Local News: Texas A&M Provost Resigns

A&M Provost Steps Down
By Vimal Patel

From the Bryan-College Station Eagle

An interim provost for Texas A&M will be named this week after the university's No. 2-ranked administrator resigned Monday.

Jeffrey Vitter, who had been in the post for almost a year, was asked to step down by Interim President R. Bowen Loftin, an A&M official and others familiar with the situation have said.

The tenured computer science and engineering professor will accept a computer science faculty position at the university.

"Considering the events of the past few months at Texas A&M University, where the President who hired me through a national search has resigned, and a new team will be starting, I have decided that I would rather devote my efforts to other professional activities," Vitter wrote in a statement.

Vitter's decision comes about six weeks after Elsa Murano resigned as Texas A&M's 23rd president amid a public falling-out with Mike McKinney, the chancellor of the 11-university Texas A&M System. H. Russell Cross, Murano's chief of staff and executive vice president for operations, resigned effective the same day as his boss. Cross and Murano have accepted faculty positions at the flagship school.

A spokesman for McKinney said Loftin was not under order to make administrative changes.

"It is the president's responsibility and authority to make decisions regarding personnel actions at Texas A&M," wrote Rod Davis, a McKinney spokesman, in an e-mail. "This applies equally to interim presidents."

Some said the appearance of Vitter's departure as provost and the seeming lack of stability could impact the search for the next Texas A&M president.

"This will make it harder to identify a national candidate [who will want the job]," said Tim Hall, a distinguished professor who is on the 15-person committee looking for the next Texas A&M leader.

In response to a request for an interview with Loftin, a university spokesman released a statement from the interim president.

"I would like to thank Dr. Vitter for his service to Texas A&M University as Provost and Executive Vice President for Academics, and particularly for his leadership in the development of the Academic Master Plan that we are firmly committed to pursuing in the years ahead," Loftin said in the statement.

"I am pleased that Dr. Vitter has elected to continue his scholarly work at Texas A&M in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering as we all work together to have our university recognized as one of [the] top public institutions in the country."

Vitter, who also resigned his post as executive vice president for academics, said he wants to pursue "scholarly activities and other opportunities as they arise."

The provost, the school's top academic officer, oversees the academic units in addition to the vice provost and vice presidents for research, information technology, diversity and institutional and federal affairs.

Presidents have the authority to replace their executive staff as they see fit. When Murano became president, she brought along with her several administrators from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, where she had been dean.

Vitter, the brother of U.S. Sen. David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, was selected by Murano last July after a national search headed by a diverse search committee that consisted of students, former students, faculty and administrators.

He led the development of A&M's academic master plan, an effort that involved more than 2,000 people. The goal is to provide a roadmap for Vision 2020, the university's long-range goal of becoming one of the nation's best public universities.

Vitter has served on the faculty in computer science at Brown University for more than 12 years, as a holder of a named and endowed distinguished professorship at Duke University for almost 10 years, where he also served as department chair, and as a holder of a named deanship of science at Purdue University for six years.

He has more than 250 book, journal and conference publications. He is credited as a founder of the field of external memory algorithms, which explores how to organize and process massive amounts of data.

Published on Tuesday, July 28, 2009