In his Feb. 12 letter to the Daily Egyptian, my colleague Prof. Kionka assured your readers that the law school dean search committee on which he served gave full consideration to minority applicants and nominees. Perhaps so, but the information with which I am familiar makes me wonder.

I do lack some of the relevant information. For example, I do not know the names of all 13 people identified by the chair of the search committee as formal candidates at a meeting of the law faculty on Nov. 7, 1995. To this day, the committee has declined to provide a list. Nor do I know the names of all 8 of these formal candidates selected by the committee for interviews in St. Louis. Again, the committee has declined to provide a list. I do know, however, that the formal candidates not interviewed included a tenured full professor of African American heritage and a tenured full professor of American Indian heritage. Indeed, these candidates have advised me that, after identifying themselves as formal candidates, the heard nothing from the committee until they received their thank you for your interest form letters.

This information reflects on the search, not on Dean-designate Guernsey. Indeed, Professor Guernsey received high marks for straight-forward candor even from those colleagues at the University of Richmond who were not his supporters. He would have been better served by a different kind of search.

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SIU School of Law, professor