During this year's State of the University, President Laura Bloomberg unveiled a transformational philanthropic gift, as well as celebrated our collective achievements and shared the strategic initiatives shaping our path ahead.

Over the past several years, CSU has gained significant momentum as Cleveland's public research university. This momentum has propelled us forward into expanding our reach in the city, deepening our partnerships with Ohio businesses and community organizations, and preparing graduates for a rapidly changing future.

Expanded Presence in Playhouse Square

CSU's presence in Playhouse Square — a thriving theatre district just next to campus — continues to grow through new partnerships, including Cleveland Play House and Ideastream Public Media. The University's physical presence is also increasing with the Galleries at East 13th Street.

A Commitment to Work-Based Learning

This fall, CSU launched the CSU Talent Hub, a new initiative to bolster, align, and amplify the entire University's collective efforts to pair students with invaluable experiences alongside the region's industry leaders.

A Sweeping Redesign of Business Curriculum

Alumnus Monte Ahuja, his wife, Usha, their family and the Ahuja Foundation have gifted CSU with $10 million to fund a significant overhaul of all academic programs in the College of Business. The college's graduates will be experienced in emerging technologies, including AI, to understand their global impact on business and the economy. In addition, students will participate in corporate partnership programs, and faculty will be recognized and incentivized for their excellence in teaching and research. Thanks to this historic gift, CSU plans to rename the college to the Ahuja College of Business and Entrepreneurship.

Oct. 14, 2026
Delivered by President Laura Bloomberg
(presented as prepared)

Thank you all for joining us for this year’s State of the University. This address is also being livestreamed on our website, and I want to acknowledge our viewers joining us online.

In the room with us today, we have CSU alumni and representatives from the CSU Board of Trustees and our Foundation Board. We’re also delighted to be joined by elected officials and community partners from across the state. Thank you for your support.

I want to recognize Governor Mike DeWine for joining us today. I have had the pleasure of meeting with Governor DeWine many times to discuss matters of importance to CSU and higher education in this state, and he has always been a strong supporter of our mission. Governor, thank you for being here.

To our Board of Trustees, I want to offer my gratitude for your continued guidance and partnership. I feel privileged to work with Tim Cosgrove, who serves as chair of our Board with careful thought and consideration. 

I’d also like to recognize our two student representatives to the Board — Abigail Blackburn and newly appointed trustee Nathaniel Taylor — who both work diligently to represent the entire student body.

We are also joined by many members of the Senior Leadership Team. We have made great strides as Cleveland’s University thanks to their leadership in service to our students. 

Last week we proudly and enthusiastically announced the Cleveland State Commitment.

As many of you have heard me say often: Opportunity and Excellence must be fundamentally linked, because why would you offer opportunity without also offering excellence? And with our mission so serve the region, I do not believe we can be excellent without creating opportunity for those who are eager to seek it. Starting next fall, incoming students from Ohio who graduated high school with a 3.0 GPA and whose families earn $125,000 or less can attend CSU with $0 tuition. 

The Cleveland State Commitment offers unprecedented opportunity to students ready and willing to put in the hard work of preparation. Today, I will highlight for you how Cleveland State University is also meeting this moment with a laser focus on delivering excellence. 

The exciting initiatives underway at CSU, all of which are structured around achieving the aspirational goals we set in our strategic plan, Cleveland State United, are programs that are preparing CSU for a rapidly evolving future, exploring new ways to support our students and the community, and expanding what is possible for learners in all our academic pathways. None of the achievements I will mention today are mine alone — and that’s the magic of it. They are the collective successes of so many people who are here with us today — our faculty and staff members, our students, and scores of partners in our community who have shared their creativity and perspective and who have invested their talent and time — in some cases, years of work — to make these ideas a reality. 

When you leave the Ballroom today, you will receive a gift for your engagement and your advocacy for Cleveland State. 

You will each receive a packet of notecards featuring the artwork of five of our students. 

I hope that you will make use of these cards. If you are grateful to a colleague for their contribution on a project; if you want to acknowledge someone who provided you with mentorship; if you want to recognize a good deed — remember that you have these cards and that your appreciation can bring someone else a lot of joy. 

