(U-WIRE) BOULDER, Colo. – The University of Colorado might be monopolizing the market on “Help Wanted” signs.

CU President Elizabeth Hoffman’s resignation Monday is the latest in a string of departures among CU administrators that has CU-Boulder faculty, administrators and regents searching for continuity.

“There’s a deep fear that we have many interim people in important positions,” said Stein Sture, vice chair of the Boulder Faculty Assembly. “And we just hope that the Regents, when they get going with their business, that they do the right thing.”

The CU Regents already are putting together their search committee for the University’s new president, while the search is ongoing for a new athletic director to take over permanently for former CU-Boulder Athletic Director Dick Tharp.

Jack Lengyel was named interim athletic director effective Dec. 1.

Other top administrative jobs at CU-Boulder also remain unfilled, including the CU Provost post vacated when Phil DiStefano was named interim chancellor.

Former Chancellor Richard Byyny accepted a job effective March 1 as the executive director of a new health policy center at the University of Colorado Hospital at Fitzsimons in Aurora.

DiStefano now is filling the dual role of provost and interim chancellor.

“I’ll just have to work with a different person,” DiStefano said. “I’m sure whoever is selected will be a very good individual, but I was looking forward to working more on a long-term basis with President Hoffman.”

The CU-Boulder faculty is still coming to grips with Hoffman’s resignation. “We lost a proponent and an effective champion of the University’s causes and faculty’s views of academia,” Sture said.

Hoffman said at a Boulder Faculty Assembly meeting last Thursday that she is a “tiger” for academic freedom and free speech.

Four days later, Hoffman abruptly resigned.

In a letter written Monday to the CU Board of Regents, Hoffman said she intended to resign effective June 30 or whenever the Regents appoint a new president.

She is leaving after nearly five years as CU’s president, she said, to “remove the issue of my future from the debate so that nothing inhibits CU’s ability to successfully create the bright future it so deserves.” -Matt Williams

CU has been hounded during the last year by allegations the athletic department used sex, drugs and booze to lure football recruits, as well as accusations of rape that spurred a Title IX lawsuit that is set to begin May 31 in federal court in Denver.

Hoffman will also figure into the academic review of ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill, who compared some corporate victims of the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks to Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann.

CU officials announced Tuesday the findings of the Churchill review will be released to the public as late as March 14.

Mark Malone, former CU system Faculty Council chair, said it’s a “personal kind of trauma” for faculty during a changeover to a new CU president.

When a new president is chosen, the faculty will be worried, first and foremost, about the viability of their respective departments, he said.

“I don’t think it’s being self-serving more than it’s self-preservation,” he said. “And self-preservation sometimes means you’re preserving your program, which means you’re preserving how that program serves students and in a larger sense, how that program serves the community.”

Malone is now the interim dean of the College of Education at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs.

“Betsy hasn’t just been a leader for the CU system. She has, in a sense, been the leading advocate for higher education in the entire state,” Malone said.

Hoffman’s departure might stall efforts to secure more funding for higher education at CU and other institutions in Colorado, Malone said.

Regent Cindy Carlisle said there isn’t a set-in-stone timetable to find a new president, though she would prefer Hoffman not stay past her self-imposed June 30 deadline.

“I think everything at the moment is holding steady; however I would think that the sooner we place the president the better, so that person can play a role in interviewing prospective candidates for the [other] job positions,” Carlisle said.

The Regents expect to begin the search for a new chancellor by the end of the summer.

Regent Steve Bosley said he wants a new CU president who wants to face the university’s challenges at CU head-on.

He doesn’t want a “shrinking violet,” he said.

“I want a person that says, ‘You bet it’s going to be tough, but by God, I know it’s going to be hard, but I can do that,'” he said.