An Unconventional Chancellor Keeps His Cool 

This story is published in partnership with CityView.

The Sandhills summer put a sheen on the forehead of Fayetteville State University Chancellor Darrell T. Allison on an early July morning. Despite the stifling temperature and humidity, Allison kept his blazer buttoned as he shook hands and greeted construction workers, politicians, trustees, and students. 

They were gathering to celebrate a new dorm being built on East Campus. The final girder—painted Bronco-blue rather than the dull gray of the other beams in the steel structure, and signed by dozens of those in attendance—lay across wooden sawhorses, waiting for the crane to lift it into place four stories up.

The new residence hall is a prominent example of how Allison, 52, is changing FSU. The historically Black university was founded in 1867 and is the second-oldest school in the University of North Carolina system. This fall, it enrolled more than 7,100 students.

Most in the crowd clung to the shade from the Willis B. McLeod Hall next door as the ceremony got underway. But Allison remained in the sunlight, on the patchy scruff of grass and sandy soil in front of the steel framework of the future residence hall.

“Well, good morning! Since you all braved the hot weather, I’ll stand—I’ll take the heat,” he told the crowd. 

The crowd chuckled. “Get used to that!” a woman called out.

“Get used to that. I hear you,” Allison replied, smiling. “I hear you.”

If Allison isn’t used to taking heat by now, he should at least have a tolerance for it. Controversy has blanketed him since before he assumed office in March 2021.

At that time, critics dismissed him as a political appointee with no academic qualifications. They alleged he was chosen in a corrupted selection process and pushed ahead of better-qualified candidates.

More recently, faculty clashed with his administration over a proposed (and then canceled) cut to summer school pay, and on plans to increase the professors’ teaching load. In May, an audit reported the FSU communications office had mishandled or misspent nearly $700,000.

As the fall 2024 semester got underway, some faculty questioned the growing number of highly compensated administrator positions while their programs went under-supported.

But three-and-a-half years into his tenure at FSU, Allison has racked up evidence of success, including more than $210 million in capital improvements, gains in enrollment, retention, and summer internships, and a doubling of research grants.

Even if critics were right about Allison skipping the traditional process of vetting and choosing a chancellorship, will the FSU community say he was ultimately the right choice?

A Nontraditional Path  

The first public hint that Allison would become the 12th chancellor surfaced in September 2020.

The previous chancellor, James Anderson, retired in 2019. A search for his replacement had already been underway for over a year when Allison suddenly resigned from the UNC Board of Governors with three years left in his term.

T. Greg Doucette, a prominent gadfly of UNC-Chapel Hill and the UNC System, publicly predicted that Allison would be appointed chancellor of one of the system’s five HBCUs, specifically noting the vacancy at Fayetteville State.

Doucette suggested an appointment would be Allison’s reward for participating in the system’s controversial attempt to pay $2.5 million to the Sons of Confederate Veterans organization to take “Silent Sam,” the Confederate statue protestors toppled in 2018.

Allison denied the two had anything to do with each other: “There was no such connection whatsoever.”

Allison’s detractors pointed out that his mother-in-law, Brenda Timberlake, served on the Fayetteville State Board of Trustees but resigned the day before the UNC Board of Governors voted to appoint him. Timberlake told The Fayetteville Observer she had no part in Allison’s hiring.

His appointment generated swift condemnation. A previous chancellor, Willis McLeod, questioned the selection process. The FSU Faculty Senate called for the Board of Governors to cancel the offer to hire him, and both students and alumni marched in protest.

In April 2022, the American Association of University Professors issued a 37-page report asserting the Republican-controlled legislature had pushed UNC System leadership and campuses away from academic freedom and in favor of central control and ideological loyalty. The report portrayed Allison’s hiring at FSU as an example.

Still, prominent leaders stood behind Allison, including Democratic state Rep. Marvin Lucas of Spring Lake and Dr. Algeania Warren Freeman, former president at Wilberforce University, Livingstone College, and Martin University.

“Darrell is one of us,” wrote Lucas and Freeman in a column in The Fayetteville Observer. “He is a product of a fellow HBCU institution. But most of all, Darrell is a friend-maker who can bring much-needed resources, both human and financial, to our university.”

Beyond the political questions, it’s easy to see why Allison’s critics were unhappy with his hiring. In the UNC system, a chancellor is the highest-ranked leader on campus, the equivalent of a president at other schools. Traditionally, that person has a background in higher education, with experience in the classroom, research, or as a university administrator.

Allison didn’t fit that mold. A lawyer by training, he’s never been a university administrator or even a college lecturer. After graduating from UNC Law School in 1999, Allison spent most of his career as a lobbyist in the K-12 school-choice movement, which advocates for charter schools, homeschooling, and taxpayer-funded vouchers to defray the cost of private school tuition. In 2005, he was hired as the first president of Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina, and in 2018 joined the American Federation for Children, a national school-choice advocacy organization.

Allison’s only higher education experience beyond serving on the Board of Governors came from serving on the Board of Trustees at North Carolina Central University from 2015 to 2017, where he’d earned his undergraduate degree.