I offer my thanks to the five student-artists whose work we have featured.

Over the course of the past several years, we have worked diligently as a public university to advance how we serve our students as the world changes around us. 

In 2023, we examined our approach to student life and support services. We assessed how we were engaging with students and where we did it best; we studied the shifting reality of mental health and wellbeing among young adults in a post-pandemic world. And then we used the insights we gleaned to create the Division of Student Belonging and Success, designed ensure a consistent and person-centered approach to connecting with students and meeting their needs in the areas of academic advising, mental health and social support, residential living on campus, and student engagement across clubs and organizations. The rationale is clear: Individuals who are known, supported, and cared about as full people with full lives are best able to achieve their full potential as students and scholars. 

We then brought our heads together to think through our academic offerings. We re-imagined our undergraduate core curriculum and created our new Inquiry Core, which embraces a student’s academic curiosity and encourages them to explore the topics that inspire them.

We also considered how to make it more feasible for first-year students to take academic risks and push themselves outside their scholarly comfort zone without fear of a failing grade holding them back. This focus led us to implement a No Record Policy, so that instead of a first-year student receiving a failing grade in a stretch course, they can receive a “No Record” designation that does not impact their GPA. 

And when our faculty heard from students who felt constrained because they were looking to earn a degree at the intersection of academic disciplines, our colleagues collaborated on degree programs across colleges to meet these needs. As a result, we became the first public university in Ohio to offer integrated undergraduate degrees. 

We now offer 17 of these degrees, and our students can bring two related fields together — like Mechanical and Electrical Engineering — or study how two disciplines can intersect and enhance one another — like Journalism and Criminology or Design and Psychology. During last year’s address, I spoke with student Angelica Catacutan, who is majoring in Design and Psychology. Angelica talked about how she had begun looking transferring from CSU in order to find the major she was looking for, until we announced our integrated degrees. 

Currently, we have over 150 students pursuing these integrated degrees, and the number is growing every day.

Everything we’ve been building, from our internal transformations to deepening our external partnerships, has been grounded in the three values and the three overarching priorities of Cleveland State United.

At this point in our history, shortly after the 60^th anniversary of our founding, we are creating momentum that drives us to create more opportunity for our students; inspires us to innovate on our student support services; and enables us to build new connections across our community.

Researcher and author Jim Collins refers to this as a “flywheel effect.” As he put it: “The flywheel is an underlying, compelling logic of momentum…there’s an inevitability built in. If you do A, you almost can’t help but do B.” 

Well, we have “done” A, B, C, D, E and F. And we won’t stop. The momentum just keeps building.

Cleveland State United has enabled internal operational momentum as well. With a strategic objective to initiate a technology transformation and improve the course scheduling, campus finance, hiring and human resource systems that our faculty, staff, and students rely on, we launched CSU Compass, a multiyear systems overhaul that is underway and on schedule. As our new systems come online, we will see smoother, more integrated and, where appropriate, AI-enabled internal processes that will positively impact all of us.

In Cleveland State United, we highlighted the importance of our community partnerships and how we, as a community of learning, can serve as a platform for discussion on important issues at the leading edge of innovation and creativity in society. One quick example: In just a week, we will host TEDxCleveland State University 2026, the only university-led TEDx event in Northeast Ohio. Next Friday, 12 speakers will take the stage in Waetjen Auditorium to explore the theme of “Untangling Wonder.”  We invite — and encourage — all of you to attend.

Our flywheel momentum continues…

Over the past several years, we have been cultivating a presence west of our downtown campus. Only a few blocks from where we are now is our Arts Campus situated in the heart of Playhouse Square. Our Arts Campus includes our School of Film and Media Arts, as well as our Theatre and Dance programs and our Visual Arts Department.

With a thriving theatre district as our next-door neighbor, how could we not place our students right in the middle of this creative environment? 

To make this area even more active and enriching for our students, we are developing a new art gallery on East 13^th Street, on the first floor of our Theatre and Arts Building: The Galleries at East 13^th Street, curated by CSU. 

We have nearly closed our fundraising goal — with only over $1 million left to go — before our grand opening in late fall of 2027.

