Ethics Newsline®

BOULDER
With her university caught up in scandals, Elizabeth Hoffman, the president of the University of Colorado at Boulder, last week announced her resignation, saying she needed to put the school’s welfare ahead of her own.

UC Boulder, most recently beset by controversy over the 9/11 comments of tenured professor Ward Churchill, is still struggling to recover from allegations of sexual harassment and assaults by the school’s football players.

Last week, Hoffman said her resignation seemed like a needed step to help the school emerge from scandals’ shadow.

“It was becoming increasingly difficult to be strong on the issues that were important in the long run because it kept coming back to questions about me,” Hoffman told the New York Times, “so I decided I had to take my future, my job, off the table.”

Hoffman, who recently lost the support of some of the school’s board of regents, also caught recent headlines for warning that the nation may be headed toward a “new McCarthyism” stifling vital debate.

“I was referring to the deep divides in this country — the red states and blue states,” she told the Times. “I’m much more concerned about the fact that whatever you say today, someone is going to take offense at it.”