While trustees and governors provide oversight, they aren’t involved in day-to-day operations of a campus. But across the country, the role of chancellors and presidents is being reshaped.

A 2018 study from Virginia Commonwealth University found it was becoming common for people with non-academic backgrounds to lead colleges and universities. They found that 40.5 percent of university presidents “have never held a tenure track eligible or tenured position in the academy.” 

Other North Carolina colleges and universities are a part of this trend.

East Carolina University’s interim chancellor in 2019 was Dan Gerlach, the former head of the nonprofit Golden Leaf Foundation. Barber-Scotia College, near Charlotte, hired former Spring Lake mayor Chris Rey in 2023, who had served in the Army and the Army National Guard. UNC-Chapel Hill’s new chancellor, Lee Roberts, comes from the finance and investment world. (Both Roberts and Gerlach also were budget advisors to North Carolina governors.)

Chancellors were once expected to be academic leaders, said Holden Thorp, a Fayetteville native who served as UNC-Chapel Hill’s chancellor from 2008 to 2013. They were “someone who could speak for the faculty and speak for the academic objectives of the university in a way that draws from their own experience.”

In today’s climate, “it’s more a top-down bureaucracy,” said Thorp, from the UNC System president and Board of Governors to the 16 university campuses.

“There are people who believe that this is the most fair way to do this, so that the administration doesn’t become a voice that could be either in resonance or in opposition to other voices on the campus,” he said. “But I think you sap a lot of the moral authority of the university when you do that.”

Is He Delivering?

In an email to CityView and The Assembly, UNC System President Peter Hans addressed challenges he saw at FSU, his rationale for picking Allison, and thoughts on his performance so far.

Allison “was one of five forwarded to me by the FSU Board of Trustees,” Hans wrote. “I deliberated on all the candidates. I recommended Chancellor Allison because I knew he would be a new type of leader for Fayetteville State—someone who is dynamic and someone who would waste no time building partnerships, focusing on student success, and reversing a long history of underinvestment in the institution.”

Hans said he wanted FSU’s new leader to boost enrollment, improve academic performance, and form strong partnerships with Fort Liberty. Allison, he said, “has done all these things, and Fayetteville State is stronger today because of it.”

Hans also described the school as in “dire need of capital improvements,” given that it is the second-oldest state-supported university in North Carolina and there has been historic underinvestment in HBCUs. The General Assembly made only eight allocations to Fayetteville State for capital projects between 1990 and 2020, totalling $36.4 million.

Since November 2021, the school has had more than $125 million earmarked for renovations and new construction.

“His staunch advocacy has helped win over legislators who have recognized the value of new and renovated facilities to serve students,” Hans wrote.

Hans took issues like faculty complaints in stride: “Sometimes leaders’ actions aren’t popular with certain constituencies, but that doesn’t mean that the decisions are without merit.”

The audit findings, he allowed, were distressing, disturbing, and “simply unacceptable … But the chancellor took action to turn things around, implementing stronger financial controls, better monitoring, and campuswide training for employees.”

Elmer Floyd, an FSU graduate and Democratic former state legislator, said he’d observed Allison in his previous role and found him to be an effective lobbyist who knew how to get support from key leaders. Both the personal and political connections Allison built at the General Assembly and the UNC System have become an asset for FSU.

Allison, he said, is “a person with a relationship in Raleigh that can deliver, and bring resources to Fayetteville State. And that’s what Fayetteville State needed.”

If for nothing else, the Allison era will be known for its new and renovated buildings. The university has said projects underway or completed as of this year total more than $210 million. 

The university’s ambitious 10-year campus master plan includes the new $50 million residence hall the university celebrated in July, a $12 million health and wellness center, a $10 million parking deck, $10 million in renovations for the H.L. Cook building, a new $69.3 million College of Education building, and $55 million in other renovations.

A Plan for Growth 

Shortly after Allison took office, he said, he asked the staff for statistics on the students’ academic performance. Year-to-year student retention rates and four-year graduation rates were far too low, he said.

“I didn’t know how much of a challenge it was until I saw that data report” in April after he arrived in March, he said. “I knew that we had to, that we were going to turn this ship. We were going to have to come up with something pretty innovative.”

The school has established and expanded a number of programs to enroll more students and prevent them from dropping out for financial reasons. That includes joining the N.C. Promise tuition program, which sets tuition at $500 per semester for in-state undergraduate students, and beginning to offer free tuition to military-connected students. This semester, 2,288 students, or 32 percent of the total enrollment, are military-connected.

This year, FSU added 12 more community colleges to its Bronco Benefit transfer program, bringing the total to 16. Students in this program can transfer credits from their community college associate degrees to FSU to complete a bachelor’s.

The school also took on other hurdles to academic success. In 2021, it began offering free summer school to undergraduates to help them stay on track to graduate in four years—and summer enrollment reached a record high of 4,463 this year, the university announced in June, and about half of them paid no tuition.