Last year, we announced a new partnership with the state’s largest public media organization, Ideastream. 

With their headquarters in Playhouse Square, this partnership offers students access to cutting edge broadcasting and production learning opportunities just minutes from where we are now. Already, dozens of our communications, journalism and film students have worked alongside media professionals to pitch, produce, film, edit and deliver cutting edge stories accessible to over 3.6 million viewers and listeners in 22 counties. 

And then, just a few weeks ago, we announced a strategic alliance with Cleveland Play House, the country’s oldest regional theatre. For more than 110 years, this Tony Award-winning theatre has produced inspiring shows from a diverse range of artists that serve to entertain and educate.

CSU and Cleveland Play House have been in collaboration for 15 years already, and this new alliance expands how we will work together for the benefit of our students. I am proud to say that students in the performing arts will learn from a repertoire of on-stage talent. And this alliance benefits students in other areas of study, as well. Regional theatre operates thanks to a host of events managers, marketing teams, finance and business leaders, and a host of behind-the-scenes professionals — all of whom have years of experience to share with our students.

We are excited to welcome Rachel Fink as a new Executive-in-Residence at the University. Rachel is the CEO and Managing Director of Cleveland Play House, and she brings more than two decades of experience in managing nonprofit theatre across the country. By joining the University as an Executive-in-Residence, Rachel will help us explore and deepen opportunities for this alliance over the next year.

The value of work-based learning — like with Ideastream and Cleveland Play House — is unmistakable for our students. 

Likewise, the student demand for these opportunities is clear and growing. Students who have participated in a work-based learning experience have found their time to be well spent, and the relationships built during an internship can often lead to long-term employment. 

At CSU, our academic departments and the Office of Career Development and Exploration do a fantastic job of pairing students with employers, and we wanted to keep the flywheel momentum growing by developing a university-wide strategy to bolster, align, and amplify our collective efforts, which is why we launched the CSU Talent Hub this fall semester. With a mission to provide every undergraduate student at the University the opportunity to participate in a work-based or experiential learning pathway, the Talent Hub is led by two exceptional directors.

Janine Kaiser is our inaugural executive director. Janine joined CSU this summer, and she comes to us with over a decade of experience in managing workforce development and higher education projects.

And Dr. Michele Heath, assistant professor of management, is our faculty director for the Talent Hub. Prior to this role, Dr. Heath has already been involved in academic innovation at the University, and her teaching — appropriately enough — focuses on the value of experiential learning.

It’s my pleasure to welcome both Janine Kaiser and Michele Heath to the stage. We are also joined by Professor Kristina Milia from our School of Education and Counseling in the Levin College of Public Affairs and Education. Professor Milia has been actively engaged in the curricular development of the Talent Hub, as we will discuss in a moment.

(President Bloomberg and panelists engage in discussion on the CSU Talent Hub)

This summer, one of our colleges reached a significant anniversary. Fifteen years ago, in July of 2011, Cleveland State University received the largest gift in its history to date — $10 million to be used for scholarships and an endowed professorship in our College of Business. 

To commemorate this historic gift, the Board of Trustees voted to rename this college in honor of our generous benefactor, who is also an alumnus, a former trustee, and a former Board chair.

For 15 years, the Monte Ahuja College of Business has prepared students to lead with purpose. Its alumni have become community and corporate leaders. They’ve gained recognition from Crain’s Cleveland Business and Forbes for their business acumen and financial expertise. Thanks to the education they earned, our alumni have been able to forge their own paths, many becoming owners of businesses they designed themselves — many of which are located right here in Cleveland.

All of this has been happening in a college named after one of its own. Monte Ahuja graduated from our College of Business in 1975 with his MBA. Soon after, he founded Transtar Industries, which became a global leader in the distribution of transmission parts. Monte developed the idea behind Transtar — the business model which made him a success and a prominent figure in the business world — while he was still a student at CSU.

I am so thankful that Monte and his wonderful wife Usha — who taught mathematics here at CSU for several years — along with their entire family, have continued their support of CSU. Thanks to their generosity, they have made a college degree attainable to hundreds of students through their financial support. Our students are so proud to receive the title of “Ahuja Scholar” and know that their educations matter to the Ahujas.

