The acting chancellor of SUNY, John Ryan, said he would apply for the permanent job as chief of the state’s 64-campus public higher-education system if “people want me.”

Mr. Ryan, 60, a retired Navy vice admiral and former president of two SUNY colleges, has served as chancellor of SUNY on a temporary basis since June when a Pataki ally, Robert King, resigned from the post after serving more than five years.

In an interview Friday with The New York Sun, Mr. Ryan put his chances of seeking the job at below 50% but said he would apply if he thinks he has a successful stint as chancellor. He also noted that some trustees have encouraged him to throw his hat into the ring.

“If people want me,” he said, “I’ll apply for the job.”

A 14-member search committee is expected to recommend candidates to the state university’s board of trustees by March, and the position will probably be filled before the 2006-07 academic year begins. Responding to complaints made about the search process by a SUNY trustee, Candace de Russy, who has demanded that trustees be told the names of all candidates, Mr. Ryan told the Sun that any changes in the process would be “up to the trustees.”

“It’s good to have confidentiality in the process,” he said. Ms. de Russy has said she would sign a confidentiality agreement before viewing candidates’ names. “I would be more impressed with his leadership if he took a position on this very important issue,” Ms. de Russy said yesterday. “I would like to have a sense of the quality of the pool of applicants. It’s absurd to say I can only see three of the names.”

The chairman of SUNY’s board, Thomas Egan, has said he opposes making such changes to the process. That, he told the Poughkeepsie Journal, would overly complicate the search. As chancellor, Mr. Ryan said his primary objective would be to push state lawmakers to adopt what SUNY calls “rational tuition policy, “which would link tuition increases to a higher-education price index. Supporters of the policy said it would allow SUNY to specify to the university’s more than 413,000 students how much they will pay in tuition over a period of four years and would eliminate the possibility of sudden sharp increases. Undergraduate tuition stands at $4,350.

In March, state lawmakers rejected Governor Pataki’s proposal in his annual budget for automatic tuition increases. Opponents of the measure have argued that making tuition increases automatic reduces incentives to cut costs that would otherwise obviate the need for raising tuition levels.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Sun, Mr. Ryan said SUNY has responded properly to a June audit conducted by the state comptroller, Alan Hevesi, that questioned expenditures made by the university’s research foundation.

The audit of the research foundation, which has fiscal responsibility over outside research grants, found that it allocated housing allowances to two SUNY college presidents who were already receiving the maximum level of housing allowances from their colleges. It also found that the foundation gave $7,000 to a SUNY employee to help pay tuition at an out-of-state college for the employee’s child.

“Most of the concerns have already been corrected,” Mr. Ryan said. He said the research foundation, as a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, “doesn’t operate under the same rules” as other SUNY offices. He also defended Mr. King’s rejected request to take a paid six-month sabbatical before stepping down as chancellor, saying it is “normal” for faculty members or high-level academic officials to take such breaks after working five consecutive years.

As acting chancellor Mr. Ryan earns a $340,000 annual salary. He also collects $110,000 a year for serving on the boards of Cablevision and CIT Group, a finance company. Before becoming acting chancellor, the White Plains resident, a native of Mountainhome, Pa., served as president of Maritime College and as interim president of University at Albany. He was superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy between 1998 and 2002. As a vice admiral, he flew reconnaissance missions in hulking P-3 Orions over Europe and Asia until 1998, a career that he said left him hard of hearing.