Terms of 4 UDC trustees to expire

The council passed a resolution recently that will permit the UDC board to carry on with reduced membership. The board faces important decisions in coming months on building the university's first student center at its Van Ness campus and leasing facilities for its community college and law school, Durso said.

"We have lots of things under way, and we're not stopping any of them," Durso said. She said current board members have agreed to stay on in an advisory capacity.

Sessoms was chosen to lead UDC in a search that netted 100 candidates, said Donald Langenberg, the trustee who led the search. The process "was perfectly conventional, routine and normal," he said. It was also the first time in UDC history that representatives chosen by the mayor and the council were on the search committee.

In early July of last year, when the field had been winnowed to four, Fenty asked the board to "pause" the search so that the applicant pool could be broadened. The board reluctantly agreed.

"We found it a little bit peculiar that, that late in the process, he had gotten around to submitting some names," Langenberg said.

Two weeks later, Fenty had not supplied any new candidates, and trustees resumed the search process where they had left off.

The mayor intervened again with the letter delivered by courier, questioning whether the search had yielded "a candidate from as strong a pool as possible." Trustees ignored the letter on advice of their attorney, who affirmed that it was the board's job to pick a president, Durso said.

"In no university that I know does a governmental bureaucrat have the authority or the power to appoint the president," said Langenberg, a former chancellor of the University System of Maryland. "It's just unheard of."

Fenty released a statement upon Sessoms' appointment in August of last year, wishing him success. Sessoms, 62, had been president of Delaware State University. He holds a doctorate in physics from Yale University and previously taught at Harvard University and worked at the State Department.

Sessoms has overseen the historic division of UDC this fall into a community college and a separate four-year university, with higher tuition and academic requirements. He and the board are working on the new student center and have opened some satellite facilities for community college instruction throughout the city. A 10-year plan calls for enrollment to grow from 5,500 to 45,000.

Sessoms said he has made several overtures to Fenty and to Rhee, whose public schools supply the largest share of UDC students.

"She's simply refused to meet, shows no interest," he said.

Jennifer Calloway, a spokeswoman for Rhee, said the district had "come up with some great ideas around ways to collaborate on future projects, and we look forward to reaching out to UDC and exploring these possibilities."