UNM-G’s new director comes with high marks

Copyright © 2009
Gallup Independent
By Bill Donovan
Independent correspondent

GALLUP — The new director of the University of New Mexico–Gallup has spent the last 20 years trying to bring fairness and equality to the college education experience.

UNM officials announced Wednesday the appointment of Sylvia Rodriguez Andrew as the new director of the branch college. She is scheduled to begin in August.

College officials, as well as a lot of faculty members and representatives from the student body and the Gallup community, have been spending the past few months going through the resumes of some 45 people who applied for the job. Barry Cooney has been interim director of the college for more than a year.

The college had an extensive evaluation process that included input from all aspects of the college life, said Dr. Marc Nigliazzo, who is in charge of branch operations at UNM. He said UNM also did an extensive background check of all of the finalists.

Each of the four finalists chosen by a local search committee spent a day on campus, being interviewed by groups of staff members, students and community representatives. They also spent half a day on the Zuni campus and another half day at the main campus in Albuquerque.

All groups gave Andrew high marks, said Nigliazzo. “They viewed her as being very direct and very honest.”

As a result, the UNM-G advisory board selected her and officials at the main campus agreed as well. She has been hired at a salary of near $140,000, some $15,000 more than Beth Miller, the last permanent director, made.

She’s currently provost and vice president for academic affairs at Antioch University in Los Angeles. In this position, she manages all educational programs and activities. She is also the administrative liaison to the school’s faculty assembly.

Before that, she was at San Jose State University as dean and professor for 12 years. She also served as interim chancellor at San Jose-Evergreen Community College district and acting president at Evergreen Community College.

She has a law degree from Lincoln Law School in San Jose, Calif., and a Ph.D. in social work from the University of Texas.

Nigliazzo said Andrew was very attracted to Gallup area and “was looking forward to becoming part of the community and serving the student population.”

She was not available for an interview, but in a news release she said she was happy to be coming to Gallup.

“The more I learned about UNM-Gallup and the range of possible opportunities, the more excited I became about being part of that vision.” she said.

Her education career is not without controversy.

Andrew has continuously been given good marks by officials at the school where she has worked.

For example, Ron Lind, president of the board at San Jose-Evergreen Community College, had this to say when she resigned: “The board members all agree Sylvia did an excellent job for us under difficult circumstances. I’ve never seen anyone work as hard as she did.”

Later, Andrew told reporters that she resigned as acting president in part because of some e-mails that she received a few months before from area African-Americans who accused her of getting rid of black administrators and replacing them with Mexican-Americans.

“The e-mail was very hurtful and it was false,” she was quoted as saying at the time.

She accused the trustees of the college for not stepping up and doing something about the e-mails and for refusing to address what she called was the “campus climate” problems. “It is a hostile work environment for a lot of people because racial tension is so pervasive,” Andrew was quoted as saying. “The truth is, it is hostile for everyone.”

There is no prominent racial tension at UNM-Gallup, but it does have serious problems with factionalism, a situation that led to Miller resigning.

Nigliazzo said Andrew was aware of the problems at the branch and realized that “healing would have to take place.”

But healing is something that Andrew has talked about in past interviews, referring to events in her past life that helped shape the course of her career.

In 1999, she told a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News of a time when she was 10 years old and saw a beautiful dress in a department store window. But when she went inside to try it on, the clerks greeted her with glares and told her to leave.

“I felt there was something wrong with a world that could deny a little girl a chance to try on a new dress just because of the color of her skin,” she said.