It took the work of two search committees, but New Mexico State University selected a new president on Thursday, welcoming the first permanent leader the Las Cruces institution has had in a year and a half.
The selection of Valerio Ferme, executive vice president for academic affairs and provost at the University of Cincinnati, came as a relief to many after a contentious search process marred by political spats and questions about the openness of the process. For years, faculty frustration had been growing over initiatives that failed to get off the ground as one leader after another came and went.
By selecting Ferme, a former dean at Northern Arizona University and a longtime professor and academic administrator at the University of Colorado, the regents extricated themselves from the political drama that surrounded one of the other finalists — the state’s former head of K-12 public education.
Three weeks ago, Arsenio Romero quit his job overseeing the state’s K-12 system after New Mexico’s governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, gave him an ultimatum: drop out of the race for the university presidency or quit the role she’d appointed him to in February 2023.
The chair of the Board of Regents, Ammu Devasthali, told reporters Thursday that Ferme had proven himself capable of doing the tough work a new president would need to tackle. In addition, she said, “He seems to be very kind and compassionate and I think we need that on our campus.”
Christopher Brown, a professor of geography and environmental studies at New Mexico State and a member of the first presidential search committee, said he was thrilled with the selection of Ferme, who he said could be “the healer in chief we need.”
Not counting Ferme, New Mexico State has had 12 presidents, including six interims, in the last 24 years. It hasn’t had a permanent leader since April 2023 when Dan E. Arvizu, then the chancellor, abruptly resigned two months before his five-year contract was supposed to end. The regents had decided not to renew his contract.
Ferme, in an interview Friday, said he welcomed the challenges ahead. “My goal is to bring stability and to rebuild a sense of pride and optimism in the university,” he said. “I always talk about myself as a catalyst to bring people together who have solutions to challenges.”
Ferme spent more than two decades teaching Italian and comparative literature, serving as chair of the department of French and Italian and as a divisional dean of arts and humanities at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He went on to become dean of the College of Arts and Letters at Northern Arizona before moving to the University of Cincinnati in 2019 as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and then provost.
His new employer is a public institution with a variety of intertwined identities, each competing in some respect for limited attention and resources. New Mexico State is a land-grant, space-grant, Hispanic-serving institution where nearly six out of 10 students is Hispanic. It’s also a minority-serving institution that aspires next year to join the ranks of Research 1 universities, the highest research category conveyed by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.
Those classifications are changing next year to make it less complicated for institutions to achieve R1 status and will include consideration of how a college facilitates social and economic mobility. Those should play to Ferme’s priorities.
Much of Ferme’s focus as a dean has been on improving student success rates and prioritizing diversity and equity initiatives. But he said he has also led a commitment to research that more than doubled the amount of annual sponsored awards in Cincinnati’s College of Arts and Sciences.
At Las Cruces, he’ll be filling a vacuum left by a succession of short-term leaders.
When Arvizu was hired as chancellor in 2018, the university began a short-lived try at having a two-leader structure. Arvizu would oversee the university system, while John Floros was hired as president of the flagship campus in Las Cruces.
That structure soon collapsed after the university was rocked by a series of crises: a basketball season canceled and coach fired after complaints of sexual assault and hazing among players; another basketball player involved in a deadly shooting with a student from a rival university; and a former provost and former Title IX official suing the university over their dismissals. In 2021, Floros was placed on a yearlong “sabbatical” after no-confidence votes by the Faculty Senate and student government. In January 2022, he resigned the presidency.
The university, which had cycled through five presidents and chancellors since 2010, reverted to a single-leader structure with Arvizu serving as both president and chancellor. After he, too, had stepped down, the regents launched a search for a new president in August 2023.
This job is not a stepping stone, and leading a large public college is not a job you learn on the fly.
A 24-member search committee, aided by an executive search firm, spent months homing in on five finalists, but the Board of Regents decided none were suitable. In March, after soliciting input from across the campus, the regents announced that the first presidential search had failed.
Ten days later, the university’s provost, Alan Shoho, announced he was leaving, effective immediately. He’d been on the job less than a year, replacing a provost, Carol Parker, who settled with the university after suing it for discrimination and retaliation over her forced removal in 2022. As with the previous resignations, no reason was given for Shoho’s sudden departure.
With the university’s leadership chasm widening, the regents quickly launched a new presidential search on April 1. This time, the board’s chair, Devasthali, would head a revamped search committee with 12 rather than 24 members.
Jamie L. Bronstein, a professor of history and a leader of a new faculty union, questioned the need for a second search. “It was a very strange process to have all of the time and effort by so many faculty, staff, and community members in the initial search rejected in favor of a very small and tightly controlled search in which the regents’ chair headed the search committee,” she said.
Brown, a leader in the Faculty Senate, said many faculty members were concerned about how the second search process was being carried out. Romero’s resignation from his job as education secretary in order to stay in the running for the university presidency “raised questions about the openness and legitimacy of this search,” Brown said. Romero’s limited higher-education experience included serving for a time as a regent at his alma mater, New Mexico State. “The board’s selection tells me it was an open and fair search,” Brown added.
As the second search was progressing, turnover at the top continued, with one interim president replaced by another.
On August 19, the regents announced a second, new set of finalists for the university presidency. Among them was Romero, at the time the state’s public-education secretary. On September 5, the state’s higher-education secretary, Stephanie Rodriguez, called on the NMSU regents to scrap its second set of finalists and start over, saying none of the candidates were suited to the job. “The recent history of leadership, with frequent changes and interim placeholders, as well as alleged instances of hazing and assault among student athletes, suggests the search process must be more rigorous,” she wrote. “This job is not a stepping stone, and leading a large public college is not a job you learn on the fly. ... The revolving door in this administration is untenable.”
Garrey Carruthers, a former New Mexico State chancellor and state governor, fired back with an editorial of his own, accusing Rodriguez of attempting “to direct, intimidate, and/or embarrass the regents of NMSU into changing their ongoing process in selecting the next president.” The secretary, and the governor she represented, should butt out of the process, he suggested.
NMSU cannot afford to have a failed presidency.
Romero, who was now out of two jobs, the one he’d quit and the one he’d aspired to, issued a statement Thursday, shared with The Las Cruces Bulletin, in which he gave his full support to Ferme. “After 28 years of service to the great state of New Mexico, I remain deeply honored by the opportunity to have been considered for the presidency of New Mexico State University,” Romero wrote. “Though I was not selected, I have no regrets about taking the risk.”
In a statement Thursday, Lujan Grisham, the governor, congratulated Ferme on his appointment. “I am hopeful he will deliver the stability the New Mexico State University students and faculty deserve and will chart a successful course for the future of this important higher education institution,” she said.
Judith A. Wilde, a research professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, has been following the selection process closely as a national expert in college presidential searches and a resident of Albuquerque.
“The NMSU search has been the most contentious I can recall in New Mexico,” with critics complaining of interference by the governor and finalists who weren’t sufficiently suited to the job, she wrote in an email. While Romero’s candidacy captured the most media attention, his chances were hurt by his relative lack of higher-education experience, she continued.
“While there have been presidents hired with little/no true experience, many of those have failed,” she wrote. “NMSU cannot afford to have a failed presidency.”
Romero’s decision to quit his job as education secretary, she added, may have led people to question “does he see this as a stepping stone to a larger university? Will he step down from NMSU if he thinks he can get something better?”
Ferme, she said, has impressive credentials and experience as a chief academic officer with a larger budget at a larger university. Being bilingual — his father is half Spanish, half Italian — will be a plus, Wilde said, at a campus 40 miles north of the Mexican border.
