The Making of a President: Neeli Bendapudi

On May 9, Dr. Neeli Bendapudi officially begins her tenure as Penn State’s 19th president. While she has spent the past few months working closely with retiring president Eric Barron, administrators, and trustees to get up to speed on the many complexities of this large university (“like drinking out of a fire hose,” she says), Bendapudi will also be drawing from a vast array of life experiences that have prepared her for her new role. 

From those experiences have arisen a very clear set of values and beliefs that will almost certainly help to inform Bendapudi’s priorities as president, including her beliefs in the power of higher education, the importance of family, the potential of every student, the essentiality of a free market economy, and the greatness of the United States of America.

Indian & American influences

Born and raised in India, Bendapudi will be the first person of color and the first woman to lead Penn State as president. As a child living in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, her family experienced poverty. The eldest of three daughters, Bendapudi was only five when her extended family pooled their resources to help send her father to the United States to pursue a doctorate in English literature at the University of Kansas.

“In India, the family as a unit is super important, and the idea was, ‘We need to make a better life for the entire family,’” she says.

During her father’s four years in the United States, the family’s communication with him was limited to occasional letters and a phone call once every several months at the home of a neighbor who owned a telephone. Although she was very young, Bendapudi remembers the hardship of missing her father, yet understanding the importance of what he was doing. 

“It was drilled into me, all the sacrifices that go into getting higher education, because it’s not just about you, it’s about the extended family. My father came back after four years with a Ph.D., and it really changed the trajectory of our family’s lives,” she says. “So I decided at a very early age that higher education would be my path.”

Bendapudi earned both her bachelor’s degree in English and her master of business administration from Andhra University in India, where her father was a professor. It was during this time that she met and married her husband of 38 years, Venkat Bendapudi. Both decided to pursue their doctorates in the United States and were recruited by many universities, ultimately choosing to attend the same school her father had attended, the University of Kansas. 

Her two sisters followed her there for their advanced degrees, and Bendapudi’s mother eventually went on to earn a doctorate, as well. 

“My mom is really a hero. While we were all in school, she also got her Ph.D. Having three small children, she didn’t get to do it when everybody else did, but she clearly knew the importance of higher education,” Bendapudi says.

Bendapudi says she knew she eventually wanted to become a professor like her parents. Again, her Indian upbringing influenced her choices, she says, as she had seen with her own eyes what happened when India’s markets opened up to competition, and monopolies no longer limited what was affordable and accessible to lower income consumers.

“What I truly believe is that competition and free markets help everybody,” she says. “Watching that transition—I wanted to study that. Marketing became something that fascinated me.”

Bendapudi earned her Ph.D. in marketing in 1994, specializing in consumer behavior. She accepted her first academic appointment at Texas A&M, went on to teach at Ohio State University, and later returned to KU as dean of the business school before becoming provost and executive vice chancellor there. In 2018, she was appointed president at the University of Louisville. 

Along the way, she served as executive vice president at Huntington Bank for several years, and also has done a lot of consulting work outside of academia, including with organizations like AIG, Procter & Gamble, Deloitte, and the U.S. Army.

“I’m actually very proud of that background. I knew I wanted to be a professor that could talk about how this applied in the real world,” she says. “To me, you would not want to be taught medicine by a doctor who said, ‘I’ve never seen the heart, but I’ve read the book.’ Likewise, when teaching business, I did not want to be a professor that said, ‘I’ve never done it.’ Not just teaching in the abstract, but connecting and working side-by-side with businesspeople—that was important to me.”

Also important to Bendapudi is her American citizenship, which she earned in 2005.

“That’s something my father instilled in me as well—this reverence and gratitude to this country,” she says. “I really hope all young people in this country get to watch a naturalization ceremony. They won the genetic lottery by being born in this country.”

Bendapudi fondly recalls being invited to speak at the naturalization ceremony when her parents became citizens in 2011. In her remarks at the ceremony, she called the United States “the greatest country on the face of the earth,” saying, “I dare you to name one other country which commands waiting lists of people who are eager to call themselves citizens.”

