NKU's new interim president has spent most of her life around college campuses, bringing a wealth of experience to her new role.
Bonita Brown's passion for higher education runs deep. The newly appointed Northern Kentucky University interim president's family often jokes that she has spent her entire life on college campuses, and that's not far from the truth. “My parents got married when my mother was in college,” Brown says. “My mom was studying to be a teacher, so she was going to classes while I was a baby there. The students would babysit me while she was in class. And when your mother’s a teacher, you have to learn. I was reading by the time I was 3 and was always at the top of my classes. It wasn’t really an option.”
Brown’s mother, who attended the first integrated high school in her region, instilled an emphasis on providing education to future generations that Brown has continued to stress in her own career. Before coming to NKU, she worked to foster student success on a national level as vice president for network engagement at Achieving the Dream, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization dedicated to creating a student-focused experience at more than 300 community colleges.
When NKU recruited Brown for the role of vice president and chief strategy officer in 2019, she was initially unsure whether to pursue the new path. Ultimately, the university’s student-focused Success By Design strategic framework won her over.
“That was what my work at the time was already all about—helping students be successful,” Brown says. “What I found was that universities can actually put roadblocks in students’ way because of the way we implement processes and structures, and we have to remove those so students can succeed. I applied and came for the interview, and I really liked the campus.”
As chief strategy officer, Brown worked alongside former president Ashish Vaidya to guide the Success by Design framework. She spent the first six months on the job going on a listening tour, visiting each college to conduct focus groups, town halls and whiteboard sessions to get a feel for NKU’s culture and needs. At the beginning of 2020, she had assembled a team to carry out her plan and help generate ideas just before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic forced her to pivot.
“We had a meeting one weekday where we were putting sticky notes up on walls in a meeting room. The next week we had to shut down the school,” Brown says.
In response, Brown shifted the focus of Success by Design to emphasize metrics, using statistics like retention, time to degree and yield rate to get a better sense of whether NKU was meeting its goals.
“While we knew what we wanted to do, we needed a way to determine whether we were successful,” Brown says. “I worked with committees over Zoom to develop these metrics. We also put together a video to make them more fun. It was an interesting pivot, and in the end, it might have actually helped us. We were able to focus, and we really had time to meet on Zoom often to help move our strategic framework forward.”
Over the past three-and-a-half years, Brown says that she is most proud of instilling the tenets of Success by Design among the campus community.
“Most people know the three pillars: access, completion and career and community engagement,” she says. “They know it's about student success, and that just does my heart good.”
Though much of Brown’s career path has centered on education, she originally studied law at Wake Forest University in order to pursue a career as a legal professional. “I went straight to law school from undergrad,” she says. “I knew my path and what I wanted to do. It wasn’t always easy. Being a minority at a predominantly white institution I was faced with racism. I had to experience people telling me that I took their friend's place in law school and challenging my intelligence. But anyone who knows me knows that I love a challenge. That made me work even harder, and I was able to graduate law school and start my career.”
Brown moved to Washington, D.C. after earning her Juris Doctor degree, working as a corporate lawyer. Two years later, shaken by the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, she returned home, where she applied to be an attorney at Livingstone College—a historically Black college in Salisbury, North Carolina.
“I went to an interview there with the president, who was the school’s first female president. She had a big personality,” Brown says. “After the interview, she said, ‘I’m not going to hire you as my attorney. I want you to be my assistant.’ I said, ‘You do know I’m not a secretary, right?’ She told me that the assistant to the president was her right-hand person, executing and communicating with the rest of the team. I thought I’d give it a try and fell in love with it from Day 1.”
Working at Livingstone College set an entirely new trajectory for Brown’s career. Over the next decade, she served as an assistant to presidents at two other North Carolina universities before becoming chief of staff at the University of Texas and later vice chancellor at UNC Greensboro.Stepping into her first role as a university president, Brown is excited by the opportunity to improve life on-campus and let those off-campus know what NKU has to offer.
“When I came for the interview back in 2019, as soon as I stepped on campus, I knew there was something different,” Brown says. “It feels like a close-knit community. I remember I called my husband and told him. ‘This really is a beautiful campus.’ When he came, he had the same experience. He’s actually in school here now studying photography and will graduate in May 2023. I've made a lot of great connections and friendships here that I'm sure I'll have for a lifetime. It’s just a great place."
