SAN JOSE — The job that made Sue Martin leave her home and university in Michigan and move across the country was, ostensibly, a temporary one: interim president of San Jose State.

Now, the campus is waiting to hear if the accessible, straightforward Midwesterner will stay on as the school’s permanent leader. The California State University board is expected to unveil its decision Wednesday — the day before students return to class — culminating a six-month national search.

Ask anyone about Martin, the past president of the 22,000-student Eastern Michigan University, and they will almost invariably compare her style and personality with that of her brilliant, but markedly less approachable predecessor, Mo Qayoumi. After a tumultuous few years, Qayoumi announced in July he was leaving San Jose — and academia — for a prestigious government position in his native Afghanistan.

Enter Martin, 65, and her golden retriever puppy.

“The atmosphere on campus changed dramatically within her first week,” said Rachel O’Malley, chairwoman of the environmental studies department, who was critical of Qayoumi’s leadership. “In one semester she has been able to move some facilities’ mountains that the past three presidents swore were impossible to touch.”

For example: Air conditioning will soon be installed in Dudley Moorehead Hall, a classroom and office building notorious for baking its occupants on warm days.

While Qayoumi was criticized for being hard-to-reach and uncompromising, Martin set the tone shortly after her arrival in August in a forum she held to introduce herself. Her arrival itself was controversial, when this newspaper reported she had been reprimanded at Eastern Michigan over an alcohol-related hostile exchange at an alumni cocktail party. At the San Jose State forum, the questions were tough — at least one person asked how, as a white person, she could effectively lead a campus so ethnically diverse — but she answered them all without appearing defensive, said English Professor Cathleen Miller.

“I was kind of in awe that she would take that on after the lack of faculty contact we had with President Qayoumi,” Miller said. “I think she’s a straight shooter, and I think that’s what we need.”

Lydia Ortega, chairwoman of the economics department, also said she has her fingers crossed for the interim president.

Martin — an accounting and tax expert known affectionately as “Su-Mar” among students at Eastern Michigan — has spoken unsparingly about the campus’ aging classroom buildings and laboratories, the source of much student and faculty distress.

“Whoever is the new president, whatever they believe, these facilities have got to be fixed up,” she said in an interview in late October.

Within two months of her arrival, 100 classrooms saw modest improvements.

Martin lives in a university-owned presidential home in San Jose with her husband Larry, an economics professor on leave of absence from Michigan State. She speaks highly of San Jose State and Silicon Valley, but she has yet to confirm that she is even in the running for the permanent job.

She declined an interview request made last week by this newspaper, saying she would need to wait until after Wednesday’s announcement.

The university’s confidential presidential-search policy most likely requires her — explicitly or implicitly — to keep her intentions private. The process CSU adopted for its searches in 2011 is so secretive that a CSU spokeswoman wouldn’t even reveal the number of finalists being interviewed for the position, let alone their names, as the university did in the past.

“When it is publicized that a seated president, provost or another top leader is a finalist, that news compromises the stability of those individuals in their current positions,” said Toni Molle, a CSU spokeswoman. “We changed the policy because the open search process compromised the pool — candidates dropped out not wanting to compromise the security of their current position.”

The secrecy is not popular among faculty, who note that most academic positions involve public presentations by top candidates. “Willingness to have a public interview process could be the first litmus test for how well the candidates would serve the campus once hired,” O’Malley said.

On the other hand, supporters say if Martin is appointed Wednesday by the CSU board of trustees, she will have passed an entire semester’s worth.

Follow Katy Murphy at Twitter.com/katymurphy.