The Board of Trustees voted 5-1 Tuesday to offer interim President Lou Hencken a two-year contract extension making him Eastern’s ninth full-time president.

The contract’s finalization will be voted upon at the Nov. 7 BOT meeting. The special session meeting was to decide if the BOT thought the university’s best interest required a leadership change.

Hencken will officially become president once the two sides negotiate the contract, BOT Chair Nate Anderson said.

“Do I believe that I have the experience and the leadership to lead the university?” Hencken asked. “The answer to that question is yes.”

Hencken succeeded former President Carol Surles, who resigned July 2001 because of illness. Hencken, the former vice president for business affairs, assumed the interim presidential role Aug. 1, 2001.

A presidential search began that fall and lasted until April 2002, but the university’s top candidate accepted a position at the University of West Florida.

The university has searched for a full-time replacement ever since.

“We are not canceling the presidential search, technically,” Anderson said. “We are postponing the search. We will restructure and go back to the search committee, Faculty Senate or any other campus constituency and discuss how to do this process right.”

The proximity of the 2003 search committee’s first meeting, Sept. 23, to the final decision Tuesday had many faculty upset. Some faculty said not opening the position for a nationwide search, and awarding it to Hencken, was not “the American way” at Tuesday’s Faculty Senate meeting attended by three BOT members.

Presidential Search Chair Betsy Mitchell doesn’t see it that way.

“It was a process, and processes work and they don’t work,” said Mitchell, who also serves as the BOT vice chair. “It’s the best time (to hire Hencken). From what we understand, the campus does quite well, everyone likes Lou.”

“There’s no one who knows the campus better than Lou. We’re in a severe budget crisis and we have to protect what money we do have on campus. I’d just hate to change horses right now.”