Shantay Bolton, former executive vice president and chief business officer at Georgia Institute of Technology, will be Columbia’s new president and CEO on July 1.
Bolton is the first woman in nearly 90 years and the first woman of color to lead the college, which is now a Hispanic-Serving Institution. Columbia’s student body is half BIPOC.
Board of Trustees Chair John H. Holmes made the announcement in a campuswide email on Monday, March 17.
In a LinkedIn post, Bolton said it was her 45th birthday. She did not disclose her new position at Columbia. She wrote, “This journey has been filled with blessings, bold moves, and beautiful transitions, and through it all, one thing remains constant: I am the author of my story. The pen never left my hand. The edits? Mine to make. The plot twists? Designed to refine, not define.”
Bolton was the executive vice president and chief business officer at Georgia Tech from 2023 until she stepped down in early March. She will take over at Columbia on July 1 from interim President and CEO Jerry Tarrer who served in the role after former President and CEO Kwang-Wu Kim left last summer after 13 years.
A presidential search for Kim’s replacement has been underway since the summer.
In his email, Holmes said Bolton “impressed the panel with her vision, poise, expertise and approachability.”
She comes at a time when Columbia is facing a $17 million deficit and declining enrollment, staff and faculty layoffs and an historic overhaul of academic programs that merged or eliminated nearly half of the school’s majors. Like all colleges and universities, Columbia is also facing threats to its DEI programs under the Trump administration.
Georgia Tech just announced that it would stop its DEI-related programs because of the Trump administration’s federal directives, the student newspaper, the Technique, reported.
In early March, Georgia state lawmakers failed to pass a bill that would also have cut state funding or state-administered federal funding for public schools or universities with DEI programs.
Bolton, a part-time faculty member in Georgia Tech’s business school, holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree in counseling psychology from Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University. She also has a doctorate in organizational psychology from Walden University and a master’s degree in corporate business from Florida International University, according to her LinkedIn profile and Georgia Tech biography.
She has held multiple leadership roles in higher education, including executive vice chancellor and chief administrative officer at Washington University in St. Louis, vice president and deputy chief operating officer at Tulane University and vice president at Tuskegee University, an HBCU.
“President-designate Bolton is uniquely suited to help our campus community in these efforts,” Holmes wrote. “She has excelled in high-level administrative positions and taught in various settings, inclusive of an exemplary record as a bridge-builder on campus and with the broader business and civic community.”
This is a developing story.
Copy edited by Matt Brady
