himself was a finalist for president of Goucher College. "I tell them to write their own letter, and I'll sign it."
Over the two years of his search, Dr. Caret was nominated for dozens of jobs. He pursued two presidencies almost to the end. A year ago, he withdrew as a finalist at Brooklyn College in New York because "it wasn't a good fit." Not long after that, he was passed over for the top job at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay. "I learned then some of the pain of losing," he said.
The California search began last summer with ads in the Chronicle of Higher Education and special-interest publications catering to minorities. The California board hired a consultant, or "head-hunter," A. T. Kearney Inc., of Washington, to seek out qualified minorities, partly because the 27,000-student school (nearly twice the size of Towson) has a large enrollment of blacks, Asians and Hispanics. (An African-American and an Asian made the final round, and all four were men.)
Dr. Caret, however, heard about the opening from his boss, Towson State President Hoke Smith, and broke Rule No. 1 by applying directly. "I thought it was a great fit," he said. "It's a metropolitan university in the Silicon Valley that's big and complex like Towson. It's a former normal school once known as San Jose State Teachers College and also the oldest university on the West Coast."
In California, Regent William D. Campbell, an investor who chaired the search committee, said its work was typical of the 14 others with which he's been involved. A list of 75 potential candidates was narrowed to 25, who were interviewed by telephone. Then a dozen semifinalists were interviewed at what Mr. Campbell called a "neutral site." In the initial stages of a search, he said, secrecy is a must. "Otherwise, you're simply not going to get good candidates to apply."
The round of 12, said Dr. Caret, is called the "airport interview," because it often takes place at an airport hotel so that candidates can fly in and out quickly.
Dr. Caret survived that stage and was named one of five finalists, one of whom dropped out. With their spouses, the four then spent a day and a half on campus, constantly under the microscope and meeting nearly every constituency.
Spouses are important. There's no package deal here; Dr. Caret's wife, Towson State Associate Dean Elizabeth Zoltan, isn't guaranteed a job. (Husbands and wives are sometimes hired as a package, but usually when one or both are high-profile faculty members.)
"But," said Mr. Campbell, "we'll do everything we can to help her find a job. She's a very accomplished individual."
Finally, it was down the coast to regents' headquarters in Long Beach for the final interview with the board and system chancellor.
"Now the realization is setting in that I'm actually going to take this job," Dr. Caret said last week. "It's pretty daunting."
Among the challenges will be sensitively handling San Jose's acting president, a finalist for the presidency and thought to be a shoo-in. Then there's San Jose's athletic program, beset by political problems and demands from alumni that it win at all costs. "We've got to stay competitive at the Division 1A level," said Dr. Caret, already sounding presidential.
"It's important that he be successful in that endeavor," said Mr. Campbell, somewhat ominously. "But we hired him because we think he has a tremendous grasp of the issues that face complicated urban institutions, combined with amazing energy."
He starts Feb. 6. "If I make it between then and September, I'll be all right," he said.
Dispute flares anew
The dispute over how best to teach reading has flared again, this time in Baltimore County.
The other day we came upon a "primer" that would please those who argue that phonics is only one of several ways to teach kids to read.
"The plan of the book," says its preface, "enables the teacher to pursue the Phonic Method, the Word Method, the Alphabet Method, or any combination." The book: "McGuffey's Eclectic Primer," dated 1881.