Editor,
So the University of New Mexico Board of Regents will now look for a president who has a background in academia, is familiar with university culture, and has experience running a large research university.
Well, duh.
The UNM faculty urged the regents to do this in 2003, but they wouldn't listen. They wrongly believed that a university president can function externally, without knowing much about the institution he leads. Day-to-day internal administration could, they thought, be left to vice presidents and lesser fry.
Although he sold himself as an external rainmaker with a one-page vita who would bring in large sums of money from federal, state and private sources, Louis Caldera soon realized that his role could not be separated into external vs. internal functions. Instead of schmoozing in New York, Washington, Los Angeles and Santa Fe, he spent his first year learning how a large research university actually works.
He devoted his second year to assembling his administrative team and dealing with urgent internal issues. He did not move fast enough on fundraising to satisfy the regents because he was trying to make himself into a real university president first. Now he is pushed out of office for not fulfilling the impossible mandate they imposed and he initially accepted.
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So, yes, the next UNM president needs to be a person with top academic credentials and extensive administrative experience in higher education; a person who can effectively represent the University to the outside world because he or she already knows what it is and does; a person who is selected after an open evaluation process that generates a degree of consensus among faculty, staff, alumni and community constituencies.
This ought to go without saying.
Only a Board of Regents who themselves know little about how universities work could ever have thought otherwise.
Hugh Witemeyer
Former UNM faculty
