UK plans to fill administrative position created for Mitch Barnhart after he declined
Mitch Barnhart may no longer be assuming the UK administrative position created for him upon his retirement as athletic director, but the school still plans to fill the job.
“It was and will be a significant role,” Jay Blanton, UK’s executive vice president for university relations, said after Tuesday’s Champions Blue LLC board of governors meeting. “I think Mitch believed that he was becoming a distraction, and that he did not want to see that initiative suffer.”
When Barnhart announced in early March he would retire after 24 years as UK’s athletic director in June, the school announced he would transition to a role as executive in residence for a new Sport and Workforce Initiative on July 1. The university provided few details about what that job would entail, and Barnhart’s $950,000 salary for the position was met with intense criticism from some circles.
Beshear joined the group of critics last week, issuing a statement about how he was “losing confidence and growing increasingly concerned with the management and decision-making” at UK. He pointed to Barnhart’s new job and the appointment of federal judge Gregory Van Tatenhove as the new dean of UK’s law school as his reasons for concern.
Two days later, Barnhart announced he would no longer transition to the new role.
“He didn’t want to see UK Athletics suffer,” Blanton said. “He didn’t want to see the university continue to be subject to that kind of criticism, so as he so often has done, he thinks about the university first.”
Blanton reiterated that the decision to retire as athletic director and step away from the workforce initiative job were Barnhart’s alone. The school is still working through the terms of any financial settlement owed Barnhart.
For the first time since Champions Blue was created to manage the athletic department last year, Barnhart was not present for one of the LLC’s board of governor’s meetings Tuesday. The athletic director serves as a non-voting member of the board.
Blanton emphasized the workforce initiative remains a priority for the university moving forward. The goal is to better help prepare students for jobs in areas of economic growth. Sports was the first area of focus, but others will be added, including healthcare.
UK president Eli Capilouto did not include any updates on the initiative in his address to the university Board of Trustees last week, though. Blanton said more information can be expected closer to the start of the 2026-27 academic year and acknowledged the lack of information about the initiative could have contributed to the criticism of Barnhart’s appointment.
“We got to learn from that and do better,” he said. “We should have thought about that maybe a little bit more: ‘Hey, what’s the pacing and the sequence of this so that it gets off to the right start?’ I think that’s something we can learn from and do better from.”