Cleveland State University’s wild year started, chronologically and otherwise, in January. 

That’s when news broke publicly that university officials were considering “potentially absorbing” the financially struggling private Notre Dame College just nine miles away. 

Then, only two weeks later, president Laura Bloomberg made headlines of her own. She announced she was one of three finalists in the running to lead the University of Minnesota, a five-campus system enrolling more than 70,000 students. It’s one of her alma maters, a former employer, and the flagship institution of the state where she was born and raised.

The announcement raised eyebrows on and off campus. After all, Bloomberg had been in the CSU role less than two years after getting promoted from provost when the board of trustees ousted her predecessor, Harlan Sands. She’s the university’s third president in six years.

Only Minnesota, she wrote in an email to her Cleveland State colleagues and students, could tempt her to leave Northeast Ohio. 

By February, both of these potential deals had fallen through. Notre Dame’s leaders decided to close the college. Minnesota’s trustees picked someone else. 

Bloomberg returned to Cleveland and got back to work. Publicly, it seemed to be a turning point. 

At a faculty senate meeting the same week – the only time she wanted to talk about her bid for the Minnesota job – she swore she had no intention of applying elsewhere. 

“You’re stuck with me unless you want me gone,” she said.  

Why what happens at Cleveland State matters to Cleveland 

The stakes couldn’t be higher – for Bloomberg, for the university, and for all of Cleveland. 

What happens at Cleveland State matters to Northeast Ohio. It’s a key employer, commands a large downtown footprint, and educates thousands of students a year. The university estimates about 80% of them stay here after graduation. The university turned 60 this year.

Cleveland State falls into a category called regional public universities. So do eight other institutions in Ohio, including Bowling Green State University, the University of Akron, and Wright State University. These are the places educating big swaths of residents who in turn power state and local workforces. Institutions’ fates, and that of the cities in which they sit, are closely intertwined.  

Yet regional publics are taking the challenges facing all of higher education – such as changing demographics contributing to declining enrollments and pressure from Republican lawmakers decrying college as being too “woke” – extra hard. 

It’s forcing leaders to juggle multiple priorities as they figure out how to reinvent their institutions to survive. 

Few feel those challenges as intensely, or weather them more publicly, than a university president. To gain some more insight into Bloomberg’s commitment to Cleveland State and how she’s working to meet its many challenges, Signal Ohio recently spent a day with her. 

‘We have to be smaller’ 

After the University of Minnesota passed on Bloomberg in February, her focus turned fast to the serious financial troubles ahead in Cleveland. The months that followed were busy. 

Cleveland State delivered rounds of buyouts and layoffs of faculty and staff in an attempt to stave off a projected $40 million budget gap. Two cabinet members left. The core curriculum got overhauled. Bloomberg gave up a potential six-figure annual bonus while inking a five-year contract renewal that didn’t raise her $464,100 salary. A residence hall closed. Moody’s dropped the university’s credit rating. 

At a better-resourced institution, “a president wouldn’t do half of the things that I do,” Bloomberg, 63, told Signal Ohio. She powers through the day on Diet Cokes and coffee heavy on the cream. 

Some of those more proactive moves were rooted in a piece of million dollar advice. A 144-page report from accounting and consulting firm Ernst & Young delivered in May was laced with all kinds of strategies for reinvention. The TL;DR of it now sits with Bloomberg.

“We have to be smaller,” she said. 

Student enrollment’s been trending that way for years. At its peak in 1980, Cleveland State enrolled about 20,000 total students. Today, the number is down 30% to about 14,000 students. Now, the rest of the university – think infrastructure and staffing numbers – is catching up. 

Many challenges, enrollment and otherwise, predate her. It’s compounded interest from choices made by her predecessors. 

“I could spend a long time going, ‘I would have made a different decision,’ but I don’t know if I would have made a different decision,” she said. “It’s my responsibility, it’s my stewardship, obligation, and opportunity today.”    

Cleveland State faculty, staff deal with cuts 

As Bloomberg’s office was preparing to host a lunch for faculty and staff in her office on a recent Monday, a staffer not on the guest list burst through the door.  

Their copy machine was broken, they said, and their administrative assistant left after taking one of those buyouts. Could someone help? 

