Laura Bloomberg was busy last week.

Cleveland State University president started off by interviewing for a new job Monday. Bloomberg, born and raised in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, was one of three finalists in the University of Minnesota’s unusually public presidential search. Hundreds of viewers watched it all play out live on YouTube. 

Though Minnesota’s Board of Regents were impressed by her, she didn’t get the gig. It went to the University of Michigan’s Rebecca Cunningham instead.  

The next day, Bloomberg issued a statement to Cleveland State’s community vowing to stay put. By Wednesday, Bloomberg was back on Euclid Avenue, making her first public comments about the process at the university’s faculty senate meeting. 

She acknowledged folks could now have both good and bad opinions, going on to urge faculty members to think about how they encourage students to take risks. That framing and those students, she said, “were very much in my mind as I grappled with this very public process.”

Later, Bloomberg turned back to the busy agenda she and her university are facing. It includes waiting for accounting and consulting firm Ernst & Young to finish up their work, which includes identifying short-term savings. 

In September, the university’s board of trustees approved tapping into the university’s reserves for up to $11.5 million to balance its 2024 operating budget.

But, Bloomberg said Wednesday, that won’t happen again. Cleveland State’s board, she said, is pushing Cleveland State to try to close the gap in a fiscal year “without dipping again into reserves, which causes all of us to swallow hard. That is a big thing to do.”

“There will be no more dipping into reserves to close a budget deficit over two fiscal years,” she said. “We know that.”

As a public university, she said, Cleveland State and its board have a legal obligation to submit a balanced budget to the State of Ohio and its taxpayers.