On Thursday, Feb. 26, 2026, at the first community meeting with one of the Western New Mexico University presidential candidates, Regent Dean Reed noted there had been a change in the search with one of the five candidates, having withdrawn his nomination.
"We're down to four and Dr. Jose Coll is our first one," he said. "We will have another candidate for tomorrow, Friday and then a candidate next Tuesday and the last one on Wednesday."
He asked all those present who served on the Presidential Search Committee to stand. He noted that 14 had taken part in the search and their results had been sent to the search firm Anthem to determine the most qualified for the position. The committee received 22 preferred candidates and whittled it down to 10. "John Wertheim, co-chair of the committee, and I, as the chair did not have a vote in any of that process. Intentionally, we felt like the committee needed to figure it out."
"We then interviewed 11 candidates over two days about three weeks ago, with five on one day and six on the next," he continued. "The committee without our votes got the list down to five, with one alternate. It's very common when we get to this stage, one of the candidates can withdraw, because top talents always being recruited. So five were picked. I would venture to say the committee spent literally hundreds of hours collectively going through these very difficult decisions. Anthem also scored the candidates, and they said it was the tightest grouping they've seen in the last seven or eight years. That's how close these candidates were. "
Reed pointed out the large QR code on a poster and asked that people scan it and give their feedback on all the candidates that the public came to hear. "That information will go to Anthem, not to the regents. Anthem will accumulate the scores and give it to us in a nice neat package."
A closed session Regents' meeting scheduled for March 5, would allow them to review the findings and choose two to make offers to and negotiate with.
[Editor's Note: Please visit https://www.grantcountybeat.com/home/news-articles/wnmu-regents-hold-executive-session to see that no result were presented to the public.]
"By March 17, we will call a press conference, and we will announce the new president of Western New Mexico University," Reed said.
He then introduced Dr. Jose Coll, who works at Western Oregon University. "He's now interviewing for Western New Mexico, so he has to catch himself."
Reed invited everyone to stay after Coll's presentation to talk one-on-one with him, like a meet and greet.
"Thank you for making time from your busy schedule, if you were at the earlier Q and A," Coll said, "And then for those of you from the community who are coming in to hear a little bit about myself, my background, what motivates me? I have actually a remarkable kind of lived experience and story. I never would have imagined as a nine-year-old Jose, who was an immigrant from Cuba with his parents in 1980 doing the Mariel Boat Lift, that I'ld be actually having this dialog today, thinking to be a university president in this remarkable state."
He introduced his spouse, Cary Coll. "We've been 32 years married, so through ebbs and flows in this career of higher education. She's my Cornerstone right there. So I want to make sure she's recognized as we've journeyed together through this remarkable career. I'm an immigrant, born in Cuba. I really thought going through high school that I was going to finish high school, get a job, go work, reach the American dream, which is pull yourself up by the bootstraps, and that was it. College was not on the radar."
"I shared with a student earlier today, with a staff member, how I'd drive by one of the universities in Florida, where I grew up and it felt always very distant. I don't even know how to apply. or who was permitted to walk onto this campus."
Coln said he has been blessed with remarkable mentors and friends, and one of the first one was Mr. Beltran. "Mr. Beltran was there when when I decided to drop out of high school, and Mr. Beltran said, 'No, I see a lot of ptential.' I think that's the value of community. Community sees potential when people don't see themselves intentionally, or unintentionally. And Mr. Beltran helped me, kind of guided me through getting a general education diploma that this institution, too, remarkably does offer. So after that, I became an EMT. I went through the fire academy, became a firefighter for the state of Florida, and worked for the Division of Forestry for a while. And then there was an urge. I've always been a servant person. So my urge was to, 'how else can I serve?' And the state had a program that if you went to the military, they will hold your position. I still remember vividly, one of the first images that I saw when I arrived to the United States, was the national anthem sung by a US black and a Marine. And at Key West, there were Marines, who supported the immigration mission, and I remember, I want to be a Marine, and so I joined Marine Corps.My spouse, Cary also served, but not in uniform, and we have to give an enormous amount of credit for the families who serve in the military, outside of uniform. I love the Marine Corps. I valued the lessons learned in the military, in the uniform. At one point, I wanted to be the next sergeant major in the Marine Corps. I wanted to stay in for a 32-year career.
