Senior vice president for administration will leave executive offices May 31

Papers were scattered across David Creamer’s conference table.

“Excuse the mess,” said the outgoing senior vice president of administration. “We’re kind of boxing up and cleaning up things.”

Creamer will end his 19-year tenure at Kent State May 31 in exchange for a position as senior vice president of finance at Miami University.

Until then, work doesn’t stop.

“Everybody’s been trying to get some things completed that involve me,” Creamer said. “(My assistant’s) been having a nightmare trying to figure out how to squeeze everybody in.”

Shelley Ingraham, Creamer’s assistant, said she has been accommodating visitors for both business and well-wishing.

“I’m not surprised by the amount of people coming to say goodbye,” Ingraham said, crediting the admiration Creamer has earned at Kent State.

Creamer has been working on the Responsibility Center Management budget model which will give more financial control to individual colleges, a downtown development plan and various construction projects. He said he’ll be leaving before he sees them completed.

“There are a lot of projects that are at some point of incompletion,” Creamer said. “Preferably I want to conclude them. If I can’t conclude them I’m going to try to leave good documentation so somebody else can.”

On top of finishing work here, Creamer has been getting himself comfortable at Miami’s campus in Oxford.

“Over the past two months, I’ve probably spent about five days there,” he said. “I’ve been helping them get to where they’re trying to get with their new budget next year. I’m trying to get a sense of projects and priorities.”

All the preparation and valediction has made his summer vacation nothing of the sort. But Creamer said he’s used to being busy.

“Someone said something about them taking a couple weeks of vacation off, and I just kind of laughed,” he said. “What people would truly consider vacation, where I didn’t take the days to do some occupational activity, I think the last one I took was about five years ago, and I think it was about three days.”

For Creamer, the associated workload isn’t the trouble of leaving – it’s the leaving itself.

“The hard part of leaving is always the relationships that you’ve established,” he said. “It’s always hard leaving people you’ve worked with for a very long time.”

Even so, Creamer will welcome the change of scenery.

“There’s kind of an excitement of doing something new,” he said.

Contact principal reporter Ben Wolford at [email protected].