HIGHLAND HEIGHTS, Ky. — When Cady Short-Thompson walked into the President's Office in the Lucas Administrative Center Monday, she met a goal she made more than 20 years ago.
"This was the dream, frankly," she said. "This was the position that, as a 27-year-old, I imagined for myself ... of course, you imagine these things, but they seldom come true and for me, the idea that this one position at the right time, that I was ready for it, would be open and I would be what they were seeking, is almost a little too much to comprehend."
Short-Thompson worked at NKU from 1996-2010 as a communications professor, eventually becoming the department chair. The board of regents introduced her last month as the university's seventh president — and the first woman in the role on a permanent basis.
NKU Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer Bonita Brown was appointed by the Board of Regents to serve as the interim president in January. The decision came after the abrupt departure of former NKU President Ashish Vaidya, which was announced in November 2022.
"What you see is what you get with Cady Short-Thompson," she said. "You'll see that I oftentimes share what I'm thinking and what we're doing and what we plan to do and then we'll do it."
She comes back to NKU from Breakthrough Cincinnati, where she served as CEO/Executive Director, after a stint as provost of Michigan's Hope College and dean of University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College.
Short-Thompson's tenure starts as Northern Kentucky University faces an ongoing budget deficit, which the university said had been cut to about $9.5 million from an original projection of $24 million earlier this year. A spokesperson said the university had a plan to have a balanced budget by 2025.
"My number one priority is enrollment management and getting our hands around the finances," she said. "Frankly, the role of the president is to ensure that we have the resources to run this university well and I want to make sure that we get there sooner than later."
Short-Thompson acknowledged cuts to campus before her hiring.
"A lot of the work has been done by the cabinet and the board to date," she said. "What I'm interested in is growing - growing our enrollment, growing our finances, so we can start to get healthy."
NKU's enrollment has started to drop in the past couple of years to under 16,000 students. And the makeup of that enrollment is changing dramatically, Short-Thompson said.
"The whole business model around higher education has changed quite a bit over the years, and NKU also will be changing," she said. "We're serving a lot more online students than we have historically, a lot more graduate students than we have. And we respond to what the region needs from us."
She called herself a "serial partner-er," with plans to re-engage high schools and other institutions across the region to rebuild pipelines for potential students to NKU, like the Gateway 2 NKU program.
As for what it will cost to attend NKU moving forward, Short-Thompson said the current budget challenges meant prices would likely continue to go up. The university said it raised tuition by 3% last year, so state law limits how much more it can raise tuition in coming years. But Short-Thompson said she would like to explore a policy she was part of during her time at UC Blue Ash.
"Once we find ourselves in a far more stable financial picture where year-to-year we're in the black, there are some really wonderful ways to limit increases," she said. "I liked the fact that [UC] would lock in tuition for a series of years after the students began and I think a lot of students and families liked that model so they knew what to expect year-to-year."
Even though she officially started Monday, Short-Thompson had spent a lot of time on campus, a desire to hit the ground running, she said. She has lots of support on campus.
Faculty Senate President John Farrar told our partners LINK nky that though faculty would have preferred a more open search, many faculty members who worked with Short-Thompson when she was previously at NKU had a positive experience with her.
“I feel like the faculty feels like she’s one of us,” he said. “Glad to have a president who is one of us that we can start now setting a new course to the future.”
Short-Thompson told WCPO she felt a certain pressure to perform, but was confident in the creativity and energy she brings to the office. She got hundreds of texts within hours of the announcement that she got the job.
"There is a certain joy that I can't really express in words," she said. "I did a good amount of jumping up and down and some screaming while trying to maintain some sense of decorum and appropriate reaction, but it was just a really wonderful moment for me."
She felt like this was a homecoming — and so did her family. Her kids are all in college, making her more than an administrator, but almost a parent-in-chief. Her husband is her high school sweetheart and excited to be her plus-one to Norse athletics.
"For me, there's nothing sweeter than being able to have this opportunity to share with him," said Short-Thompson. "And we are in it together. He will be on NKU's campus a lot of evenings and weekends every week and we're going to call it date night and it's going to be fun for the two of us."
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