This just in,

Carlisle backtracks on Benson

University of Colorado Regent Cindy Carlisle will not vote for Republican Bruce Benson as the next CU president, she said Saturday, despite having previously endorsed the political activist as the sole finalist for the job.

Carlisle, a Boulder Democrat and state Senate candidate, initially supported Benson as a candidate in the search to replace outgoing CU President Hank Brown, writing a Jan. 8 letter of support to the presidential search panel and later seconding and supporting a motion to have Benson be the sole finalist.

However, Carlisle told the Camera both in a phone interview and through a commentary piece in today's Insight section that she met with Benson last week to say she would not support his bid for the office.

"When the CU Presidential Search Committee met with the regents Jan. 30, I was dismayed Bruce Benson was put forward as the single finalist for the job," Carlisle wrote in her letter to the Camera. "Grudgingly, I voted to move the process to the next phase of evalua-tion of Benson by the university community."

She said while having only a single finalist is a "ridiculous" process, it was outcry from the university community about Benson that changed her mind about supporting him.

"I've heard from a wide variety of people who are unhappy with this choice," Carlisle said Saturday afternoon. "He is not the candidate for this job."

The wide variety of people she heard from includes the hundreds of ProgressNow network members who called her office directly, or the thousands who signed the petition opposing Benson at boycottbenson.com. We and everyone else who cares about the University of Colorado's future welcome her change of heart.

Regent Carlisle also provides an interesting bit of previously-undisclosed knowledge about the selection process in in op-ed also published today:

In recent days I learned for the first time that at least two candidates for the CU presidency not only had strong academic credentials but were leaders of large state university systems with more students and more campuses than CU. I have no idea why they were never presented to the board.

Before this process moves forward another inch, we have to know more about the other candidates and under what grounds they were rejected. Join the call to STOP Bruce Benson and start this whole thing over:

http://boycottbenson.com