The president of Montana State University has halted the search for two positions at Montana State University-Northern until a review of the searches can be conducted.

President Waded Cruzado, in an email to the faculty of the College of Education, Arts and Sciences and Nursing, said MSU personnel will review the procedures in searches conducted to fill the positions of dean of the college and director of field experience.

The review will be “to determine if there has been a procedural error or violation of MSU-Northern policies in the conduct of the search,” Cruzado said in the email. “No further action will be taken on either search until such time as the review is completed.”

Tracy Ellig, director of public relations at MSU, said Cruzado, and former interim Northern Chancellor Rolf Groseth, met with faculty from the college March 24 in response to a letter signed by 21 of the 23 tenured faculty in the college.

The letter says the senior faculty of the college had met to discuss “concerns related to the overall direction and leadership of the campus, ” with the 21 signatories requesting a meeting with Cruzado.

In her email, which Cruzado sent to Chancellor Frank Trocki’s office to be forwarded to the faculty, she said she had consulted with Trocki regarding the search processes and decided to conduct the review of the process in each search.

That review will be done by University Counsel Leslie Taylor and Director of Human Resources/Affirmative Action Diane Letendre, Cruzado said in the email.

Comments from Trocki were not available by deadline this morning.

The search for a new dean already took one delay. Three candidates, Northern professor Carol Reifschneider, Brown College Chair Randy Olson of Woodbury, Minn., and Scott Searcy, department chair and dean at Waldorf College in Forest City, Iowa, were the finalists in November and were interviewed then.

The search was thrown back open, and two new candidates, Susan Muller, chair of the Department of Health and Sport Sciences at Salisbury University in Maryland, and Tim Rees, who worked the last 10 years at University of Phoenix and Aims Community College in Loveland, Colo., were interviewed in early March.