Presidential priorities

As Bendapudi takes the lead at Penn State, she believes the mission of the university is clear: “uplifting lives through creating and disseminating knowledge.” In service of this mission, she has developed a well-defined set of priorities.

“To me, for anyone in this job, students have to come first. We’ve got to focus on our students and student success,” she says. 

Toward that end, Bendapudi points to what she calls the “ABCs of success” as three critical areas of focus: Academic preparedness, Belonging (“I want to make sure that for every student, no matter who they are, when we say ‘We Are,’ they know that they are part of the ‘We.’”), and Cost.

Her focus on students is not just lip service. Her sincerity is evident in her interactions with them. At a Penn State men’s ice hockey game in January, she went out of her way to introduce herself to some of the students in attendance, asking each of them about their majors and their experiences with genuine interest.

“The truth is, when I interact with every single student, I cannot help thinking about the potential. You never know what this person is going to go on and do, and what this education is going to mean for that individual,” she says. “So I love talking to students.”

“My second big focus will be on faculty and staff—making sure we support our faculty and staff, that we are competitive, that we attract them and retain them,” she says.

Bendapudi says her third priority will be keeping alumni invested in Penn State, “and by that, I mean giving your time, talent, treasure. Will you mentor a student? Hire a Nittany Lion? Speak to our classes? Support what matters to you?”

Her other key priorities are unique to Penn State, she says. One is the university’s 19 commonwealth campuses. As part of her transition period, she began touring the campuses in March.

“[The commonwealth campus system] was so attractive to me, because we have an opportunity to make life better for so many people all across the commonwealth. We have a powerful economic engine. We are the key for bettering lives. So that’s going to be important.”

The other priority that she considers to be relatively unique to Penn State is the university’s health enterprise, including the College of Medicine and the Penn State Health system, and “really leveraging that to improve the health of people in the commonwealth, the country, and the world.”

In the short term, another priority that has arisen is that of hiring a new athletic director, as Sandy Barbour retires this summer. While at Louisville, Bendapudi served as vice chair of the Atlantic Coast Conference, and was slated to take over as ACC president before she accepted the Penn State position, so she has tremendous respect for the role of sports at a university.

“Definitely, hiring a phenomenal athletic director is a key priority,” she says. “Athletics is genuinely, extremely important. … As others have said, athletics is the ‘front porch’ to the university. It’s what invites people in. It’s also what brings people together.” 

Along with whoever fills the athletic director position, Bendapudi’s administration will be navigating the new world of NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) compensation.

“It’s here; it’s a reality. We need to figure out what we do. I’m really proud because I think Penn State has a really rich history of caring about all of our student athletes. So we will also make sure that the student athletes that give so much to all of us have an opportunity to have a strong career.”

Juggling this wide-ranging set of priorities may sound daunting. That’s where Michael Wade Smith comes in.

Smith has worked with Bendapudi as her chief of staff at both the University of Kansas and the University of Louisville. At Penn State, he will serve as senior vice president and chief of staff. (See “Right-Hand Man” below.)

This is a new position for Penn State, but Bendapudi explains that the chief of staff position is not uncommon at other universities and organizations. Her experience consulting with the U.S. Army influenced the way she has modeled the position. Bendapudi says that in his role, Smith will “make sure that my key priorities get implemented.”

A family move

Smith is not the only person who is relocating to State College with Bendapudi. It is often customary in Indian culture for generations of family to live together. Her father is now deceased, but her mother will be living with the Bendapudis in Schreyer House, Penn State’s official presidential residence. 

In addition, the Bendapudis’ only child, daughter Sirisha Bendapudi, a corporate attorney, will also be moving to State College with her husband, Kyle Ladd, and their 14-month-old son, Arjun.

Like any proud grandmother, Bendapudi lights up when she talks about her first grandchild.