"Then I fractured my back during a training exercise and that cut that career short, but it gave me again an opportunity, because I had remarkable mentors and leaders around me, and one of them was Colonel Coates. I served in a small company as a Reconnaissance Marine. Current code said if you have a family, you're going to be discharged, so you need to go to school. I started attending Palomar Community College, just outside of San Marcos, California, in the evenings, and doing other stuff during the daytime. Through mentorship at this community college, because the faculty, which is very similar to the faculty that we have here at Western, allowed me to get an AA degree. And then again, I never thought beyond an AA degree, because higher education was not the trajectory that I had in mind. I was kind of like this Marine mentality walking into a cultural anthropology class. I earned an associate's degree, and then I wanted to become a college anthropologist. And the VA said," Well, there's really no work in cultural anthropology, so 'how about becoming a social worker?' I had no idea what social work was, but what I learned about it is like, it's this remarkable mixture of professions that allow you to understand culture and people. I ended up leaning more to the administrative side within the profession. I really thought I would be the director of nonprofit. Then I was told; 'you really need to go and get your master's degree in social work. Social work as a terminal degree, sign up for a master's degree in social work.' Then I became an adjunct at my alma mater. Then I became an instructor.
"And then again, another mentor said, You really need to go get a PhD. I didn't have the luxury to relocate, so I needed to do a PhD locally at University of South Florida, which allowed me then to work full time at day as an instructor, full time instructor, and then take my classes at nighttime. For my PhD program, I worked out with my faculty and my department chair that I could teach what I'm taking. So I have a cohort of undergrad students out there somewhere that they don't know it, but they actually earned a PhD, because whatever I was learning at night, they were learning the next day in the morning. And actually a handful of them have actually gone on to receive their own PhDs afterwards, and become very successful community leaders in their own right.
"I became very early in my career an administrator, probably too soon in my career. And I say that because there was a need at my university for a department chair, and I was an assistant professor, just newly minted PhD assistant professor, and I needed somebody to take on and be the lead as a department chair in my program. I'm not good at being voluntold, but I'm really good at volunteering. So I said, you know, I'll become a department chair, something that I probably wouldn't tell an assistant professor now as a provost to do, but I took on this leap to be a department chair.
Next thing you know, I'm being recruited to the University of Southern California, where I had the opportunity to develop the first military social work program in the country. I was able to secure significant congressional appropriations to build this robust curriculum across the nation, and build a council of leaders across the country at the height of our Afghanistan war to really understand post traumatic stress disorder and do research in that area and post traumatic growth. Think about how wide the rate of suicide, how we're training counselors, what we're doing with counselors who are being deployed as social workers or psychologists and working directly.
At Texas State University I was the director of the entire school of social work, again to look at their curriculum, help them be innovative. They were at the cusp of doing online education, where you here are already doing online education, so we developed an online education there as well. Then opportunity came up, and another mentor said, I really believe you're ready for a dean show.
"And this time it was in Portland, Oregon. I had like, this was funny. For years, I grew up thinking there's this kind of line across the US I'll never cross, and if I see snow, I don't want to go. I grew up in the South.. And I remember we went out there in June, and we were wearing hoodies. In June, I was cold. We just weren't ready for what cold looks like in the Pacific Northwest, mostly the rain, but we've adapted. During my time there at Portland, I led the School of Social Work through covid, and then the provost there asked me to also lead the college of education that, at the moment, had a $5 million deficit. So I was asked to help balance the budget, address the challenges that they were having in recruitment. It supposed to be a six-month period to be an interim dean. I ended up doing it for three years.
"Then an opportunity again arose at Western Oregon. They had just gone through a very difficult time. Now, Western Oregon University had just had, in 2018 declared exigency, so they were going bankrupt. In 2019 there was a vote of no confidence for the entire administration. They had no HR director. They needed a new provost. They just had a brand new president. We had no legal counsel, and I didn't want to relocate. I wanted to stay in the community. But I decided to take the job. Western Oregon looks very similar to Western New Mexico. We have about 3900 students, a large online presence. We, last year, became the first public four-year HSI (Hispanic-Serving Institution) in the state of Oregon. And that took enormous amounts of my work. We've had a decade of declining enrollment, had a decade to grow the enrollment of students to 3900, and this year will be the first year and decade that we actually see, not only a flat enrollment, we actually are going to see an increase, significant increase in enrollment. And that's been part of our strategic investments that we've done across the campus, making strategic initiatives to recognize that our greatest value is our community. So we engaged the state collectively to understand what is the value of coming to our institution. And it's been great.
