The search for the next University of New Mexico president continues, as the Board of Regents recently announced the top five finalists. This month, all finalists participated in open forums at UNM’s Student Union Building, which gave the UNM community an opportunity to get to know the candidates in person.
The Board of Regents will select UNM’s 22nd president between Oct. 30 and Nov. 3.
David Brenner, M.D.
David Brenner is a vice chancellor for health sciences and a dean at the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. He was also the editor-in-chief of the journal Gastroenterology from 2001 to 2006.
Brenner said what draws him to UNM are its similarities between managing UCSD’S health sciences system along with his experiences in research, large projects and government relations.
On dealing with the state’s budget cuts, he urged UNM to focus more money on research, he said during his forum. He said he also wants to avoid faculty cuts, because the faculty are the “lifeblood of the University.”
Brenner wants to work with UNM, because he believes he can do good and have fun, he said.
He doesn’t pick a job looking at its salary — he earned more in one year at UCSD than what UNM paid its last two presidents, according to the Albuquerque Journal.
“I think what I would do differently would be to try to get more student engagement with the regents and more faculty input with the regents,” Dr. Brenner said, according to the Albuquerque Journal.
Anny Morrobel-Sosa, Ph.D
Dr. Anny Morrobel-Sosa is the president and founder of The Micaela Group, a consulting firm focused on helping universities recruit more minorities and women, with a focus on STEM.
She finished her Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Southern California in 1985. She served as the provost and senior vice president for Academic Affairs at Herbert H. Lehman College for four years.
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In Morrobel-Sosa’s open forum on Oct. 10, she proposed ways to increase revenue for the University, such as by finding more outside private funding and offering new degree programs like five year bachelor’s-to-master’s degrees, according to the Albuquerque Journal.
Morrobel-Sosa discussed UNM’s unique student body, where roughly half the students are the first in their families to attend college, and many of them come from low-income households. She stressed the importance of continuous advisement programs for these students to succeed, according to the Albuquerque Journal.
Charles “Chuck” Staben, Ph.D.
Dr. Charles “Chuck” Staben has been the president at the University of Idaho since March 2014. He was also a provost and vice president for Academic Affairs at the University of South Dakota from 2008 to 2014. Staben holds a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of California at Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.
He is attracted to UNM by its location, its major healthcare mission and its connection with two big laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratory, he said during an interview with the Daily Lobo. The nuclear engineering program, strong medical centers and about $300 million dollars for research support are also things that attracted Staben to UNM.
He mentioned in his open forum at UNM that the University is facing great challenges but also has immense potential to overcome them.
“The University needs to shift its mindset towards being more enterprising,” Staben said when discussing UNM’s financial challenges. “(We should be) a little less dependent on state funding and look for opportunities to optimize for enrollment and tuition growth and other remedy sources to support the University.”
If he were selected as president, he said he would generate revenue by attracting more out-of-state students, who would pay higher tuition, and charging all international students out-of-state tuition.
According to the Faculty and Exempt sheet from the University of Idaho, Staben’s salary as of June 2017 at the University of Idaho was $374,010 a year.
Garnett Stokes, Ph.D.
Dr. Garnett Stokes is the provost and executive vice chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Missouri. She completed her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in industrial/organizational psychology in 1982. She is the former provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs at Florida State University.
For Stokes, various challenges like lower campus budgets or athletic scandals are issues she’s already faced while working at different universities. She also addressed issues like sexual harassment at her open forum, another issue that UNM faces, and discussed how she dealt with it in her previous position.
She didn’t go into detail about her specific plans for tackling these problems at UNM. Instead, she discussed how she has overcome challenges in her previous positions.
Kenneth Kaushansky, M.D.
Dr. Kenneth Kaushansky has been the senior vice president for Health Sciences and Dean of the School of Medicine at Stony Brook University since 2010.
He spent about 16 years teaching and working as an attending physician at the University of Washington from 1986 to 2002. He earned his bachelor’s and medical degrees from the University of California-Los Angeles in hematology.
In his open forum, Kaushansky was confident that the experience he’s gained in his 30-year career at public colleges has prepared him to run a university. He addressed UNM’s budget issues and offered his solution: focusing on what the University does best and considering making cuts in the programs that bring in fewer students and less money, according to the Albuquerque Journal.
He suggested that the budget gaps the University is facing could be overcome by extending partnerships with other businesses and industries, according to Albuquerque Journal.
According to a state employee salary database from the Democrat and Chronicle newspaper, Kaushansky made $446,371 in 2016 at Stony Brook University.
Ashish Khatri is a news reporter for the Daily Lobo. He can be contacted at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @DailyLobo.
