March 29, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Orenduff seeks to regain professorship at NMSU

LAS CRUCES, N.M. — Former New Mexico State University President J. Michael Orenduff will try to win back his professorship at the school via a faculty committee, his attorney says.

“We believe he was wrongfully terminated from his position as professor, and we will let the university procedures decide,” said Jim Darnell of El Paso, Texas, Orenduff’s attorney.

Orenduff, a former chancellor of the University of Maine System, asked Monday that the committee review the NMSU regents’ June 28 decision to fire him from his tenured job as a philosophy professor.

He has said the regents were within their rights to fire him as president, but that they failed to meet a different standard required to fire him from his faculty job conferred by his contract.

Orenduff previously said he would appeal the regents’ decision in state district court.

He has said the regents, by firing him, tainted the internal appeals process available to tenured professors who have been fired.

Clyde Eastman, NMSU faculty senate president, said many faculty members were worried by the regents’ action against Orenduff in his capacity as a professor.

Tenured faculty members normally can be fired only for conviction of a felony, moral turpitude or gross neglect of duty, Eastman said.

And before professors can be fired for neglecting professional duties, they first must be warned, he said.

“If they can fire him for reasons no more substantial than the ones they laid out, then none of us are safe,” Eastman said.

Larry Sheffield, the regents’ president, has said Orenduff kept the regents uninformed about financial, policy and management issues, provided incomplete or inaccurate information and acted contrary to regent policy.

“Available evidence suggests that Dr. Orenduff did not respect the board’s policy-setting role and viewed the regents as `meddlers’,” he said last month.

Darnell, referring to the confidentiality of the personnel process, declined to release a copy of a letter from NMSU detailing the basis for Orenduff’s firing.

A faculty committee consisting of senior faculty senate members from each of the academic colleges must convene within 30 working days for a hearing, unless a settlement can be worked out first.

The committee, after holding a hearing on Orenduff’s grievance, then will submit a recommendation to NMSU President William Conroy.


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