Penn State names Louisville president Neeli Bendapudi as its next leader

Pennsylvania State University hired its first female president in the school’s 166-year history on Thursday.

Neeli Bendapudi, who currently directs the University of Louisville, has been named to succeed the outgoing Penn State President Eric J. Barron. The Penn State Board of Trustees unanimously approved her appointment at a meeting at State College.

Bendapudi, 58, who began her academic career as a professor of marketing but also worked in the private sector, was born in India and has been running the school in Kentucky since 2018. In addition to being their first wife, she was the first ever President of Color for Pennsylvania’s flagship university.

Beginning July 1, she will oversee Penn State’s 24 campuses, including a law school, medical school, and graduate campus, and more than 97,000 undergraduate students, nearly half of whom are moored in University Park. In contrast, Louisville has about 23,000 students in three locations.

“Neeli Bendapudii is the total package when it comes to remarkable university leadership, and she has demonstrated it in a significant way,” said Trustee Bill Oldsey prior to the vote. “She has faced a number of significant challenges, both financial and organizational, and her ability to collaborate, problem-solve, innovate and lead is well documented.”

Bendapudi’s appointment follows a national search that found hundreds of names, despite universities across the country experiencing significant presidential turnover amid the coronavirus. It also comes because schools across the country, including Penn State, faced racial reckoning and demand for more diversity following the Minneapolis police force’s assassination of George Floyd. Penn State’s student population is roughly two-thirds white. About 5.6% of the student body are black and about 7.7% are Latinos, with other groups including Asian, multiracial, and international making up the remainder, according to 2019 federal data, the latest available.

“It is time we had a president who is not a white man who speaks as one himself,” said Jesse Barlow, professor of computer science and engineering and president of the state college district council.

Penn State trustees on Thursday set the new president’s salary at $ 950,000 with a deferred pay of $ 350,000 under a contract that runs until 2027. In her last contract, Bendapudi had made nearly $ 1 million a year in salary and benefits.

Barron, who reportedly earned $ 1.1 million in total compensation in 2020, announced in February that he was stepping down towards the end of that academic year after leading Penn State for eight years. He was hired in 2014 following the child sexual abuse scandal surrounding Jerry Sandusky, who is now a decade old. Barron has since led the university through yet another crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic.

»READ MORE: Penn State President will step down next year

Bendapudi was born in Visakhapatnam, India, in 1963 and attended business school at the nearby University of Andhra. She later moved to the United States to attend graduate school at the University of Kansas, where she completed her PhD in marketing.

Bendapudi taught at Texas A&M University and Ohio State University before returning to Kansas to serve as dean of that university’s business school and later as vice chancellor.

She was named President of the University of Louisville in 2018 after her predecessor, James R. Ramsey, who was embroiled in a number of internal scandals, resigned. As president, Bendapudi was involved in a push to rename the U of L football stadium after it was revealed that Papa John’s Pizza founder John Schnatter had used a racist slur.

During her tenure, Bendapudi received awards from the University’s Board of Trustees for improving the school’s credit prospects by attracting a record $ 170 million in research funding and expediting school enrollment. The school also acquired the ailing KentuckyOne Health hospital network, greatly expanding the university’s medical operations.

“She’s a president I’d love to learn from,” said Erin Boas, Penn State student body president. Boas said she had already learned from Bendapudi, including her belief that “a leader can never communicate enough” and her focus on communicating with students.

In recent months, sports reporters have alleged her office was heavily involved in a controversial decision to suspend men’s basketball coach Chris Mack. Mack had secretly taken on an assistant who had targeted him for a blackmail scheme. These and other issues contributed to reports of an allegedly controversial relationship with Vince Tyra, the outgoing head of the university’s popular track and field division. Sports blogs reported that Tyra went to Florida State University on Thursday, the same day that news of Bendapudi’s departure surfaced.

She is married to Venkat Bendapudi, an associate professor at the University of Louisville.

She is the first Penn State president since Joab Thomas, who retired in 1995 and did not previously work for Penn State.

Barlow, the district council’s president and professor, said he hoped the lines of communication between the new president and the council would be open.

“As a professor, I hope she just makes the university better and makes Penn State degrees even more valuable,” he said.

Barron came to Penn State less than three years after Sandusky, a former assistant coach, was charged with molesting young boys. Several university leaders have been sacked. The Board of Trustees was deeply divided over how the controversy was handled, and Barron sought to achieve a stable influence. His focus is on economic development, fundraising, and making the college available to more students. Under his leadership, tuition fees were frozen three times.

The university’s research spending exceeded $ 1 billion under his supervision. Barron also advocated a plan to build an $ 85 million art museum to replace its aging facility and house a growing collection. He also cracked down on Greek life after Tim Piazza’s death in 2017, chairing a national meeting of university officials on ways to improve fraternity and sorority life.

This is a development story and will be updated.

Staff writers Bob Fernandez and Chris Williams contributed to this article.

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