As Ryan Lombardi starts the academic year at another university, he looks back at his time at OU
Bobcats might notice one notable face missing from campus this year.
Ryan Lombardi, Ohio University’s former vice president for Student Affairs, left OU in July for a similar position at the Ivy League halls of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
It wasn’t a move Lombardi planned. He thought he’d be in Athens for at least the rest of President Roderick McDavis’ time as president. However when a search firm asked Lombardi to apply for the position earlier this year, he couldn’t turn it down.
“It was an incredible hard decision to make, to leave, despite a great opportunity, despite so many perks to going to Cornell, it is very hard to leave OU and very hard to leave Athens,” he said in a sit-down interview with The Post in May. “This was an incredibly difficult decision for us as a family.”
Cornell’s VP spot is more broad and allows for him to do more, he said.
On top of all the great professional aspects, this was a great opportunity for Lombardi’s wife Kara and their young daughters Anna, 7, and Emily, 5, he said.
“The icing on the cake was that it’s an hour from where my wife grew up,” he said.
Kara grew up in Syracuse, New York, and her family still lives there.
The Lombardis never planned on moving back to upstate New York and that wasn’t the main reason Lombardi accepted the position, but he said, “to have this great professional opportunity, with all these things I was really excited about and then to say ‘oh by the way it will put the kids an hour away from one set of their grandparents’ will be good too.”
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Lombardi first came to OU from Duke University in 2008 as OU’s dean of students and became the VP in 2013 when his predecessor, Kent Smith, left.
Just a few of his accomplishments include combining career services and the leadership center, leading a taskforce on sexual assault in 2009 and retooling OU’s student health center — a much needed change.
“The service level quality in the student health center has gone up through the roof, whereas early in my tenure here it used to be one of the most complained about,” he said. “I’m not being sarcastic, when two, three calls a week of just some miserable experience that occurred over there to now being very, very strong.”
He said the service isn’t always perfect, but students are much happier now.
He also said he was a “behind the scenes mechanic” of the Margaret Boyd Scholars Program, which is modeled after a program at Duke.
But of all his accomplishments, he has one that stands above them all: his relationship with students.
“The fact that for seven years I’ve had this kind of mutual respect between I think myself and the student body, doesn’t mean all the students have always agreed with my decisions,” Lombardi said. “But I think in large part students knew that I was serving them to the best of my ability every single day.”
He said he remembers when he applied for the VP spot three years ago, a very passionate student wrote a letter to The Post asking Lombardi not to apply. The student said he didn’t trust anyone else to be OU’s dean of students.
“To me that really speaks to the level of investment in relationships I’ve had with students in my time here,” Lombardi said. “That’s what I’ve treasured the most and that’s what I’ll miss the most.”
He said he hoped his new position would be finalized before students left for the summer so he could tell students goodbye, but instead had to settle for an email.
“I literally sat on the stage at commencement with tears in my eyes because I knew this was it and no one else knew, but I did.”
Lombardi has loved working for OU students and he knows Bobcats are in good hands with Jenny Hall-Jones and the rest of the Student Affairs team, he said.
Hall-Jones, dean of students, has been the interim VP since July 1 and will hold both positions while a national search is done for Lombardi’s replacement.
The university hopes to have the position filled by the end of the year, said OU spokeswoman Katie Quaranta.
Hall-Jones is splitting her time between the dean of student’s office in Baker Center and the vice president’s office in Cutler Hall — something Hall-Jones called “surreal.”
“I feel like I’m sitting in Ryan’s office,” she said.
Hall-Jones said she has enjoyed her first few weeks as the interim vice president, but still has no plans to apply for the position.
Lombardi’s final message to students was simple: thank you.
“Thank you for letting me serve you,” he said. “Thank you for accepting me and kind of taking me in and helping this be such a fun thing to do everyday.”
@MariaDeVito13
