Former University of Colorado president Elizabeth Hoffman, who resigned amid scandals involving football recruiting and professor Ward Churchill, is among two finalists for provost of Iowa State University.
Hoffman, now a professor at CU-Denver’s Graduate School of Public Affairs, is scheduled to visit Ames, Iowa, this week for open forums with faculty, staff and students, ISU said.
Iowa State announced Tuesday that Hoffman was a finalist for the position of executive vice president and provost, which is the chief academic officer. The other finalist is Jeffrey S. Vitter, science dean at Purdue University.
Hoffman previously was arts and sciences dean at Iowa State. She also was provost at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and was a professor at the University of Arizona, Purdue University and Northwestern.
When the recruiting scandal blew up, Hoffman kept former athletic director Dick Tharp, who has since resigned, and former head coach Gary Barnett in their jobs. She did reorganize the department, instituting some of the most stringent recruiting restrictions in the country.
Hoffman spent some of her tenure at CU battling lawsuits filed in 2002 and 2003 by women who said CU failed to address complaints of sexual assaults involving football players.
Critics said one of Hoffman’s biggest mistakes came during a deposition involving one of those lawsuits when she defended a derisive four-letter term for women that one CU player used.
Hoffman again drew the ire of critics when she assured faculty members that Churchill, whose essay comparing some Sept. 11, 2001, victims to a Nazi, would not lose his job on free-speech grounds and complained of a new McCarthyism sweeping the nation.
Staff writer Jennifer Brown can be reached at 303-954-1593 or jenbrown@denverpost.com.
