• The committee, still largely undefined, will try to boost shared governance of the university, trustees said. Critics said the board missed the mark.

By Andrew Graham, WyoFile.com

Rising furor over the controversial demotion of a University of Wyoming engineering dean has brought the state’s only public four-year university to a tipping point.  

Academic leaders, donors and others decried the demotion as emblematic of a culture of top-down and inscrutable decision making by the UW Board of Trustees and President Ed Seidel. 

Twelve college deans signed a letter expressing “deep concern for the trajectory” of the university — citing the dean’s demotion and mounting pressures on academic freedom. 

And on Monday, the faculty senate overwhelmingly delivered a vote of no confidence in Seidel, the first such vote in recent memory. 

The outrage appeared strong enough to threaten Seidel’s leadership. Professors and deans expressed hope for lasting change to leadership that, according to the faculty senate, has driven the departure of talented academics and made replacing them difficult — ultimately threatening the learning experience for students. 

The gravity of the moment was not lost on Seidel, he told the trustees Tuesday morning, reading from a written statement before they entered a closed-door meeting without him. 

“How we handle this pivotal moment is important for the future of the institution,” Seidel said, “which is clearly facing a crisis.”

After an hour and a half behind closed doors, the board reemerged and issued its response. They will form a committee to study the issue. 

The committee will include two trustees, and most likely one faculty member, one staff member, one student government member, Seidel and the provost, board chairman Kermit Brown said. “That committee will be charged with working on communications and working on ideas to more fully engage shared governance in the university,” he said.

Neither a timeline nor the new committee’s authority were discussed. The trustees are also crafting a “formal statement,” Brown said, “with regard to the current state of affairs and the work of the [new] committee.” That press release will be vetted by the university’s legal department before its release, trustees said. 

The trustees had not published the statement by 6 p.m. Tuesday.

The trustees did not raise the prospect of imposing consequences on Seidel for losing the faculty’s trust. His current contract extends through the summer of 2026. Nor did the trustees address the underlying issues that sparked furor following Dean Cameron Wright’s demotion — most notably the allegations lobbed across campus that it was a retaliation for Wright’s opposition to funds being shifted from his budget to that of Seidel’s romantic partner, who heads UW’s new School of Computing. 

Faculty senate members considered their vote a risky endeavor. Though many of them are tenured professors, they conducted yesterday’s meeting mostly in a closed session so that senators could feel safe speaking against university leadership. Once the meeting opened to the public, votes on the no-confidence resolution were issued by hand-written paper ballots to avoid any hand raising or spoken votes. 

“You are justified in fearing retribution from this administration,” Bob Sprague, a former chair of the faculty senate, wrote in a letter to the body ahead of its Monday vote. But he also urged senators to “speak truth to power and send a clear message to the entire University community that this administration’s conduct is not acceptable.”

The faculty senate ultimately voted 43 to 11 to back a resolution that declared Seidel’s leadership “unacceptable,” though it did not call for him to be removed. Instead, in a final paragraph — referenced by Brown when he announced the new committee — it called for the administration and campus to work together to “reestablish an atmosphere of mutual respect, to rebuild trust and a willingness to work together.”

On Tuesday, faculty members returned to a campus Seidel will remain in charge of for the foreseeable future. During a campus town hall the president hosted yesterday, Seidel rejected any suggestions he would retaliate. 

“I am absolutely against any form of retaliatory action,” he said at that event, according to a report in Oil City News. “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.”

After days of impassioned statements and letters from his critics, Tuesday appeared relatively quiet following the morning board meeting. Ray Fertig, the faculty senate president, did not respond to WyoFile voicemails requesting comment.

Two outspoken former faculty members, and Democratic Laramie lawmaker Karlee Provenza — who has criticized Seidel’s advocacy for the School of Computing and his conciliatory approach to the Legislature’s efforts to meddle with campus — told WyoFile the trustees’ response fell flat. 

“They don’t have a really genuine, authentic response to anything is what it feels like,” Provenza said. She hoped faculty and deans would continue to push for change if they wanted something beyond the new committee, she said.

“One choice is ‘aw shucks, I didn’t get what I wanted, I don’t have any power in this situation,’” Provenza said. “But I think the other option is we have to build our power. There are more levers of power for faculty, for deans, and I encourage them to exercise those rights.” 

Sprague and former president of the faculty senate, now-retired veterinary professor Donal O’Toole both noted that the committee, as Brown described it, appeared stacked toward the administration and the trustees, with just two faculty representatives and one student on a seven-person body. 

“They will put forward probably some very watered down recommendations that ultimately will be ignored,” Sprague said. Ultimately, he feared the episode will lead to “no substantial improvement to the situation on campus,” and the trustees, he said, will “rationalize [faculty] unhappiness in various ways.” 

O’Toole agreed that the trustees had opted for a tepid, middle-of-the-road path. “Seidel is a known quantity,” he said, “and [in the wake of criticism] he’s certainly saying all the right things.” 

Beginning last week, when the faculty senate leadership expressed dismay in his leadership ahead of the full body’s vote, Seidel has been conciliatory and said he has learned from the uproar. In several statements and in yesterday’s town hall, he promised to renew his commitment to the university’s model of “shared governance,” which, notably, calls for faculty input on the removal of academic officers. 

Faculty members say that part of the university’s governing code was firmly ignored when the board demoted Wright. The board demoted Wright even though every department head in his college — with the exception of school of computing head Gabrielle Allen, Seidel’s partner — called on them not to. 

Coming back from a no-confidence resolution to a place where the campus is working well together will be very hard to do, O’Toole said. 

“On the one hand, I think the faculty senate executive committee thought this had to be done,” he said. “On the other hand, they realized that in the short and medium term it’s going to make dealing with Seidel’s administration pretty frosty … The feeling is ‘we’ve sent the message, let’s hope for the best.’”

WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.