In recognition of the generations of alumni and the many faculty members in the College of Business who have benefitted from their unparalleled generosity, we recently spoke with members of the Ahuja family, as well as their friends and a few of us at Cleveland State, about Monte and Usha. I’d like to take a moment to share with you some comments from those who know the Ahujas best and those of us who have so much gratitude for their philanthropy.

(Video plays)

For 15 years, the Ahuja family has supported our mission to equip our students with knowledge and future-ready skills. I am pleased to announce that Cleveland State University is the very proud recipient of another historic gift — an additional $10 million from the Ahuja Foundation and the Ahuja family — to support the College of Business. 

This gift will be allocated to areas of prime importance to today’s world of business and how we educate our students on the rapidly evolving technological and entrepreneurial realities that are reshaping our global corporate and economic environment. Students will participate in corporate partnership programs and invaluable hands-on experience. We will prepare our students to be at the forefront of AI innovation and its ethical application. 

In addition to supporting our students and a significant redesign of our business curriculum, the Ahujas will support and incentivize faculty excellence and innovation in the college. Our faculty will have the resources they need to pursue new areas of inquiry — knowledge that will, in turn, be passed on to our students. 

When I shared this news recently with Dr. Sebastian Brockhaus, associate professor of supply chain management and director of our MBA program, he was also excited about what this means for the college and his colleagues. 

As he put it: “This is an amazing vote of confidence and investment in our mission to make our students successful in their future careers. It allows us to build the capabilities we need to continue to change lives today, tomorrow, and for years to come.”

With this most recent gift, Monte and Usha are the donors with the largest lifetime giving in the history of Cleveland State University. 

We cannot express our gratitude enough — but we are going to try. When we received notice of this incredible gift, we wanted to do something that would reflect the Ahuja legacy of philanthropy and student support, while also celebrating Monte’s personal approach to business.

As an MBA student, Monte developed the business plan that would become Transtar. And like Monte, students in our College of Business are exploring their own ideas, putting them to the test, and reiterating until they find success.

Monte himself spoke on this perseverance that is needed for success. When speaking with Smart Business Magazine, he once said: “As you begin to think creatively about some idea or plan, whether you punch through it, crack it or climb it, it seems that, if you are a truly motivated entrepreneur, you will find a way to get through.”

It only seemed fitting that we honor Monte and the entire Ahuja family by reflecting this “can-do/get-it-done” spirit in a new name to accompany this renewed focus: the Ahuja College of Business and Entrepreneurship.

This name will be a signal to the region that our business programs are attracting world-class faculty, offering students world-class opportunities, and producing alumni prepared to lead with entrepreneurial thinking, innovative ideas, and the preparation to deliver on them. 

The Ahuja College of Business and Entrepreneurship will be the academic heart of Northeast Ohio for finance, economics, management, marketing, and administration. We are preparing our students to lead, to break through and to create their own success.

As you heard in the video, in addition to being a longtime supporter of Cleveland State University, Monte and Usha are supporters of so many organizations throughout Ohio. Governor DeWine is very familiar with the generosity and sincere care that the Ahujas have for Ohioans.

Since 2018, he has served as the 70^th Governor for the people of the great state of Ohio. He will soon conclude his second term as governor, but Mike DeWine has proudly spent decades in service of Ohioans. 

It is my pleasure to welcome the Governor to share some of his thoughts on this historic gift.

(Governor Mike DeWine delivers remarks)

Our momentum as a university — as Cleveland’s University — continues.

Transformational efforts like our strategic alliance with Cleveland Play House, the growth of our Talent Hub, the Cleveland State Commitment, and now the new Ahuja College of Business and Entrepreneurship underscore the values the drive everything we do: Collaborate with Community, Serve our Students, and Unleash the Creativity that is all around us.

The true impact of many of these efforts will be seen in the coming months and years as our momentum propels us ahead — providing students with more access to an exceptional education that shapes lives and the region. I am truly excited to see how these initiatives will evolve and the progress we will report on at this time next year. 

Thank you all for being a part of this momentum — and go Vikes!