Jun. 25—GRAND FORKS — Chancellor Mark Hagerott’s term as leader of the North Dakota University System will end at the close of 2025.

North Dakota State Board of Higher Education members voted Tuesday to extend Hagerott’s current contract another six months through December 2025, after which the chancellor will serve as a distinguished professor of artificial intelligence and human security.

Board members made the vote publicly after over an hour’s worth of discussion in executive session.

“This will be an orderly transition,” Jerry Rostad, vice chancellor of strategy and strategic engagement, told the Herald.

Hagerott will continue at his current salary of over $424,000 per year through 2025.

Rostad said the state board will be tasked with assigning a search committee to find a new chancellor for when Hagerott’s term ends, though that process may not begin for some time.

“There’s a lot of time between now and then, so I don’t even want to begin to speculate what will happen,” Rostad said.

In a brief remarks following the executive session, Hagerott expressed his enthusiasm for working with the Legislature in 2025 as well as continuing his academic work on artificial intelligence and cybersecurity within the NDUS system.

Hagerott’s new role as distinguished professor will not be tied to a specific campus but instead to Dakota Digital Academy, Rostad said.

Board Chair Tim Mihalick complimented Hagerott’s academic work in his own remarks, crediting the chancellor as “second to none” in his AI and cybersecurity expertise.

At the end of 2025, Hagerott will have served as NDUS’s chancellor for a little more than a decade.

Hagerott took over the role from interim Chancellor Larry Skogan in 2015. Skogan had been appointed to the position following a 2013 vote by the state board to buy out then-Chancellor Hamid Shirvani’s contract.

In his nine years as chancellor, Hagerott has cut an at-times divisive path in North Dakota higher education.

In 2017, fired Vice Chancellor Lisa Feldner, accused Hagerott in a labor complaint of cultivating a hostile work environment, alleging gender discrimination and retaliation as well as bizarre behavior, including numerous incidents where the chancellor allegedly expressed fear he was being surveilled by Chinese and Russian nationals.

Hagerott fired Feldner after he accused her of making derogatory comments about staff members.

In a column published late Monday evening, Forum Communications columnist Rob Port speculated board members could move to oust Hagerott during Tuesday’s executive session, pointing to critical remarks made about the chancellor when his contract last came up for review in 2023 as well as private conversations with Hagerott’s supporters and defenders.

Hagerott’s supporters characterized the alleged ouster as retaliation for the firing of North Dakota State University President Dean Bresciani as well as Hagerott’s favoritism toward NDUS’s western institutions, Port wrote.

His detractors instead told Port the chancellor was too myopic to take on policy issues like declining enrollment across the university system.

Rostad disputed the characterization of the board’s motion as a termination.

“This is not a motion to terminate, it’s a motion to transition,” Rostad said.

He said he could not compare the motion to Shrivani’s departure in 2013, saying he had not been with NDUS at the time.

Board members subsequently moved to renew the contracts for all presidents of NDUS institutions after another 90-minute executive session, after which the board broke for lunch.