The University of Rhode Island announced that Abby Benson will be the new vice president of administration and finance after serving as interim at the position since May 2023.
Growing up in Newport, Rhode Island, Benson has had strong ties to the state for her whole life. Her family has been in the state for many generations, she said.
After leaving to get her Bachelor of Science in geology from Yale University in 1996, she had not been back to Rhode Island for a while, she said.
“I’ve been out of the state for most of my career,” Benson said. “I’ve been bouncing around a lot of the time.”
In the year 2000, after graduating college, she worked multiple jobs in environmental consulting. Benson worked in jobs from Boston to Florida, and decided to join the United States Coast Guard.
The Coast Guard changed after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Benson said. After planning to only stay in the Coast Guard for a few more years, she stayed for another decade until 2012. In 2009, she moved from Boston to Washington D.C.
Lessons she learned from the Coast Guard translate directly to her new position, Benson said. With being stationed in Boston, where two of the planes involved in the September 11 attacks took off from, there was a lot riding on the security of the ports in the surrounding areas.
“I got to help create a port security team and work with the FBI, and all of the law enforcement agencies,” she said. “I was young so I was sort of thrown into all of this.”
No one had experienced anything like that before, so even the highest ranking officers were trying to figure out the best ways to go about security, Benson said. She learned in that situation that the most experienced and high up officers did not know everything, they were just great leaders who were able to work through difficult situations.
“It’s about being thoughtful, asking the right questions, taking care of people and being a leader even if you don’t really know how to get there,” she said.
The Coast Guard sent her to graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003 for free. To pay back the time she was in school, she went to Washington D.C. to do policy work for the Coast Guard.
She got swept up in the Washington D.C. lifestyle, learning more about policies and regulations and ultimately deciding to stay. After learning about the MIT office in D.C. from a colleague, she became their lobbyist, lobbying for financial aid and support for them.
A few years later, she decided to move to Colorado, and work for the University of Colorado school system in 2012. She lobbied for research funding for them and other educational issues. During her time there, she worked for all four of the branches of CU and later took a job at the Boulder campus in the research office. She did work with various corporations matching them with various researchers at the University.
One of her mentors at CU was the campus chief operating officer, who asked her to be the chief of staff at the University. She was later promoted to the deputy chief operating officer soon before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Just like every other university, we went virtual over the course of two weeks,” she said.
At the time, she was seven and a half months pregnant, Benson said. Navigating safety for not only the campus and students, but also for herself and her family was her biggest goal.
Having a baby, and going through the pandemic made her realize that she wanted to come back to the east coast to be closer to her family, Benson said.
“I kept hearing about how great URI was,” she said. “My mom, nephews, nieces and father have all gone to URI.”
She saw that the new University President Marc Parlange had put out a job opening for chief of staff and quickly applied. She got accepted to the position and moved back to Rhode Island.
A year and a half later the serving vice president of administration and finance retired, and Parlange asked her to serve as interim vice president. When they began searching for someone to be the permanent vice president, she applied and was accepted.
The administration has developed a plan called Focus URI, with four pillars dedicated to the future of the University. The fourth pillar, Powering the University of the Future, dedicated to infrastructure is the one that she hopes to work towards as soon as possible.
“Because of a historic lack of funding from the state we have not been able to invest in the physical and digital systems as much,” Benson said.
She wants to focus on the maintenance of older buildings and making sure that the digital landscape of the University is keeping up with their mission goals.
The state has invested into renovating the Bay Campus, and Fine Arts Center, which already has renovations underway.
“Those are all multi-year and multimillion dollar projects so I’m really focused on making sure we can execute those properly,” she said.
Benson hopes that students will feel seen and be willing to speak up about their problems. She plans on doing whatever she can for the betterment of the University, and with her new position, is excited to see what her and the rest of administration can accomplish.