The New Mexico State University Board of Regents on Monday suspended its search for a new president, and plans to start the process over next year when as many as three new regents join the board.
Waded Cruzado will remain interim president throughout that time and, though she wasn’t allowed to this time, she may get to apply for the permanent position if she’s interested when the search starts up again next year.
Joseph Pfeiffer, a computer science professor and member of the regents’ presidential search committee, explained the situation on Monday in an e-mail to faculty. He said each of the eight candidates invited to off-campus interviews for the job had withdrawn their applications.
The search committee had selected five of the eight candidates to invite for on-campus interviews and designated the other three as alternates. The committee, Pfeiffer wrote, planned to publicly name the finalists in late October and “invite them for on-campus interviews by, well, now.”
But some dropped out because of a state law that requires that the five finalists be publicly identified, Pfeiffer wrote. It’s a law that Regent Bob Gallagher recently complained about in a guest editorial published in the Las Cruces Sun-News. Others, Pfeiffer wrote, “had either personal or other reasons that seem unrelated to that law.”
The situation is further complicated by the fact that three of five regents’ terms expire at the end of the year. At least one will be replaced and, while the other two could be reappointed, they could also be replaced by the governor, so the majority of the board could be brand new next year. That was a factor in the regents’ Monday decision to suspend the search, Pfeiffer wrote.
He said the search could be more successful next time because it will be conducted during the normal hiring cycle, with the plan to bring in the new president on board in the summer or fall. In addition, he wrote, in the interim “there will be an attempt to modify the law to better compromise between the need for open government and the need to hire the best candidates we can.”
As for Cruzado, Pfeiffer noted that there has been “increasing interest on campus” in adding her name to the pool of candidates. The regents originally barred the interim president from applying for the permanent job. But, Pfeiffer noted, several regents said on Monday “that they would very much hope that in the new search the waiver to the rules that’s been asked for would be granted, so (if she so chooses) it would be possible for her to be a candidate on the next try.”
Cruzado has been serving as interim president since Michael Martin left to take the job of chancellor at Louisiana State University’s main campus in Baton Rouge at the end of July.