This blanket of silence may prove to be a contentious point this fall. For a student body already distanced from the search process, being kept in the dark will most likely not help.
According to Slichter, there are reasons for the confidential nature of the meetings, with publicity sometimes causing more harm than good.
"You can lose some of your best people by making it public that they are under consideration," he says.
Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68--who compared the secret nature of the search to the ongoing Middle East peace summit--says the secrecy will allow the search to be more productive.
"Public search processes actually produce less information about candidates," he writes in an e-mail message. "The kind of sensitive information that is most wanted about individuals is almost never anything that the people who know it best would be willing to share with more than a very small number of known trustworthy individuals."