Earlier this month, the Colorado State University system announced former state official Rico Munn, an experienced education leader in Colorado, as the sole finalist to become the system’s next chancellor.
But, as ordinary as that result may be, critics say the path to get there was anything but.
The entire search and interview process spanned only seven weeks, four of which fell while the university’s campuses in Fort Collins and Pueblo were on winter break. The CSU Board of Governors chose to make the job open only to internal candidates — the board did not do a national search or hire a consultant to help — and the system received just five applications for the job.
Applicants were instructed to submit their materials to an email address associated with current chancellor Dr. Tony Frank, a larger-than-life figure within the university who has served as chancellor for more than a decade and was president of CSU Fort Collins before that. And faculty and staff members at CSU Fort Collins say they were never consulted on the search, something that caused four campus organizations to write letters to the Board of Governors objecting to the search process.
Naming Munn, who is the interim president of CSU Pueblo and was previously the university’s vice president for metro Denver engagement and strategy, as the sole finalist for the job kicked off a 14-day statutorily required waiting period before he can be officially hired. That waiting period ends Friday, and the Board of Governors has scheduled a special meeting for that day to consider Munn’s appointment.
Mary Van Buren, a professor in the anthropology and geography department at CSU Fort Collins, said the university’s faculty council barely had time to hold a single meeting before Munn was announced as the sole finalist.
“It was a very short time frame,” Van Buren said in an interview. “To a lot of people, that timing seems really suspicious.”
CSU defended the search process, saying that the university has a deep bench for leadership and that it is important to hold steady during what has been a difficult time for higher education nationwide.
“An internal search ensures continuity in key relations at a time when funding challenges are at the forefront, maintains momentum around critical objectives, and builds on the progress already underway while still bringing new energy and vision to the role,” Tiana Kennedy, CSU’s associate vice president for communications, wrote in an emailed statement.
One national expert on leadership searches said CSU’s process appears to have deviated from what is typical in higher education. But, he said universities are also generally becoming more mindful of politics and connections when selecting their top leaders, leading to changes in how the jobs are filled.
“What Colorado State is doing is reasonably unique,” said Richard Wueste, a senior executive search consultant for the firm AGB Search who made clear he was speaking on his own behalf and not his employer’s. “But it’s not completely outrageous given all the things that are happening.”
The role of a chancellor
The Colorado State University system spans two physical campuses and one online — CSU Global — as well as facilities at the National Western complex in Denver, in the mountains west of Fort Collins and near Cabo San Lucas in Mexico. Combined the university educates more than 50,000 students per year and employs more than 8,500 faculty and staff members.
While each campus has its own president, CSU’s chancellor is the chief executive over the entire system. The chancellor reports to CSU’s Board of Governors, whose nine voting members are appointed by Colorado’s governor and confirmed by the state Senate.
Frank was appointed CSU Fort Collins’ president in 2008 before adding chancellor duties in 2015. In 2019, Frank transitioned to being the system’s chancellor full time. His current salary is $675,000 per year, according to CSU.
Frank’s tenure has been marked by ambitious growth of the CSU system, but there have also been controversies of late. Faculty and staff protested a new policy — which was later withdrawn — that they saw as restricting free speech, and the university also made changes to diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Both of those changes came amid pressure on colleges and universities nationwide from President Donald Trump’s administration.
Faculty have also been critical of the rate of administrative turnover, which included the recent resignation of the provost — the top academic official — at CSU Fort Collins after just two years in the job.
The Board of Governors announced on Dec. 18 that Frank plans to retire at the end of June 2027 and kicked off a search for a new chancellor with the intention that person will serve as executive vice chancellor until Frank’s departure.
The board outlined a lengthy list of qualifications for the job — for instance, “A record of significant accomplishment as a senior leader in a complex organization,” and “Higher education knowledge and proven familiarity with the culture of Colorado public higher education.” Applicants had until Jan. 26 to submit their materials.
“These should be submitted via email to chancellor_tony_frank@Mail.Colostate.edu,” the announcement stated.
“The chancellor is not a king”
To many members of the CSU faculty and staff, that email address sounded alarm bells.
“The chancellor is not a king who is free to unilaterally anoint their successor,” Brian Munsky, an engineering professor at CSU Fort Collins, said during the public comment portion of a Board of Governors meeting earlier this month, one day before Munn was named as sole finalist.
Kennedy, the CSU spokesperson, wrote in an email to The Sun that the chancellor_tony_frank email address is “a generic email address that other system staff members access.” She said Frank did not participate in applicant interviews but did offer to talk with applicants about the position and the search process.
“The chancellor’s role was to assist with the search process, along with other system staff members,” Kennedy wrote.
But some have raised questions about how large Frank loomed in the search. One CSU professor, biomedical engineer Michael Detamore, said he decided to apply for the position just to see what would happen.
Less than an hour later, he received an email from Frank’s executive assistant saying, “As a follow-up we’d like to set up a time for you and Chancellor Tony Frank for a Zoom meeting next week,” according to a copy of the email that Detamore provided to The Sun.
Detamore said he declined the invite and heard nothing back from CSU until he received an email the Monday after Munn was announced as the sole finalist.
“The search process was competitive and yielded a strong candidate pool,” the email, signed by the board’s chair and vice chair, stated. “Unfortunately, the board did not advance you on to the next stage of the process. On behalf of the Board of Governors of the Colorado State University System thank you for your time and effort in applying.”
Kennedy said the university received complete applications from five candidates and that all of those applicants’ materials were forwarded to the search committee, which was composed of members of the Board of Governors.
“It’s not the norm in higher education”
Wueste, the executive search consultant, said the idea of limiting the search to only in-house candidates is “very corporate” but is not common for colleges and universities.
