EDUCATION
Zack Smith Builds His Own Search Committee for PSC’s Next President
The board chair has appointed himself to lead the hunt for Pensacola State College’s next leader—a process that looks nothing like the one that picked Ed Meadows 19 years ago.
Pensacola State College’s District Board of Trustees will choose the institution’s next president. But how that choice gets made and who controls the path to it looks dramatically different than it did the last time the college went through this.
At the board’s monthly meeting on June 16, PSC Board Chair Zack Smith formally appointed himself and the rest of the board—George Atchison Jr., Rick Byars, Ed Fleming, Richard Holzknecht, Todd Leonard, Oscar Locklin, Audrey McDonald and Brooke Snyder—as the college’s Presidential Search Committee. Smith will chair it.
- Why this matters: The search committee is the board. There is no separate screening body of business leaders, faculty and students standing between the trustees and the candidates. Smith and his colleagues will do the screening themselves. Smith has run this play before.
A Familiar Playbook
Smith also sits on the University of West Florida Board of Trustees, where he chaired the presidential search committee that considered 84 applicants and forwarded exactly one name to the board: former Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr.
“If the search truly produced only one worthy candidate to bring on campus, then this should be considered a failed search.”
That was Amy Mitchell-Cook, vice president of UWF’s faculty senate, addressing the board before it approved Diaz in January with a pay package worth as much as $1.2 million.
- Critics, including an outgoing trustee and an anonymous letter from UWF employees, accused Smith of using a loophole in Board of Governors regulations, which call for “more than two” finalists unless a committee documents “exceptional circumstances” for offering fewer. Smith never publicly provided that documentation, according to Florida Phoenix and Florida Trib reporting at the time.
How It Worked in 2007-08
Compare that to the process that brought Ed Meadows to Pensacola Junior College, PSC was then known, as its sixth president.
- PJC President Tom Delaino announced his retirement in August 2007, effective the following May.
- Business leader John O’Connor, who also served on the PJC Board of Trustees, led a 24-member screening committee composed of local business and community leaders, faculty and students.
- That committee’s job was narrow by design: sort applications and hand the Board of Trustees a list of four to eight finalists. The board itself stayed out of the screening.
- The committee held four campus hearings across PJC’s three campuses in late September so the community and college employees could weigh in.
The process wasn’t fast, and it wasn’t tidy. By December, O’Connor told the board the committee had whittled 34 applications down to 13, but with no consensus front-runner. “There was not what this committee would call overwhelming support for any one candidate.”
Rather than push a name through anyway, the board spent up to $40,000 on a national search firm to widen the net. The applicant pool nearly doubled to almost 70 candidates.
- By late February 2008, the screening committee sent the board eight names, including sitting community college presidents from Mississippi and Alabama, a Portland Community College campus president, administrators from Austin Community College and St. Petersburg College, a PJC vice president, and an Alabama community college president named Ed Meadows.
The Board of Trustees interviewed four of the eight—Scott Elliott, Lars Hafner, James Martin Jr. and Meadows—before unanimously settling on Meadows after two narrowing votes. Start to finish, the search took eight months and ran through two layers of vetting before a single trustee cast a vote.
The Difference
In 2008, the people deciding who got interviewed were not the people doing the screening. A community-led committee and a national search firm did that work first; the board only voted once the field was already narrowed by others.
In 2026, those are the same nine people. The person in charge is Zack Smith, who has already run a one-finalist search at a public university 20 minutes from PSC’s main campus.
What to watch: Whether the PSC board hires an outside search firm, holds public hearings like PJC did in 2007, and forwards multiple finalists, or whether it follows the UWF model of a single name with little public process behind it.
PSC’s Board of Trustees has not yet set a timeline for the search. We’ll keep tracking it.
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As long as Thomas Zackary Smith still gets his Heritage Foundation paycheck and the blessing of Dear Leader Ron, we can expect this behavior to continue unchecked. I’m shocked that his wife works in public education, given his disdain for things that don’t align with his personal worldview.