By Zack Sampson and Colin A. Young, News Staff
When Steven Kadish leaves bucolic western New Hampshire for a senior position at Northeastern this fall, the move to Boston will in some ways be a homecoming.
“I’m literally a Boston kid,” Kadish said in an interview with The News. “I was born in Boston, grew up in Framingham, so I was very aware of Northeastern when my friends and I were applying to colleges in the 70s.”
Kadish has worked as an administrator at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. since 2009, and he will fill the new senior vice president and chief operating officer position at Northeastern. The university announced his hiring on its website last week.
Explaining what drew him to Northeastern, Kadish mentioned the school’s experiential learning model and its expanding profile.
“To be able to watch Northeastern deliberately and aggressively grow and change to be a national presence — and increasingly an international presence — is one of the great higher ed stories,” he said.
Kadish heaped praise upon President Joseph Aoun – with whom he will work closely at Northeastern – describing his admiration for Aoun’s leadership abilities.
At Dartmouth, Kadish said, he focused on operational and financial tasks as executive vice president and chief financial officer. His job at Northeastern will deal less with finances, he said.
“I’ll be spending more time on real estate, facilities and helping President Aoun and the leadership with strategic planning and further innovations,” Kadish said.
As senior vice president and COO, Kadish will oversee facilities, human resources management and business services, according to a Northeastern statement. He will also be involved in the management of information services and will lead an office of real estate planning and development.
Though he did not know the details of his specific duties, Kadish said he expects to have some involvement in the development of Northeastern’s Institutional Master Plan (IMP), the guiding document for the university’s goals and physical plans over the next decade. The IMP is due to the city by the end of the year.
Kadish said he was approached about the position in the spring, though he did not remember exactly when. The new administrator did not know his exact start date, and he declined to identify the greatest problem he believes Northeastern faces right now, saying that he still has much to learn about the university.
Before he began at Dartmouth, Kadish was director of global health equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He also served as undersecretary of Massachusetts’ Executive Office of Health and Human Services.
Kadish studied political science and French as an undergraduate at Tufts University, he said, and he later earned a master’s degree in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
