New regent finds footing

New regent Bradley Hosmer said UNM can lead the country in changing the education system.

Hosmer was the superintendent of the Air Force Academy and the president of the National Defense University before retiring in 1994.

Unlike his colleagues, Hosmer said after retirement he worked pro-bono advising, helping and consulting high-tech industries in Silicon Valley and the Department of Defense. There, he said long-term planning entailed asking an organization where it wanted to be in five or 10 years, and then shaping actions to achieve those goals. And he said the same strategy can be applied to educational reform.

“I guess you could call that proactive planning and action as opposed to reactive, which happens an awful lot,” he said. “So with that spirit, I’ve tried to be useful where I’ve lived and in organizations I’ve been asked to help.”

Hosmer said his experience working on boards for large, complex organizations taught him the importance of working together to promote the University’s goals. He said he’s focused on the budget right now.
“An individual regent has no authority at all,” he said. “The regents have authority only as a group. The kinds of things that I have in mind are personal to me. So far, there’s not yet been an occasion when I can work with enough of my colleagues to know that the regents as a group support some of these things. So, for me to say, ‘We’re going to do this or that’ would be speculation.”

Hosmer said New Mexico is the perfect place to effect change in the education system.

“If you look around for places in which you could begin to test out an improvement, and do so dramatically, it’s difficult to find a place that would be a better test bed than in the state of New Mexico,” he said. “The entire college/university structure in New Mexico is important to this picture, and it’s important that they all work in consonance to a common gameplan.”

Having had little opportunity outside regents’ meetings to share his thoughts, Hosmer said he is trying to absorb how the University operates.
“It may be of course that there’s very effective long-term planning going on at the University right now, and I just don’t know about it,” he said. “I’m the new guy here, and I’m still learning a lot about how the University functions and where all the levers are.”

Hosmer said he wouldn’t have taken the job on unless he believed in educational reform.

“I think that education in the U.S. is in desperate straits and can be fixed,” he said. “I think New Mexico is an ideal place to pilot test strong improvements. I think UNM is a place to come to understand the role of higher education in that change. I think the future of UNM may be very bright, and if I didn’t think those things were all true, I wouldn’t be here.”