Bonnie Yegidis, UT system vice president for academic affairs and student success, spent 18 years at the University of South Florida. Now she’s going back.
It was announced last week that Yegidis was resigning her position to become professor and director of the School of Social Work at USF.
Meanwhile, Katie High, who previously filled the same position two years ago before Yegidis was appointed, will fill the position once again in the interim.
Yegidis’ last day in the role will be July 31, and High’s first day will be Aug. 1.
Yegidis, who got her doctorate in measurement research and evaluation at USF, said she was called sometime in late spring and invited to apply for the position.
“I was thrilled to get the opportunity, and I’m happy to be able to lead the School of Social Work,” she said.
It’s a School of Social Work that Yegidis is a founding faculty member of. She helped build the master’s program in social work and was there during the development of the school in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
Yegidis grew up in upstate New York, near the Catskills Mountains area. And it was this life that led her to find West Virginia, where she got her master’s degree in social work, and Tennessee, where she served in higher-education administration since 2008, attractive.
“That’s one of the things I loved about Tennessee and West Virginia, frankly, was the mountains,” she said.
It was never a question for Yegidis about what she would do for a career. When she was in junior high, she watched a television program that featured a social worker, a community organizer in the South Bronx, and it left a big impression. She majored in social work and then got a job in social work right out of college.
“I knew my whole life from the time I was 12,” she said. “I wanted to be a social worker and help people and communities to thrive and also ensure that public policy is responsive to what people need.”
After her years at USF, she left to become dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Georgia for nine years, and it was here where she was first introduced to UT properly — predictably, it was through football.
“One of my most vivid recollections at the University of Georgia was going to a Georgia-Tennessee football game,” she said. “It was my second year as dean. ... It was fun.”
She said she was introduced firsthand to the power of football rivalries there, and her past at UGA was the source of many jokes when she went to UT.
After Georgia, she served as provost and vice president for academic affairs at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, Fla. Then she took the position at UT in 2008.
Yegidis said the achievement she was most proud of accomplishing at UT was working to lead a state-wide initiative to make sure students had the ability to transfer into UT and across the system without losing academic credit.
She also worked with nursing to allow UT system and Tennessee Board of Regents students access to becoming nursing students.
And she worked on making accountability measures more transparent, so stakeholders would know clearly what higher education does and how UT is measured.
But the most critical initiative in Yegidis’ mind is one that is still ongoing — improving graduation rates at the state level and the university level.
“We have to be able to get students through,” she said. “We have to develop schedules that work with students. We have to ensure there is access to coursework online. We have to provide students with support services for students who are at risk and generally make an all-out effort to graduate the students we admit.”
She said there’s a lot she’ll miss about UT.
“I think the people, the staff and the students at UT are so outstanding,” she said. “I will miss the contact with students and with staff and with faculty leaders. I think UT has incredible faculty and good leadership.”

Returning to the role
High is returning to a role she served just two years ago, but working in different positions in academic affairs is nothing new to the administrative veteran.
“Actually I’ve been in the academic affairs office for 23 years, so if there’s been a position in that office, I’ve held it,” High said.
From a northwest corner of Ohio, High grew up in farm country, where all you needed to know was a letter and a number and you could place someone’s geographic location.
“The roads going east and west were called A, B, C, D, and the roads going north and south were called 1, 2, 3, 4,” she said. “... So someone who lived in G7, you knew exactly where they lived.”
She called it “the kind of town where if something happens to you, everyone pitches in to help.” Perhaps this was a precursor to a career in higher education.
She earned her bachelor’s degree in American literature and master’s degree in teaching at Miami University in Ohio and taught public school in Knoxville and Clinton for nine years.
She taught sixth grade but found it not as rewarding as the time she spent in Clinton teaching first grade.
“The very best thing about teaching first grade is that, if there’s a day, usually in October, where 95 percent of the class has a light bulb go off, and they figure out how to decode the letters, and they learn to read that day,” she said. “Maybe when a baby takes his first steps, it’s that exciting. But when a little kid learns how to read, that’s the most gratifying thing for a teacher that I can imagine.”
During this time, she went to get her Ph.D at UT, with the idea of returning as a principal or at least to the elementary school.
But after just one month on the UT campus, she fell in love with the atmosphere and did not want to leave. So she earned her doctorate, all the while serving as a graduate assistant in the system vice president’s office, and her career in higher education took off from there.
She worked at UT from 1983-2001, serving various positions and working on various projects, including director of licensing, designing the Leadership Institute, starting the Tennessee Governor’s Academy and revising high-school credit requirements for college enrollment.
At UT-Martin, where she served from 2001-2005, she started that campus’ LEAD Academy, tore down old residence halls from the ‘60s to make way for more apartment-style housing and got a new student recreation center.
High said, as part of her role at UT, she needs to focus on the entirety of the UT system and all its moving parts.
“The goal of this office is to do everything they can to encourage and support all those institutes as they reach their goals,” High said. “Knoxville’s trying to be a top 25. Martin and Chattanooga are also developing specific goals that they increase in their stature among their peers. The Medical Center is doing similar kinds of things.
“My expectations are to see all those pieces come together so that, as a system, we’re even more vibrant and more robust and more productive and more well-received than we are now, and you can always strive for improvement,” she said.