University of Missouri President Leaving

University of Missouri president Elson Floyd is leaving and will be announced at mid-day, our time, as the the new president of Washington State University. A University of Missouri spokesman says Floyd is in Pullman, Washington, waiting for school regents to make the formal announcement. The seattle Times reports he’ll earn about 100-thousand dollars more a year to run a university system that is about one-third the size of the University of Missouri system. The Seattle Times says the announcement of the new school president is coming sooner than expected because search consultants had told the school to act before other universities started their own high-profile searches for new leadership. Floyd is not unfamiliar with the state of Washington. He was at Eastern Washington University from 1990 to 1993 and was executive vice-president before leaving the school to become the executive director of the Washington Higher Education Coordinating Board. He served for two years there before going to the University of North Carolina, where he served three years as the Chief Administrator and Operating Officer. He was hired by the University of Missouri in late 2002 after he had spent four years as President of Western Michigan University. He’s expected to take over at Washington State after the end of the spring semester.