Faculty and staff across the university are learning to do more with less. Call it the right-sizing woes. 

Later on, that lunch spanned all kinds of topics, including infrastructure. She had thoughts. There are upgrades the university needs to make on its outdated technology (“Can’t get much worse”) to dealing with aging buildings (“We’ve got to figure out Fenn Tower, God knows.”)

Some of the 1,758 total employees – a number that’ll drop by about 70 at the end of the December when more depart in the latest round of buyouts – still at the university have deep ties to the institution. Their careers and their lives transcend the presidents they serve under, a commonality at these types of colleges. 

Another employee mentioned that they felt as though the people attending the lunch – “the ones doing the work” – weren’t being recognized as much as others at the university with bigger titles. 

“When people say ‘I’m hurting,’ I think it’s important to say, ‘I see that you’re hurting,’” Bloomberg told Signal Ohio in an interview later that day. “But it doesn’t mean I have to say, ‘Oh my God, the sky is falling.’ I try to balance it.”

Cleveland State vs. the culture wars 

The average age of Cleveland State students is 27. Many are working or juggling other responsibilities outside of the classroom. 

Mays Turabi, a current junior and editor-in-chief of an independent campus news organization, said Cleveland State isn’t really the type of place where a president is put on a pedestal. 

“I think students don’t have extreme opinions about the president of their university, nor the administration,” Turabi said.  

As Bloomberg crossed campus for another meeting, aside from a few waves here and a hello there, she walked briskly without being bothered. 

That walk across campus was to meet with Tachelle Banks, vice president of student belonging and success. The department launched late last year. It was around the same time the university’s previous head of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) left the university. Several of that office’s previous responsibilities got folded into Banks’ office. 

The university wasn’t technically required to do any of that. But leaders in Cleveland can certainly read the tea leaves from lawmakers in Columbus. 

Public presidents had to be ready to talk about DEI efforts when asking for capital improvement money this spring. So-called “intellectual diversity centers” are now required at several colleges, including Cleveland State. Last month, state lawmakers passed a bill requiring people at education institutions to use bathrooms that match the gender they were assigned at birth.

When asked about this climate, Bloomberg does not mince words: Her university “does not spend our days embroiled in the culture wars.”  

“We’re busy making sure that people pass biology and get to graduation and have enough money to buy their books,” she continued. “The amount of time that some people who are influencing higher ed are spending, I would say, almost obsessively focused on the culture wars is a head scratcher to me.”

Bloomberg’s transparency has been applauded. A faculty union president describes her as a breath of fresh air.  

But it’s not all warm and fuzzy feelings. Privately, in unsigned letters to reporters, faculty and staff pointed to pockets of continued high salary spending by — and on — Bloomberg’s administration as one pain point. 

The future of Cleveland State

By this point in her presidency, Bloomberg checks all of the prerequisites that leaders who aren’t from here originally tend to do. 

She posts selfies with her husband from the Towpath Trail on her LinkedIn page, sits on a few of the city’s big-name boards, and has a favorite meal (it’s the salmon fish and chips at the university’s on-campus restaurant, if you’re wondering, and it’s “so rich, and so high calorie, and so darn good.”) 

“We need more [leaders] like her that are fully engaged in the success of the community writ large, not just the success of their organization,” said Baiju Shah, president and CEO of the Greater Cleveland Partnership. 

The city is woven into the pithy new mission statement (“Cleveland’s university. Infinite opportunity.”) anchoring the university’s five-year strategic plan. 

Called “Cleveland State United,” the plan focuses on building stronger partnerships with local businesses and other organizations, getting to stronger financial footing, and improving the student experience. 

Next year brings faculty contract negotiations. Union chair Linda Quinn said members are feeling optimistic with “some pretty good skepticism, too.”

“We’re looking to make sure that the things that she’s saying – this story that she’s putting together, this new, beautiful mission, our strategic plan – [that there’s] follow through,” Quinn told Signal Ohio. 

It’s clear that Bloomberg will always be a Minnesotan at heart. Her accent still slips out when she says words such as ‘roof,’ after all. But now, two and a half years into her tenure and despite the challenges of it all, Cleveland — and the university she leads — is home now, too.

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