“It’s not the norm in higher education,” he said. “I can’t tell you it will end up with a bad solution. It could be the best answer for Colorado State.”
While Wueste said executive searches can vary quite a bit in their process, it is common in higher education to have a search committee made up of faculty, staff and members of the governing board. If the university hires an outside consultant to help with the search, that consultant will typically conduct surveys on and off campus to find out what key constituent groups want in a leader and what issues are most pressing.
“It would give the board a sense of how the community sees the university and what it needs,” said Wueste, who said he has helped with around 100 executive searches and who served for a time as president of Adams State University in Alamosa.
He said most searches typically feature a larger candidate pool than what CSU’s did, with eight to as many as 15 candidates receiving interviews before winnowing the list further for those brought to campus for follow-up interviews.
(Kennedy, the CSU spokesperson, said Munn will not visit campuses while he is a finalist but said, “members of the board will be on campus for conversations and input during this time.”)
Wueste said the benefit of a big search is that it casts a wide enough net to reel in unfamiliar candidates who might be able to bring new ideas or talents to campus.
But, as politics and budget issues place more pressure on higher education, Wueste said more universities are going with candidates who don’t come from academia and who may have political experience or other advantageous connections. Public universities no longer can rely on robust taxpayer support to keep themselves afloat, he said. They increasingly need leaders who can woo donors, maneuver in the legislature for additional money and protect the institution politically from cuts to research funding.
Still, though, Wueste said searches need to be transparent to have the trust of faculty, staff and students.
“The key is to provide reasonable assurances at the lower levels that there are going to be people running the school who really know how to run the school,” he said.
Extensive education experience
Munn is certainly no stranger to education leadership in Colorado.
He served as the executive director of the Colorado Department of Higher Education from 2009 to 2011 before embarking on a decade-long tenure leading Aurora Public Schools. Prior to those jobs, he led the state Department of Regulatory Agencies.
“We strongly believe Mr. Munn’s qualifications, passion for higher education, and demonstrated commitment to our shared values can help us write an outstanding next chapter for the Colorado State University System,” Board chair John Fischer wrote in a statement announcing Munn as the sole finalist.
Munn also has deep connections to leaders at CSU. He was appointed to CSU’s Board of Governors in 2012 and served until 2020, including two years as the board’s chair. That means he was on the board when it elevated Frank to chancellor. Munn was the board’s chair when Frank became chancellor full-time.
Munn resigned as superintendent of Aurora Public Schools at the end of 2022 after alleging that school board members had discriminated against him, a complaint that an independent review substantiated. He then served as chief of staff to CSU Fort Collins President Amy Parsons, who worked closely with Frank as CSU’s executive vice chancellor during the period Munn was on the Board of Governors.
He later became the university’s vice president for metro Denver engagement and strategy, in which he oversaw CSU’s Spur campus at the National Western complex, before being tapped last year to be the interim president of CSU Pueblo after that campus’s president, himself a former Board of Governors member, resigned amid allegations of policy violations.
Fischer, the board chair, said it was “highly unlikely” the university could have found a more qualified candidate than Munn by conducting a national search.
Protest from faculty and staff
In the first week of this month, as concern about the search process grew on campus, four faculty and staff organizations at CSU Fort Collins wrote letters to the Board of Governors objecting to the search process.
These groups included the executive committee of the university’s Faculty Council, the Administrative Professional Council, the Multicultural Staff and Faculty Council and the CSU Fort Collins chapter of the American Association of University Professors. Each group raised concerns about transparency, potential conflicts of interest, and violations of the university’s commitment to shared governance, the idea that students, faculty and staff all deserve a voice in university decisions.
“The absence of meaningful public engagement, the lack of a national search, and the implementation of an unnecessarily expedited timeline risk excluding highly qualified candidates and may foster perceptions of favoritism or nepotism,” the Faculty Council executive committee wrote in its letter.
Adriana McClintock, the chair of the Multicultural Staff and Faculty Council at CSU Fort Collins, said in an interview that engagement with groups on campus is crucial in a leadership search because it informs the qualities needed in a candidate and the work to be done.
“With shared governance, it is so critical because you need all of those voices to make sure you aren’t doing something that could impact another group in a negative way,” she said.
As her organization put it in its letter: “It is concerning that someone could be hired to make decisions about us and for us without knowing what is important to us.”
“Discussed at length”
The Board of Governors, during its Feb. 5 meeting, acknowledged receiving the letters. Munn was announced as the sole finalist the next day.
In a statement to The Sun, Kennedy, the CSU spokesperson, said the board took faculty and staff concerns seriously but ultimately decided against pausing the search or opening it more widely.
“This is an issue the board has discussed at length and with consideration of all the points faculty have raised,” she wrote. “We respect the sentiments expressed throughout this process and also recognize the strength and depth of talent within our own community. The role of chancellor in the CSU System is, by design, primarily focused on government and board relations and relies significantly on knowledge of Colorado and a strong statewide network.”
In answers to follow-up questions, Kennedy said Frank was appointed chancellor in 2015 — and then made chancellor full-time in 2019 — without a national search. But the last six searches for new presidents at either CSU Fort Collins or CSU Pueblo were national searches, with four of those searches using an outside search firm. For this chancellor search, Kennedy said the board opted not to use a search firm, which can cost upward of $250,000, due to the strong internal candidate pool.
McClintock, with the Multicultural Staff and Faculty Council, said those with concerns about the search aren’t trying to tear down Munn as a candidate. But, she said, it’s hard to feel heard when you’re not even given a seat at the table.
“From our standpoint, we really do want Rico to be successful,” she said. “And I hope that the administration really opens up and wants to listen to what folks need. That’s really all that we were asking for from our end.”