Air Force Secretary resigns

U.S. Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson will be the next president of the University of Texas at El Paso.

The UT System Board of Regents on Friday selected Wilson as the only finalist for the job.

She submitted her resignation Friday as Air Force secretary to President Donald Trump, and plans to leave that job May 31, according to a copy of the letter released by the Pentagon.

The UT System regents are expected to take a final vote on hiring Wilson in about three weeks.

She’d become UTEP president effective Sept. 1, according to the letter.

“American higher education needs strong leaders to meet the challenge of the 21st century,” Wilson wrote in her resignation letter. “As you know, I left a university presidency to become Secretary of the Air Force (in May 2017) and our family home is in New Mexico, a few hundred miles north of El Paso on the Rio Grande.”

Wilson will replace Diana Natalicio, 79, who is retiring after being president for 30 years — the longest tenure of any public university president in the United States. Natalicio was the first woman president of UTEP in its 104-year history.

Wilson, 58, a Republican, was a member of U.S. House of Representatives for five terms, representing Albuquerque, from 1998 to 2009. In 2012, she lost a bid for U.S. Senate to now-Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-New Mexico.

President Trump nominated her to be Air Force secretary in early 2017, and she was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in May 2017. Wilson had been considered a top candidate to become the next U.S. secretary of defense, according to published reports.

Wilson, an Air Force Academy graduate and Rhodes Scholar, was the first woman president of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, an engineering and science research university in Rapid City, S.D., where she was president from 2013 to 2017, according to information from the UT System.

The science and engineering school has an enrollment of just over 2,600 students — much smaller than UTEP’s enrollment of just over 25,000 students.

“Dr. Wilson’s broad experience in the highest levels of university leadership, and state and national government — whether securing federal grant awards, advising our nation’s most important national research laboratories, raising philanthropic dollars or running large, dynamic organizations — will help ensure that UTEP continues its remarkable trajectory as a nationally recognized public research institution,” Kevin Eltife, UT System regents chairman, said in a statement.

President Trump offered congratulations and praise on Twitter, saying Wilson “has done an absolutely fantastic job as Secretary of the Air Force, and I know she will be equally great in the very important world of higher education.”