“Being a grandparent is the best title in the world,” she says, showing off a picture of Arjun wearing a Penn State shirt with his arms raised in a “touchdown” pose.

Spending time with Arjun and the rest of her family is one of her greatest joys, she says. She also enjoys reading, writing, painting, and just being with her “best friend,” Venkat, who is retiring as a professor of statistics (“at least right now he claims that is his plan,” she says). She is also looking forward to becoming a part of the State College community.

“I love college towns. You’ll be seeing me at musical theater and concerts and the Palmer Museum on campus, but I’m also going to be looking for opportunities to engage with the community.” T&G

Right-Hand Man: Meet Michael Wade Smith, Penn State’s new senior vice president and chief of staff

As President-elect Bendapudi begins the complex work of leading a $7.8 billion organization, she’ll be relying on the support of a long-time trusted colleague: Michael Wade Smith, who was recently appointed to Penn State’s newly created position of senior vice president and chief of staff.

“Large organizations now are incredibly complex to lead. There are so many demands on an executive’s time, and a chief of staff allows them to be in multiple rooms and multiple conversations,” Smith explains.

Smith, 33, believes he is one of the youngest people outside of the tech world to hold a chief of staff position, but his youth belies an impressive background of extensive leadership experience. 

As a high school student growing up in rural western Kansas, he became deeply involved in Family, Career, and Community Leaders of America (FCCLA), serving as the organization’s national president. Later, as an undergraduate student studying English literature and American studies at the University of Kansas, Smith served as student body president, managing a $26 million budget. After graduating, he worked with Teach for America until meeting Bendapudi at a KU alumni event. 

“Neeli, in her normal Neeli way, was just magnetic, and she convinced me to come back to Kansas for my MBA,” he says.

Smith briefly worked in the private sector for Colgate-Palmolive after obtaining his MBA, but, he says, “I just was not entirely excited about the idea of marketing pet food. I’m a mission guy and wanted to be closer to my passion of education.” 

So, in 2015, when the role of chief marketing officer in the school of business opened up at KU under Bendapudi as dean, Smith threw his hat in the ring. 

“We’ve been working together since then,” he says. 

After Bendapudi was appointed provost and executive vice chancellor at the University of Kansas, she tapped Smith to become her chief of staff. In 2018, he relocated to the University of Louisville with Bendapudi to serve as chief of staff and vice president for external affairs. 

The two share a clear mutual admiration for each other. 

“Michael shows great interest, ambition, inclination; he’s very bright, very strategic as a thinker,” Bendapudi says.

For his part, Smith says, “Neeli is a visionary leader. She is a motivator. She is one of the most strategic people I’ve ever met in my life, and she’s someone who has set incredibly ambitious and bold goals. … I just have the utmost expect for Neeli as a leader. I will often joke that it’s good that we have the most ethical person in the room at the top of the organization. She makes great decisions. … And I get to be the beneficiary of learning from those good decisions.”

Smith, who also earned a Ph.D. in higher education management from the University of Pennsylvania, has been working at University Park since March, and he expresses genuine excitement about being part of both Penn State and the State College community.

“Penn State is truly unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It’s a behemoth,” he says. “My father, when we told him we were heading this way, he said, ‘Oh man, that’s the big leagues!’ And I have that refrain in the back of my head in almost every room I enter.” 

Outside of work, Smith’s interests are eclectic. He enjoys golf and the occasional cigar. He’s a licensed pyrotechnician. He is also a trained opera singer and says he is looking forward to getting involved in the local arts community. 

Smith says he is particularly looking forward to experiencing a Penn State football season.

“I am excited to fall in love with the majesty of 110,000 people inside Beaver Stadium this fall; I’m very excited for the White Out game and all that’s to come with football,” he says, noting that he has found head coach James Franklin to be particularly welcoming already, along with the rest of the community.“State College has been wonderful so far. … I have felt overwhelmingly welcomed,” he says. “I can tell this is going to be a wonderful home.”

Karen Walker is a freelance writer in State College.