During her tenure as Vice Chancellor, Dr. Short has led the implementation of Defining Our Future initiatives including reducing the credit hours to the degree, adopting a common calendar, reviewing and eliminating low producing programs, developing a lower division general education core that is fully transferable, removing remedial education from the universities to the community colleges, and implementing online degrees to meet statewide needs including the master of science in nursing and the masters in education degrees through the Regents Online Degree Program. In addition, Dr. Short has established the Regents Academic Leadership Institute to provide leadership development opportunities for department chairs and unit heads. She also introduced and implemented the Academic Audit quality process within the Board of Regents institutions. Board of Regents community colleges are the only community colleges in the US involved in the Academic Audit. Dr. Short's leadership with the academic audit has also been recognized by the Australian Universities Quality Agency through her selection as an auditor for its Academic Audit program. Her vision for establishing local P-16 Councils has led to a major effort statewide to improve education thorough partnerships among key players in communities in Tennessee and the redesign of teacher education programs through the statewide Teaching Quality Initiaitve. Dr. Short led the Board of Regents involvement in Tennessee EPSCoR and co-chaired the committee that wrote the document, Commission Report: OneTenn – A 21st Century Cyber-Instrastructure for Tennessee. Dr. Short serves on the Advisory Board of Cumberland Emerging Technologies, a joint initiative among Cumberland Pharmaceuticals, Vanderbilt University, and the Tennessee Technology Development Center. In addition, she recently was elected to the Board of Directors of the National Consortium for Continuous Improvement. In 2006, she was honored nationally by The Chair Academy as an Outstanding Leader and in 2008 with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Regional Council on Educational Administration. Through her leadership, the Tennessee Board of Regents has been honored with the Leveraging Award-Honorable Mention from the National Consortium for Continuous Improvement and as the System of the Year by the Washington Center Internship Program.

Prior to coming to the Board of Regents, Dr. Short served as Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs for the University of Missouri System. While at Missouri, she provided leadership to initiate the University of Missouri New Faculty Teaching Scholars Program, the Campus Mediation Service, the University of Missouri Consortium for Educational Policy Analysis, and the Statewide Ed.D. in Educational Leadership-- a collaborative among the University of Missouri-Columbia and five other Missouri universities. She co-chaired the Missouri Statewide Articulation and Transfer Conference and helped start the UM President’s Academic Leadership Institute—a system-wide initiative to provide leadership training for department chairs. She also served as State Coordinator for Missouri K-16.

Dr. Short was a tenured professor and former Department Chair in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Missouri-Columbia. From 1992-1995, she was program chair and associate professor in educational administration at The Pennsylvania State University and from 1987-1992, Short was associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Educational Leadership, Foundations, and Technology at Auburn University. She has held tenure at the University of Missouri-Columbia, The Pennsylvania State University, and Auburn University. She currently is a tenured professor at Tennessee State University and is an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She also taught and held administrative positions in the North Carolina public schools including the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction.

Dr. Short received her Ph.D. in Administration and Supervision in the Department of Organizational Development and Institutional Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1983. Her areas of emphasis included organizational leadership/management and organizational change. A nationally recognized scholar and researcher in the field of educational administration, Dr. Short was chosen as the recipient of the 1993 Jack A. Culbertson Award, given nationally by the University Council for Educational Administration to the outstanding professor of educational administration who, within the first ten years in the professorship, made distinguished contributions in research.

She has published over 85 scholarly articles and 16 books, book chapters, monographs, and technical reports. She has also made over 120 national and international scholarly presentations. Short has served as editor of one of the top refereed journals in educational administration and on the editorial board of several others. She has mentored and graduated 22 doctoral students some of whom are professors in academe. Short has also won three teaching awards from the University of Missouri-Columbia. She has served as a consultant to numerous universities across the nation. Short has been president of the National Council of Professors of Educational Administration, the Southern Regional Council on Education Administration and the University Council for Educational Administration, a consortium of 80 research universities in the US and Canada that prepare educational leaders and served as a member of the Washington-based National Policy Board for Educational Administration. She conducts leadership training nationally.