Lt. General William Lennox, Jr., was not the popular choice with faculty members involved in the search process -- they preferred David Ashley, vice chancellor and provost of the University of California, Merced.

That’s astonishing. UC Merced is a fledgling, eight-month-old college in a farm town of 70,000, with a first-year enrollment of 875. And Mr. Ashley, though he may be a fine fellow, didn’t even run the place.

Compared to the skills necessary to rise to three-star rank during a 35-year career in the U.S. Army, culminating in a successful appointment to command West Point, a few months trying (and failing) to scare up 1,000 students at a brand new “open enrollment” state college are seen as superior qualifications?

(General Lennox also holds a Ph.D. in Literature from Princeton University, which did not come in a Cracker Jack box.)

There are 7,000 people at West Point, and it’s hardly “open enrollment.” The cadets there are among America’s best and brightest. The $250 million campus occupies 16,000 acres. General Lennox completed a $95 million physical development center while he was there, broke ground for $120 million library and science complex, and recently concluded a “$150 million” fund-raising campaign. Which actually raised $220 million.

UC Merced hopes to open its auditorium this spring. The college Web site brags that the cafeteria serves pizza and tacos.

In fact, Mr. Ashley’s fans preferred his willingness to promote “faculty governance” (in other words, he was seen as a weak sister who would let the faculty do as they please) and his commitment to “diversity,” a Politically Correct euphemism which those on the left never see as embracing anyone as diverse as, you know, a soldier -- someone who might actually enforce the rules, encourage excellence, expect some productivity.

(How dangerous is the “diversity” jihad at UNLV? Witness the case of internationally renowned economics professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe, dragged through a months-long secret Star Chamber proceedings by the university’s diversity police for allegedly “offending” a gay student with a perfectly routine economics lecture which used gay couples as an example of those who, being childless, often invest with shorter time horizons.)

Specifically, David Corsun, an associate professor at UNLV’s school of Hotel Management, admitted Tuesday that General Lennox was “the one candidate the faculty couldn’t support” precisely because of his background in the U.S. Army, with its “don’t ask, don’t tell policy on homosexuality.”

A policy instituted by Bill Clinton -- a Democrat -- that says a soldier's sexuality is his or her own business, so long as it doesn’t interfere with discipline, disqualifies anyone who has ever served as an officer in the U.S. armed forces from a leadership role at UNLV? How pathetic is that? Do the taxpayers who fund the place know this? Wait till these lavender lads learn that General Lennox once fired a gun; they’ll be fainting away like the chorus line in “Les Femmes Faux.”

General Lennox, if he is chosen, may indeed face a challenging adjustment. All kinds of people have been talking about turning UNLV into a world-class research university, without acknowledging that the caliber of a university is measured largely by who’s admitted, and that many of the students who now attend UNLV wouldn’t have the academic qualifications to attend a major research university.

So how do we get there from here?

Can the university reach such an ambitious goal, and still remain an open-enrollment day school for the graduates of a Clark County School District that ranks near the bottom of the nation for academic achievement?

To keep enrollment numbers -- and, thus, tax subsidies -- high, UNLV now admits hundreds of students who are immediately assigned to remedial classes, where they’re taught the kind of stuff that kids at Phillips Exeter and Phillips Andover are expected to master in the 9th and 10th grades, if not sooner.

Is that to continue? High standards generally prevail in an inverse ratio to large class sizes and high graduation rates. How many local high school graduates are going to get booted in favor of all those international graduate students likely to fill all those new graduate programs, if they’re really to be so top-notch, and staffed on merit?

If he asks the regents to make these tough decisions, General Lennox may well be told, “Yeah, we want to be a world-class university ... but we also want you to hold a seat for any local high school kid who can walk and chew gum.”

To reach goals, you have to know what they are. This could get interesting.