The Iowa Board of Regents will meet Monday at its offices in Urbandale, where it will formally accept Iowa State University president Steven Leath’s resignation letter, and officially appoint former University of Northern Iowa President Ben Allen to Iowa State University’s interim presidency — effective May 9, 2017.

Until a new president is appointed, Allen will serve Iowa State University as its president, to the office’s fullest capacity. A former Iowa State faculty member and administrator, Allen was appointed UNI’s president in 2006. He served for a space of six years before being issued a vote of no confidence by the faculty in 2012, and then resigning in August of 2013.

As this Editorial Board has previously expressed, our university’s next president needs to be student-focused. He or she needs to be selected in a transparent process, and then serve under a transparent authority.

Allen himself is well-known for his perceived severe budget cuts and program closures in response to a UNI budgetary deficit, during his tenure, of $5 billion. He believed that these cuts were a necessary extreme and would ultimately be better for the university than direct layoffs. In any case, the result was the faculty’s rejection of him, and, as some claim, his eventually being “forced out.”

While these events do not necessarily in themselves tell a story totally unkind to Allen with respect to the student population — though there were allegations of inappropriately proposed academic cuts under his leadership — it is a little odd that the Board of Regents, and its president, Bruce Rastetter, decided to appoint an individual with murky history to serve as interim president.

We hope that the regents’ next selected president for Iowa State University will not be quite as saddled with prior baggage. We hope that this is one of the regents’ first and foremost interests when vetting potential candidates, and we hope the ISU faculty, students and community will be allowed to participate in this process.

To add, this Editorial Board hopes that Iowa State’s next president will have the concerns of Iowa State’s student population first in their thoughts and actions. While Iowa State University is indeed a research institution, it is the students’ tuition that funds so much of the university’s activities, and as such it is the students’ issues that the president should champion.

While Ben Allen may not have the capacity to accomplish much in Ames on account of his limited stay, we hope that his time is not an unproductive or stagnant one, and that he listens to the students’ concerns.