Data from the UNC System and FSU suggests that the programs are working. Total enrollment this fall semester is at a record high of 7,107, which is 5.7 percent above fall 2020.

FSU’s freshman-to-sophomore-year retention rate had been trending downward, then dropped significantly during the pandemic. It has rebounded since Allison took office; the number of freshmen who returned increased from 62.1 percent in fall 2021 to 75.2 percent this year.

Four-year graduation rates have also been a struggle. FSU’s rate for students who enrolled in fall 2017 and graduated in spring 2021 was 20.7 percent; the UNC System average was 51.9 percent. 

This year will be the first test of Allison’s effect on four-year graduation rates, as the students who arrived in fall 2021 head into their senior year. He is optimistic. “I believe that in the years to come, we’re going to see some real movement in the right direction,” he said. “We’re very laser-focused on systemic culture change.” 

Allison also highlights the increase in research dollars flowing through the school. Grant money awarded to FSU has more than doubled, from $15.95 million in the 2021–22 academic year to $33.14 million last school year, according to a June presentation to the FSU Board of Trustees.

He told the professors at a town hall meeting in April that the school had been doing too little to support its research mission, and needed to work harder to increase the “deep buckets of funds, so that our faculty, who are also researchers, who also have ingenious ideas, can have not only resources … but time to be able to do such research.”

‘Let Me Show You What I Can Do’

The faculty were slow to warm up to the new leadership. 

Three and half years ago, the FSU Faculty Senate passed a resolution that said Allison shouldn’t be hired: 26 voted “aye,” three voted “nay,” and two abstained, according to records provided by Faculty Senate Chair Zahra Shekarkhar, an associate professor of criminal justice.

And some faculty interviewed this summer cited the negative state auditor report and ongoing dissatisfaction with campus administrators. Getting anyone to be critical on record for this article, however, proved difficult.

But this past spring when the Faculty Senate issued a no-confidence vote against Provost Monica Terrell Leach over concerns about teaching workload and summer school pay, the resolution notably did not include Allison. 

The chancellor responded to the vote by holding a town hall meeting with the faculty. A recording of the meeting indicates it was sometimes contentious, but Allison stayed and took their questions. He promised faculty would have more input on policy in the future. “I know we’ve got work to do,” Allison said. “OK? I promise you, I am sure, I am confident: We’re going to work all these things out.”

Allison has reached out to the professors in other ways, Shekarkhar said.

“I would personally like to thank Chancellor Allison for his commitment to enhancing the relationship with faculty, such as visiting our classrooms and meeting regularly with members of the Faculty Senate. These efforts are very much appreciated,” she wrote via text message.

Avis Hatcher-Puzzo, an associate professor of dance and theater who served on the chancellor search committee in 2020, said other candidates the committee interviewed focused on their background in higher education. That gave the faculty a certain level of comfort, she said.

But Allison spoke about something different: “Potential.”

Faculty were more skeptical of that. “It’s not like we weren’t hearing him,” she said. “It’s: We didn’t know how this was going to work.”

The pandemic was also still well underway, and many faculty were just holding on by a thread, Hatcher-Puzzo said. “And so you’re coming in with all this energy and possibility, and we’re just—you know, it’s almost like, ‘Can we stay under the covers a little bit, ’cause we’re scared.’”

Allison asked the faculty to give him a chance, Hatcher-Puzzo said. Now they can see changes like construction, investments, and grants. “I think he weathered the complaints,” she said. “And he was—I want to say ‘gracious,’ but I need another word—to go: ‘Hey, I know, I’m not what you’re used to, but let me show you what I can do.’”

In Hatcher-Puzzo’s department, that has included a $600,000 grant from the William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust—more than she has seen in her entire previous 13 years on the campus. 

“He sees outside of education what we need,” she said. “And again it’s not easy, because Fayetteville State is very unique.” 

Associate Professor of History Rob Taber, an outspoken member of the Faculty Senate, said he had concerns in 2021 about Allison’s hiring process, but he kept an open mind about Allison himself. “I think Chancellor Allison has proved himself to be the right chancellor for FSU at this time,” he said.

Some people seek these positions for the title and quickly move on without accomplishing much, Taber said. He doesn’t see that in Allison.

“He’s done a lot to promote aspects of HBCU campus life as a chancellor, to provide a sense of community,” Taber said. That can be especially challenging at a commuter-heavy campus with a growing online course component.

Last spring, nearly 47 percent of the students were adult learners.

Allison—a first-generation college student who has said his life was changed for the better by the opportunities and mentors he had at N.C. Central University—has striven to welcome and encourage them all, Taber said.

“He’s a different kind of chancellor—for sure—having not come from a traditional academic background,” Taber said. “But looking at his life arc, I think helps explain a lot of what he’s trying to do.”

Allison acknowledges he isn’t traditional. He cites FSU’s motto, Res Non Verba—Latin for “Deeds, not words”—and asks that people measure him and his staff and faculty by what they accomplish.

“We’ve had a lot of work to do,” he said. “I am one who believes that we need all hands on the plow, traditional or non-traditional, we need all.”