Mark R. Kennedy, president of the University of Colorado system, will be stepping down just two years after he was named to that position. The announcement, on Monday, follows a shift in partisan control of the Board of Regents.
A narrow Republican majority of the regents voted 5 to 4 to appoint Kennedy president in 2019. The system is one of the few in the nation where a governing board is chosen in partisan elections. The 2020 elections, however, gave Democrats control of the board for the first time in more than 40 years, and Kennedy is calling it quits. Four of the regents, all Democrats, are also current or former employees at system campuses.
“The Board of Regents has a new makeup this year, which has led to changes in its focus and philosophy,” Kennedy said in a prepared statement Monday announcing that he and the regents had “begun discussions for an orderly transition” to find new leadership.
It isn’t just the Democrats’ new one-seat majority that’s a problem, said Glen Gallegos, a Republican and current chair of the regents. The controversy surrounding Kennedy’s appointment may have hindered his ability to lead the four-campus system, Gallegos said: “It’s been two years and it’s still a difficult candidacy.”
“From the very start it’s been a rocky tenure,” Gallegos said in an interview. “People may not want to read the fact that I’ve said that.”
As part of its 2019 presidential search, Colorado’s board voted unanimously to name Kennedy the sole finalist. But emails obtained by The Chronicle through a public-records request revealed a deep partisan division among the regents about his candidacy. That division deepened as faculty members and students protested Kennedy’s record as a former Republican congressman and, in particular, his past opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion rights.
Gallegos praised Kennedy as a hard worker and said the 2019 vote to appoint him was the right one. But the tensions with the faculty and some individual campus leaders remain, he said. “I"m not going to say Mark Kennedy was terrible,” Gallegos said. “He was not.”
Kennedy was not available for comment, according to a system spokesman. In his statement, Kennedy said the system had “made great progress” in strategic planning; diversity, equity, and inclusion; online education; and technology transformation.
One sign that some professors remain unhappy with Kennedy came last month when the faculty assembly at the system’s flagship campus in Boulder voted 35 to 20 to censure him, citing “failure of leadership with respect to diversity, equity and inclusion.”
A statement from the Boulder Faculty Assembly said it “welcomes the news” of Kennedy’s decision and calls for faculty members to have “a robust role in the search for a new leader.”
It’s not clear when Kennedy will actually step down. His contract runs through June of 2022, but even if he remains in his position until then it will mark another short tenure in higher-education leadership.
Kennedy was hired for his current role after just three years as president of the University of North Dakota. During that relatively brief period, he was named in 2018 as one of four finalists to lead the University of Central Florida, but he was not hired.
