Dr. M. Roy Wilson, the chancellor of the University of Colorado campuses in Denver and Aurora, will resign from both positions effective June 30, university spokesman Ken McConnellogue said Friday.
Wilson, who has a year remaining on a five-year contract with the university, “will have some new responsibilities for the remainder of his contract,” McConnellogue said.
That will include consulting with two national organizations, the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities and the Association of Academic Health Centers.
Wilson also will assume the title of chancellor emeritus and is expected to consult with the next chancellor.
McConnellogue said university president Bruce Benson and Wilson “have been talking about this over a period of months” and that the president did not ask the chancellor to resign. Benson could not be reached for comment.
McConnellogue said Wilson’s departure as the head of University of Colorado Denver and the Anschutz Medical Campus “has nothing whatsoever to do with the dental school,” whose handling of prescription and sedation drugs prompted a federal Drug Enforcement Administration inquiry.
In a message Friday to the university community, Wilson said he “will spend considerably more time on national issues and policies that affect higher education and academic health centers” with two national associations.
He already is a board member of both.
Wilson said he will expand his work with both associations, focusing on increasing money for higher education, building the nation’s health care workforce, collaborating with international universities and helping urban medical centers “address health disparities in urban populations.”
He wrote that “we have made great strides in recent years, and I am proud of the work and accomplishments of each member of our university community in education, research and clinical care.”
The university’s Board of Regents is expected to approve the change in his title at a meeting next month.
This fiscal year, the university is paying Wilson a total of $697,209, which includes a base salary of $444,709, a housing allowance and other supplements.
He will be paid $500,000 from July through December unless he finds another job, McConnellogue said, plus his benefits through the balance of his contract.
Hank Brown, Benson’s predecessor as president, hired Wilson in 2006 to head the two campuses. “It’s a sad thing,” Brown said of Wilson’s impending departure. “It’ll be a real loss to the university.”
He said Wilson “did a great deal to improve research grants” and in developing the new medical campus.
“It’s phenomenal, all the different medical services that have come together in one location there,” he said.
Former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb also called Wilson’s departure “a great loss” and a setback for the university.
The university has been striving to promote its medical campus on a national stage and hopes to make it a medical-care destination comparable to the Mayo Clinic.
In doing so, it has dropped references to the Denver branch, changing the name of the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine to the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
That change emphasized that the medical school is part of a larger university system, not the Denver campus headed by Wilson.
McConnellogue said he does not think “the issue of how we promote the Anschutz Medical Campus” was a factor in Wilson’s departure as chancellor.
Wilson, a Harvard Medical School graduate, came to Colorado from Texas Tech, where he served as president of its health-sciences center.
Wilson is the second chancellor to leave CU in a little more than a year. Boulder campus chancellor Bud Peterson resigned to become president of Georgia Tech last spring.
The University of Colorado Denver, a traditional urban college, and the Anschutz Medical Campus, which teaches health professionals and draws research grants, are two distinctly different campuses within the university system.
Benson is studying whether one chancellor should continue to head both campuses and expects to make an announcement concerning the university’s future leadership next week, McConnellogue said.
