February 11, 2008
For Immediate Release:
Contact: Melissa Gardner
gardnermab@yahoo.com
303.440.0986


Cindy Carlisle announces she will vote against Benson for President of CU system

Last week I spoke with Bruce Benson and explained that I could not vote for him as sole candidate for president of the University of Colorado System. I would like to explain my decision publically as well.

When the CU Presidential Search Committee met with the regents January 30 I was dismayed Bruce Benson was put forward as the single finalist for the job, and doubly dismayed by the only alternative we heard—a "second tier" of two entirely unacceptable candidates. Grudgingly, I voted to move the process to the next phase of evaluation of Benson by the university community.

I've since attended three forums at which the candidate engaged with students, with staff, and with faculty; had over a hundred conversations with people at CU-Boulder, at other campuses, and in government; and learned a great deal of new information from nearly a dozen people who worked closely with Benson in higher education. A number of these supported Benson's candidacy going forward. A greater number did not. And nothing, it turned out, could repair the polarizing harm caused by the process itself.

This single finalist process is a throwback to the dark, bunkered days of CU secrecy I've spent five years working as regent to pry open. It is also the end result of a disastrous decision—spearheaded by a Denver regent—to move the CU system, and hundreds of Boulder jobs, from our flagship campus to a downtown Denver office building. With help from Pete Steinhauer, I fought to keep the president here, but lost. What we're left with is a diminished presidency.

Nothing could be more important to me than the health of the Boulder campus. I was heartened when Bruce Benson assured me there would be autonomy for the CU-Boulder Chancellor, and an end to partisan politics.

I was not one of Benson's three nominators, as has been misreported, but did write a short letter stating that I thought he should be among a group of finalists meriting consideration. What he most had to offer, as I saw it, was the chance finally to save CU from TABOR with a Nixon-Goes-To-China paradigm shift only a pro-higher ed Republican like him could bring off.

I'm a diehard, lifelong, yellow dog Democrat.

But being a Republican at CU is not an automatic disqualifier for me. If it were, I wouldn't get very far on a board that's stacked six to three with Republicans. Some Benson critics seem to have lost sight of this cold fact of CU life. Like a lot of people who caucused February 5, I yearn for a politics that transcends partisanship.

Bruce Benson's strengths finally were not enough to overcome the flawed process that did him and the university a grave disservice. Because the single finalist process is so defective and polarizing, and has sown such division, and stained the committee's and regents' and candidate's credibility, constrained CU's options, and violated the openness and accountability that I value, and that President Brown values, I must vote against Bruce Benson and for a renewed search.

In recent days I learned for the first time that at least two candidates for the CU presidency not only had strong academic credentials but were leaders of large state university systems with more students and more campuses than CU. I have no idea why they were never presented to the board.

Now I urge my fellow board members to regroup, to examine what went wrong, to reopen the search, and to name two or more finalists with experience running multi-campus university systems for evaluation as finalists by our community.

And to persuade Hank Brown to keep ahold of the flagship's tiller until we've weathered this storm.