"So what drew me to to Western New Mexico, and specifically this position, one, is my motivation to be a servant leader. The values of this institution aligned so closely to my values and my own lived experience, and that carries, as a first gen student, as a veteran, as someone who took more than four years to graduate, we have the value and recognize what that path looks like. As long as they reach it, they reach their goal. Western New Mexico is not a vanilla-type of institution. I say that because the institution has made a decision to go outside of what these kinds of boundaries and perimeters we have created in higher education to be a liberal arts institution. You offer opportunities for GED; you offer certificates of an amazing quality program; you offer professional programs. You've been able to create an academic portfolio that is truly representative of the needs within your region and your community. And you don't see that often. It's a challenge that we have in a lot of regional public universities across the United States.
"It's also a university that understands its core values and is hopefully working together collaboratively and has a really bright future ahead of it. And when I looked at everything that I could get my hands on and did as much research as I could, the more excited we feel about being part of this community, and always asking ourselves, what can the university do for its community, instead of just always sitting back and waiting for the community to do something for us, I think that's pivotal and extremely important for us to recognize that a university lives to serve to serve its students and to serve its community. So we have to be responsible. We have to be responsible of our tax dollars. We have to be responsible to our community and our student tuition. In order to do that, you have to always ask yourself, what more can we be doing to serve our community?
Someone asked me earlier about athletics, and I want to share that it is difficult to be in Division Two for a reason. Division Two programs are expensive, but if you take the expense out of the equation, athletic programs create community. Athletic programs are important for student life. Athletic programs are important for community life because they bring people together. What we know nationally is our student athletes actually retain and graduate at higher rates than other students, so there is a significant value to supporting and understanding what the athletic program student athletes do that's more than just dollars and cents. It's so much more than that. That's true to all your other programs, from recruiting our international students who make a decision to come to the beautiful campus and beautiful community through engaging our workforce.
"So I've done some kind of fun math. I like to do fun math, as I call it, as for every dollar we invest here at Western New Mexico, it literally is $1.50 that's invested in our community. So if we figure out a way, not only to sustain enrollment, because you've had pretty much sustained enrollment for the last decade, but if we figure out a way to increase enrollment at the university, which we will, then we know that is an investment back to the community. We are large employer, one of the largest employers in community, mining and health, so we have a responsibility, not only to the city, but to the community and the state. And if I am chosen to come in, that is my commitment. My commitment is to be a responsible steward to the obligation set forth on allegiance to the president, responsible and engaging, engaging with all the stakeholders, collectively, our entire community."
Wertheim said: "Dean Reed and I have committed ourselves. We're going to be doing this for all the candidates. So we really are not going to be opening it up to questions. We want mingling."
This author spoke to Cary Coll. She expressed excitement at the possibility of moving to Silver City. "Looking at those mountains up there, I can't wait to go hiking out there."
At this point, Jose Coll was speaking in rapid, Spanish with a couple of students, so he is comfortably bi-lingual.
To the question that Wertheim asked of Coll about the workforce in higher education, Coll replied, "Specifically looking at workforce in higher education, what I share in that specific group is where most institutions are trying to catch up, because workforce continues to shift. Artificial Intelligence continues to play a major role, and enrollment declines continue to persist across the nation. What we end up seeing is that your institution has been doing that and is ready for making the shift. So as you think about the role that you're playing as an institution with the certificate programs, we're trying to develop that right now in Oregon, we're trying to catch up, and this university has already built this remarkable platform. Now the next question is, where do we go from there, really embracing and understanding what the workforce needs are of the state and the region. At the moment, health is currently on that workforce demand. I think you're kind of achieving some of those goals. And I think the next step really is to think of where are the gaps? If the gaps exist, how do we strategically invest in those gaps and prepare the continued workforce demand of the region and state, and making sure that our students stay within the state so they can contribute back to the needs of the state. That's critical for a regional university."
