The Chronicle of Higher Education
10-13-06
The Faculty
PEER REVIEW
MIDWESTERN RETURN: Elizabeth Hoffman, who resigned under fire last year
as president of the University of Colorado System, has been named executive
vice president and provost of Iowa State University.
Ms. Hoffman was an economics professor and dean at Iowa State from 1993 to
1997. She was also provost at the University of Illinois at Chicago and has held
faculty posts at Northwestern and Purdue Universities and at the Universities of
Arizona, Florida, and Wyoming.
But she is best known for her five years of leadership in Colorado, a time in
which a perfect storm of controversies ended up wrecking her presidency. The
trouble began with accusations that the Boulder campus's football team had used
alcohol and sex to lure top prospects to enroll. A year later, Ward Churchill, an
ethnic-studies professor at Boulder, drew outrage for suggesting that victims of
the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were akin to a top Nazi.
Ms. Hoffman will start at Iowa State on January 1, 2007.
"It feels particularly great to be back at Iowa State," she says. "I spent four
wonderful years there as dean of the college and know lots of wonderful people
there. ... It's like a homecoming."