Things were going so well, too. Before late Friday morning Slippery Rock University’s search for a new president seemed to be going exactly to plan. The process was on schedule, the university was providing copious updates, and the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education’s Board of Governors seemed primed to pick a new SRU president at their meeting next week.

All that changed at about 11 a.m. Friday, when trustee Robert S. Taylor sent a letter calling the entire process into question.

Taylor called the process fatally flawed because of a “significant breach of integrity” involving an internal candidate, Amir Mohammadi, and two search committee members: Molly Mercer, assistant vice president for finance, and Scott Albert, assistant vice president of facilities, planning and environmental safety.

Taylor pointed out that Mercer and Albert report directly to Mohammadi at SRU, and said this fact wasn’t properly disclosed or handled by university and state officials. The situation, Taylor said, is either a perceived or real conflict of interest; he asked trustees to stop the search process and investigate.

Jeff Smith, an SRU trustee and chairman of the university’s presidential search committee, said he disagrees with Taylor’s assertions. Smith says Mercer and Albert were cleared by State System officials to participate and that it should have been abundantly clear what their professional relationships with Mohammadi were and that they were participating despite that history.

Smith also argues that any internal candidate for the presidency would likely be able to influence or affect any university employees serving on the search committee, because any viable candidate would likely occupy a high-ranking campus position.

That’s true, but having broad institutional power isn’t the same thing as having a long-standing, direct managerial relationship with individuals on the search committee. Smith’s argument is essentially: “the process doesn’t have a foolproof mechanism for dealing with internal candidates, so anything goes and everything’s fine.”

It’s likely that everything actually was fine. Mohammadi, Albert and Mercer haven’t been accused of anything by anyone. In fact, it’s fair to argue that Albert and Mercer provided invaluable insights on Mohammadi to the committee during the vetting process.

But that doesn’t mean a potential conflict of interest didn’t exist. It clearly did. And in true Pennsylvania fashion officials decided simply to brush it off and move the process forward with little consideration for any possible repercussions.

Now, instead of a vote next week to permanently replace retired SRU President Cheryl Norton, Taylor has raised questions about the appearance of impropriety and both the university and the state face uncertainty about what happens next. Trustees deadlocked in a 5-to-5 vote on Friday, which trustee Bill McCarrier said means the entire process must start over.

We can’t help but believe this entire situation was preventable. Would it have been too much trouble for state and university officials to adopt a better-safe-than-sorry approach?