No confidence: University of Wyoming faculty senate rejects leadership of embattled president

The University of Wyoming’s faculty senate overwhelmingly delivered a vote of no confidence Monday against President Ed Seidel’s leadership, as fallout from the controversial demotion of a popular dean continued to spread across the campus community. 

The resolution, passed by a vote of 43 to 11, declared Seidel’s leadership “unacceptable” to the body that represents the university’s professors. 

But Seidel’s future will ultimately be decided by the University of Wyoming Board of Trustees, a body appointed by the governor. The board has made no public indication it’s considering a change to Seidel’s leadership of Wyoming’s only four-year public university. On Monday, the board announced it would meet Tuesday morning in a closed session to discuss a personnel matter, but did not indicate what would be discussed. 

Seidel has led the university since July 2020. Though spurred by the demotion of College of Engineering and Physical Sciences Dean Cameron Wright, the faculty senate’s resolution expressed a distrust going back years, that centered on the removal of deans, provosts and other academic leaders without public input or explanation. 

“The President’s lack of leadership and loss of faculty trust has resulted in significant impacts on campus,” the resolution read. “These have included serious declines in morale resulting in good faculty leaving, programs struggling to provide capacity and content, research agendas being paused or abandoned, and the quality of education declining as we struggle to hire high quality faculty to put into classrooms.”

According to members of the faculty senate, it is the first such vote in recent memory. One former member of the senate suggested the body last delivered a no-confidence vote against a University of Wyoming president in the 1970s. 

Dean’s demotion spurred outrage

University officials, including the board of trustees and the school’s administration, have said Wright was demoted because he failed to achieve an ambitious but long-running goal of bringing the engineering college into the nation’s top tier of such institutions. 

At a board of trustees meeting just before Wright’s demotion, trustees implied he had not sufficiently moved the school toward that goal and did not appear to have a plan to do so. 

But Wright’s supporters, who are considerable on and off campus, contend he was removed as dean because he challenged an effort by Seidel to shift $500,000 in funding over to the new School of Computing. That school, which has been housed within the engineering college but is becoming its own independent entity, is headed by Seidel’s romantic partner, Gabrielle Allen. 

On Friday, faculty senate leaders announced they would move for a vote of no confidence in Seidel. 

Besides faculty, Wright’s dismissal also drew outraged responses from industry professionals who advise the engineering college. One major giver to UW, The John P. Ellbogen Foundation, announced a pause to any new grants to the university based on its concerns over how Wright was demoted. 

(The Ellbogen Foundation also funds WyoFile, but does not have any influence in editorial decision making.) 

Also on Friday, the deans of the university’s 12 other colleges — exempting only Allen — wrote the board and Seidel to express their own “deep concern for the trajectory of the University of Wyoming.” That letter highlighted issues beyond last week’s controversial demotion. In it, deans described a campus in a pressure cooker. UW has been caught between a national and state-level Republican backlash against institutes of higher learning, and a campus community often frustrated by changes brought on by that shift in politics.

State lawmakers have criticized its diversity efforts and gender studies program. Legislators, particularly those in the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, have challenged UW’s funding and ability to craft its own programming and regulate the carrying of guns on campus. This year, the Legislature banned spending on diversity, equity and inclusion-related programming. 

Amid those rough waters, Seidel and the trustees have made fundamental choices without consulting their campus, the deans said.

“Recent policy changes — touching on fundamental issues, such as equal opportunity, academic freedom, and even insurance allocations — have been enacted without appropriate consultation and respect for shared governance,” the deans wrote. 

Some on campus and around the state have criticized Seidel for seeking to work with the conservative lawmakers, instead of demonstrating stauncher opposition to meddling with the campus. 

President sought to ward off no-confidence vote

Seidel began the week on the defensive, sending out a 7:10 a.m. campus-wide email Monday in which he sought to ward off the no-confidence vote. The embattled president announced a hastily organized town hall and meetings with the college deans as well as any individual university community members who wanted a chance to speak with him. 

The president wrote to “affirm” his respect for shared university governance, transparency and a collaborative atmosphere, he said. “I ask that we take a moment to pause and reflect,” ahead of the no-confidence vote, which was scheduled to take place that afternoon, he wrote. “The issues at hand are complex and deserve thoughtful discussion.”

University officials have countered the prevailing view among faculty upset over Wright’s demotion — that it was, in fact, the result of a retaliatory push from Seidel — by saying Wright had performance issues and, principally, that he had failed to achieve Tier-1 status for the engineering college. But they have also cited a state law that prevents governing bodies like the Board of Trustees from discussing personnel decisions in public. 

In Monday’s message, Seidel also noted that statute, while acknowledging the secrecy may not be helping school officials assuage those outraged by Wright’s demotion. 

“Simply stating that decisions were well-considered is not enough to build or maintain trust,” he wrote. But, he continued, “while I may have insight into the details behind recent and past actions, the legal restraints surrounding personnel actions severely limit what I can say publicly.” 

But following a series of mysterious demotions of prominent school officials, including that of previous president Laurie Nichols, trust in the trustees and school administration is low on campus. Since last week, Seidel had learned of “deeper and pent-up concerns about shared governance” on campus, he said.

Former provost questions official account

Wright resisted the effort to shift money into the computing school’s control as it branched out from the engineering college last fall. On Monday, an account from a former provost involved in that debate revealed the level of contentiousness tied to the dispute. 

Last August, Wright brought his attorney to a meeting with the university’s general counsel where the budget dispute was discussed, according to an account written by former provost Kevin Carman, who was also present at the meeting. After that meeting, university leadership backed off their demand for a budget transfer.

Carman sent his account Monday morning to Seidel, board of trustee chairman Kermit Brown and other officials. WyoFile obtained a copy of it once it was circulated to members of the faculty senate ahead of their afternoon meeting. 

The former provost was himself dismissed under mysterious circumstances last fall, around the time of the funding dispute. 

As uproar over Wright’s demotion grew last week, university officials stated they had conducted a review into whether the president had demonstrated any conflict of interest during the push to move $500,000 into the permanent control of his partner’s college. That review concluded with a finding that Seidel did not violate a conflict of interest agreement governing his approach toward the school headed by his partner. 

In Monday’s email, Carman argued university officials were “misleading and factually incorrect” in their description of the events.

In a statement provided to WyoFile on April 3, university officials wrote that it was Carman who asked Wright and Allen to sign the agreement shifting the money to the computing school’s budget. 

But the university didn’t tell the whole story in that case, Carman wrote. When sending the agreement out for signatures, “I was following a direct order from Pres. Seidel,” Carman wrote. 

He quoted what he said was a July 2024 email from Seidel in which the president ordered Carman to pursue the agreement: “This should be finalized and signed by Sept 15, 2024. You need to have this and to be able to argue why this benefits [the engineering college],” Carman said Seidel wrote. 

The University of Wyoming communications office did not immediately respond to a request for a response to Carman’s account Monday evening. 

In a Monday night statement to WyoFile, a university spokesperson defended the school’s account of events as “factual and confirmed with emails and verified accounts.”

The spokesperson also confirmed that Seidel had ordered Carman to pursue the budget agreement with Wright. “The university’s original response was not an attempt to mislead, and our statement was not meant to exclude the president’s direction,” the statement from spokesperson Chad Baldwin read.