This has been a frustratingly interesting thread to follow… We all love Wyoming, but we need to stop acting like high-level academia or administrative candidates are banging down the door to get to Laramie. They aren’t.
Wyoming simply isn’t a “player” on the global higher-ed stage. Beyond our borders, the University is seen as a small, isolated land-grant institution struggling with its identity. Laramie is a great town for us, but for a top-tier academic, people with proven success, or on the rise, it’s a hard sell. We aren’t just competing with the Mountain West; we’re competing with the world, and right now, we’re losing.
Look at what happened with Laurie Nichols. We finally hired a regional powerhouse who did the dirty work to fix a $40M budget hole, only for the Board to ambush her and refuse to renew her contract without giving her or the public a single reason why. If someone like Nichols can get “disappeared” despite fixing the books and having the support of the campus, why would any top-tier outsider touch this job?
The instability at the executive level is the elephant in the room. We’ve had a revolving door of presidents and deans, and everyone knows why: the Board. It’s become so dysfunctional that the Higher Learning Commission (the accreditation board) officially flagged the university in 2020 for its “persistent pattern of leadership turnover.”
High-level candidates talk. They see a board that can’t stay out of the weeds and an accreditation report that lists “instability” as a major risk, and they pass. Who wants to move their family to Wyoming just to get sacked in two years because a Trustee didn’t like a specific hire or a curriculum shift?
To the “football-first” crowd: The new President has a monumental task ahead of him just to get the car out of the mud and execute a basic vision for the university itself. The school has much bigger problems than the NIL fund or the depth chart at QB. If we want a stable athletic department, we first need a stable university. Don’t expect him to be a regular at every booster lunch or focus 100% on sports until the actual foundation of the school isn’t crumbling.
In higher ed, confidentiality is the standard, not the exception. Any candidate worth their salt is currently employed elsewhere and isn’t really interested in knowing that they're shopping. If we made the list public, the quality of the pool would drop to zero overnight.
Let’s hope this President can actually stick around long enough to fix the ship.
Go Pokes.
