Months of bad press have finally taken their toll. Under fire for a financial meltdown and questions about managing the purchase of a for-profit university, the president of the University of Arizona announced Tuesday that he will step down.
Robert C. Robbins will resign as soon as his successor is named, but no later than June 2026, when his current contract ends. The chair of the Arizona Board of Regents, Cecilia Mata, said in a news release that a presidential search “will move forward with expediency.”
“The past 18 months certainly have been difficult for our university,” Robbins said in an email to the campus, “but I am confident that our passion and commitment for doing what is right, as well as our thorough and thoughtful analysis to address our ongoing challenges, will bring our institution greater stability in short order.”
Robbins’s decision to resign marks a key inflection point in a four-month leadership saga that has roiled the institution and drawn an unusual level of attention from the state’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs.
Robbins has faced harsh criticism from Hobbs, not to mention faculty and staff, after revealing in November that the university was facing a massive and unexpected budget shortfall because of overspending and poor financial modeling.
The financial emergency has forced the university to propose a wide range of cost-cutting measures — including a hiring and salary freeze, saving $27 million from unfilled positions or jobs where a retirement is imminent, cutting a tuition-guarantee program for students beginning in the fall of 2025, as well as restructuring the administration. Robbins also cut his $816,000 salary by 10 percent and eliminated $270,000 in bonuses.
The financial fallout has led to other changes in leadership, including Fred DuVal, who stepped down as chair of the Arizona Board of Regents but will fulfill his term, and John Arnold, who took a leave of absence as the board’s executive director and now serves as the university’s interim chief financial officer.
More recently, the university has come under fresh scrutiny for its 2020 purchase of the for-profit Ashford University, now the University of Arizona Global Campus. The new entity was meant to help the university compete with other national online institutions, such as Purdue Global — created when Purdue University purchased the for-profit Kaplan University — as well as more established institutions such as Southern New Hampshire University.
But the purchase of Ashford was controversial because of questions about whether it would be a financial drag on the university and because the for-profit college had been the subject of numerous investigations by state and federal regulators.
Even as questions about Robbins’s leadership grew louder in recent months, he continued to hang on to his job. Then a major blow came last week, when The Arizona Republic reported that Robbins had hired a lobbyist to urge California’s attorney general to erase millions of dollars in fines against Ashford. Robbins had previously denied being involved.
Hobbs had repeatedly called out the board for its lack of oversight, and at a news conference in late March, she said she was “very quickly losing patience with how this crisis has been handled. We take one step forward, and three steps back.”
“I need to know what President Robbins knew when,” Hobbs continued, “and why myself and the public can’t get a straight answer out of him.”
