Syracuse, N.Y. — Syracuse University has hired Brett Padgett as the school’s new chief financial officer, the school announced.
He replaces Amir Rahnamay-Azar, who stepped down last September. The role had been handled on an interim basis by Gwenn Judge.
Padgett comes to Syracuse from the University of Chicago, where he was the associate vice president for finance. He also spent a year at Chicago as an interim vice president and chief financial officer.
At Chicago, Padgett was tasked with developing a five-year financial forecast for the school, engaged in campus land-use and planning and managed the school’s banking relationships.
Prior to his work with the university, Padgett was an investment banker for more than two decades, working for Citigroup and JP Morgan/Banc One Capital Markets. He served in the U.S. Navy as a lieutenant in Special Operations.
“Brett is an outstanding leader with an impressive depth and breadth of experience in finance administration,” Syracuse chancellor Kent Syverud said in a statement from the school. “His deep understanding of fiscal management in higher education, his track record of success aligning resources with strategic priorities and his military service will serve Syracuse University well in fulfilling its mission and achieving ambitious goals in the coming years. I am looking forward to welcoming him to the Orange community.”
He takes over at Syracuse at an interesting time for higher education, with the industry in the midst of an enrollment drop-off due to the pandemic and an expected future drop because of a declining birth rate in the United States.
While those are concerning factors across the country, Syracuse received a record number of first-year applications in each of the past two years.
Syracuse is also in the midst of determining what to do with its South Campus. In developing a campus framework during previous years, the school expressed a desire to move students off South Campus and into the “campus core” in the future to create a more concentrated university.
Padgett earned his Master’s Degree in business administration from the University of Notre Dame and a bachelor’s in aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.
The chief financial officer is generally one of the school’s highest-compensated individuals, regularly joining the chancellor, vice chancellor and key athletic department officials.
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Source: syracuse.com
