University of Minnesota regents set to choose U's next president

The University of Minnesota may have a president-designate by the end of the day Monday.

The university’s Board of Regents will conduct final public interviews with the finalists during a meeting starting at 9 a.m. Monday.

They’re expected to spend Monday afternoon deciding who should be the president-designate.

The finalists are:

• Dr. Rebecca Cunningham, vice president for research and innovation at the University of Michigan

• Laura Bloomberg, the president of Cleveland State University

• James Holloway, the provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of New Mexico.

The university began its search for a new president in April 2023, shortly after former President Joan Gabel announced her departure to become the chancellor at the University of Pittsburgh 

The University of Minnesota has been led by former Hormel CEO President Jeff Ettinger in the interim.

Each of the three finalists visited each U of M campus over the past couple of weeks. During their visits to the Twin Cities campus, each was asked questions about free speech on campus.

Holloway said institutions should not take stands on important issues, unless it is something that directly affects them. Rather, he said, the role of the university, as an institution, is to protect the rights of individuals to express themselves.

“The No. 1 thing that higher education institutions have to do is to be absolute models for free speech. And that means higher education institutions have to do some really hard things. It’s very easy to defend free speech when someone says something I agree with,” he said.

“When free speech needs to be defended is when someone says something I find abhorrent. And higher education institutions have to be the place where that can happen, where that can be allowed.”

Bloomberg, who previously was a dean and an associate dean at the U’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs in the Twin Cities, said that “what a university is at its finest is like a Petri dish of ideas, and ideas at their best often come at the friction points where we are talking to each other about ideas where we may or may not disagree,” she said. “But we elevate our collective knowledge by sharing our full ideas. And sometimes that becomes contested space, and we need to protect that space.”

There are First Amendment rights as well as passion for free speech and academic freedom, Bloomberg said.

“We also have things like codes of conduct within our university. And, we have to protect those as well."

Cunningham, who has family ties to St. Paul and said she visits the Boundary Waters each year, said that “the time that it’s most important to protect free speech is exactly the time when we don’t agree with the person who’s saying it or what they’re saying. Because somewhere down the road, we’re going to be saying something that somebody else also doesn’t agree with. And that’s when free speech is most important,” she said.

“With that, we have to couple our strong focus on protecting free speech with good policies that provide clarity for when that free speech crosses into threats and harassment, and even safety concerns and violence. And we need to have clear and swift policies and consequences for that, that we all understand.”

She said there should also be support and acknowledgement for people hurt by speech.

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