LARAMIE, Wyo. — Old wounds surfaced at a Monday afternoon town hall where University of Wyoming faculty grilled President Ed Seidel about questionable actions ahead of a “no confidence” vote. The meeting, initially about the College of Engineering dean’s controversial termination, broadened into wider faculty concerns.
Last week, the University of Wyoming Board of Trustees met with CEPS Dean Cameron Wright regarding the initiative to achieve “Tier-1” status in engineering colleges, a goal established by former Gov. Matt Mead.
The presentation wasn’t received well: Wright was told his answers weren’t satisfying, but he would get another chance to present in a few months. However, in the board’s following executive session, Wright was terminated.
Seidel had been critical of Wright in months past for his public opposition to the proposed transfer of $500,000 from the school’s budget to the newly formed School of Computing — a school Seidel’s partner heads. According to Seidel, he was not involved in the position’s hiring and, unlike other university positions, is not involved in setting her wage or the terms of her job.
While a university statement cited Wright’s failure to meet the state’s expectations to achieve the coveted Tier-1 status, the college and several deans around the university suggested that the board’s actions and Seidel’s close personal proximity to the issue violated the sanctity of shared governance.
“We write today out of deep concern for the trajectory of the University of Wyoming,” a letter to the president authored and signed by 12 of the university’s deans stated.
The deans noted that Seidel’s administration was taking actions inconsistent with the role of faculty at the school amid nationwide shifts in perceptions about academia.
“The abrupt dismissal of several senior leaders, absent transparency or meaningful engagement, has further eroded trust in the administration’s commitment to transparency and shared governance,” the letter said.
At the same time, members of the school’s faculty senate drafted a resolution calling for a vote of “no confidence” in Seidel’s leadership. Sensing a crisis, Seidel sent out a statement Monday morning addressing the faculty’s concerns and establishing a public time to discuss.
“Given the many conversations I have had over the last few days, it has become apparent to me that the calls for a Faculty Senate vote reveal deeper and pent-up concerns about shared governance, the strength of which had not been apparent in my frequent meetings over the past year with faculty leadership,” Seidel wrote in the email.
At the town hall scheduled for that afternoon, Seidel heard from faculty about their concerns, particularly regarding his alleged preferential treatment in terminating deans.
“From my perspective, more so than any other issue including the school of engineering, is a larger pattern of what can be received as retaliation,” one participant said. “I’d say that this began with Arts and Sciences in 2021: They lost their dean during reorganization. There was also some unpleasant rumors about how the former dean was spoken to around that. Then Agriculture lost their dean, and then, oddly, Health Sciences didn’t, even though there was a vote of no confidence in them.”
That’s referring to the termination of the director of the Wyoming Institute for Disabilities during the controversial two-year tenure of Health Sciences’ Dean Jacob Warren. He was eventually forced out after months of public outcry and after the Faculty Senate voted “no confidence” in him.
“Nothing there was taken as a matter of retaliation,” Seidel said. “It just simply wasn’t the case. And I would say, in every case, there were reasons for those actions. All board approved, by the way. In some cases, you can say, ‘Well, gee, you didn’t act quickly enough in one case,’ and maybe we didn’t act quickly enough in one case. That would be the College of Health Sciences, and I’ve spoken to that.”
Seidel defended himself by stating that the reasons behind a dean’s termination are usually not public. He said the public nature of Warren’s late departure and Wright’s sudden dismissal, along with the board’s private meetings, suggests these situations were handled differently, even though he believes they shouldn’t have been.
“I guess it doesn’t necessarily help when I say that these were well-considered actions because you don’t know. But that’s a part of my job,” he said.
Another faculty member raised the idea of suing for access to the board’s executive session actions, as Wyoming news organizations WyoFile and the Casper Star-Tribune did a few years ago to understand the motivation behind the secretive termination of Seidel’s predecessor, President Laurie Nichols.
“I am absolutely against any form of retaliatory action,” Seidel said. “I’ve been very, very clear about that. And I do not want to ever have any kind of a retaliation against someone for speaking their mind.”
Seidel was heckled multiple times by an audience member during the event. He concluded by saying he had just canceled a week-long trip to India with a faculty member to focus on brainstorming ways to improve his own transparency with the faculty, especially the deans, and to enhance dialogue with the university community.
“If you don’t know, I do have lunch with every dean at least once during the year. But it is not enough,” he said. “So, we’re going to just get together and talk through maybe next week. We’re arranging for a 90-minute meeting, and then we will have a couple things on the agenda. And so, well, at least my thought is, ‘So I want to get some feedback,’ but the first thought was, ‘What’s the process that we could follow to help guide how we meet and what we do going forward?’”
The Faculty Senate met less than an hour after and, at the time of this story’s publishing, was in executive session discussing the matter. Whether the body votes “no confidence” in Seidel will soon be announced.