After a Decade at UNC Greensboro, Frank Gilliam May Be the Last Chancellor of His Kind

When UNC Greensboro Chancellor Frank Gilliam reached a decade in office last year, he had a lot to celebrate.

Enrollment for the fall semester was 18,682 students, an increase of nearly 4% and the most the campus has seen since 2021.

The school’s Light The Way fundraising campaign exceeded its $200 million goal.

U.S. News & World Report and the Wall Street Journal again ranked the campus first in the state for Social Mobility, Affordability, & Student Experience, highlighting that UNCG graduates more first-generation and lower-income students and students from underrepresented groups than any public university in the state.

Reaching 10 years was itself a milestone in today’s UNC System, where longevity and stability in top leadership roles is increasingly rare. Gilliam is tied with UNC Pembroke Chancellor Robin Cummings, who also began in the summer of 2015, as the longest serving current campus leaders in the system.

N.C. A&T State University Chancellor Harold Martin and N.C. State University Chancellor Randy Woodson had served 15 and 14 years, respectively, when they retired in 2024. But four to five years has become a more common tenure for a chancellor in the system. Surveys have found that college leaders’ tenure is getting shorter at universities across the country as well.

There are a lot of reasons for that, Gilliam said.

“These are bigger enterprises now,” he said. “Chancellors and presidents are expected to do much more, both in functioning more like chief executive officers and less like academics, and in the fundraising aspect.”

When he took his first faculty job in 1983, Gilliam said, chancellors went to cocktail parties and glad-handed faculty members, alumni, and donors.

“It’s really changed,” he said.

“The public, alumni, and trustees want to see results,” Gilliam said. “We’re not quite like football coaches, but they want to see results, and they want them quicker now.”

That’s a tall order, he said, as large public university campuses are more like cruise ships than speed boats. It takes time to meaningfully change course, and even longer to see the full impact.

Gilliam has recent experience with that problem. In 2024, he faced a faculty revolt over a plan to cut academic programs in response to declining enrollment and financial pressures. The faculty passed a vote of no confidence in Gilliam’s provost, who resigned a month later. Chuck Bolton, one of the loudest critics of the cuts, quit his position as associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

A year later, Bolton is chair of the faculty senate and meets regularly with Gilliam. He now believes the chancellor was right to make the cuts when he did.

“I was very upset at the time,” said Bolton. “We were just sort of making up how to do it as we went along. We didn’t get everything right. But having made it through that now, it doesn’t seem quite as bad.” Other campuses are now making their own steep cuts, he said.

Despite that turmoil and other pressures in recent years, Gilliam said UNCG’s mission hasn’t changed since Charles Duncan McIver founded it in 1891 as the state’s first public college for women. UNCG went co-educational in 1963, but it is still one of the most diverse universities in the 17-campus UNC System.

“Our North Star has never really changed,” Gilliam said. “It’s been about access—access to excellence.”

Auspicious Beginnings

Gilliam arrived at UNCG in 2015 with fanfare. A star professor of political science and public policy, he had taught at colleges large and small, from Tanzania to Middle Tennessee State University, where he co-taught with former Vice President Al Gore.

He made a long-term academic home at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he did civic engagement work in the city and rose to associate vice chancellor of community partnerships in the University of California system and dean of UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs.

Gilliam’s selection as chancellor came on the heels of a rocky time for the university. Enrollment was falling, and faculty morale was low. His predecessor Linda Brady’s time in office was marred by academic program cuts and a scandal in which several employees were fired after being accused of using university equipment to run a side business and falsifying time sheets. Brady stepped down after the incident as students, faculty, and staff questioned her leadership but denied it led to her decision.

Gilliam brought a new energy, said Wade Maki, a philosophy lecturer at UNCG, and earned trust with the campus community through navigating some tough political waters early on.

Gilliam was UNCG’s first Black chancellor and arrived just as its Board of Trustees made the controversial decision to strip white supremacist former Gov. Charles B. Aycock’s name from the campus auditorium in 2016. Students and faculty said they were impressed with the way Gilliam handled the issue, being firm and clear about the school’s values while making room for dissenting opinions—including strong opposition from Aycock’s descendents. They were similarly impressed as he steered the university through protests and a national racial reckoning after police murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020.

“That was a big deal at the time, for him to walk into that,” said Marty Kotis, a Greensboro developer and member of the UNC Chapel Hill Board of Trustees. Kotis helped hire Gilliam when Kotis was a member of the UNC System Board of Governors and has remained impressed with him. “He does not get rattled. He listens to all of the people he needs to and then he does it. And even if people disagree, I think they respect that.”

The COVID-19 pandemic upended much of society and led to safety and financial crises across the UNC system. On a campus like UNCG, with many more working- and middle-class students than some other system schools, it devastated enrollment—and the pandemic’s impacts would be felt for years.

“We lost a cohort of students in COVID—2,500 students,” Gilliam said. “That’s a whole class. However, our fixed costs remained the same. And why did we lose more than a lot of schools? Because of our demographics.”

“We have more Pell-eligible, first-generation students,” he said. “And let me tell you, if COVID hit, you couldn’t afford school. You had to, in many cases, go back and help the family. You couldn’t go to school and be in your parents’ guest house or guest room or whatever, like upper-middle-class kids could.”

Some students dropped out of UNCG’s nursing program after doing rotations during hospitals struggling with the surge in COVID-19 patients.

After COVID, UNCG faced new challenges recruiting students. Before the pandemic, Gilliam said, UNCG’s biggest competitors for students were other regional schools like Appalachian State University, UNC Charlotte, or UNC Wilmington. Now, he said, many students who decided not to come to UNCG told the university they weren’t going to other schools. They were opting out of college altogether, instead taking whatever jobs they could get immediately.

Enrollment did begin to rebound, however slowly. But Gilliam had a financial conundrum to fix. Before COVID, when enrollment was high, Gilliam had poured the extra revenue into hiring. Between 2014 and 2019, the university hired about 400 faculty members. Gilliam told The Assembly last year that his biggest mistake was operating as if that revenue would keep coming in.

“Historically, we were able to grow ourselves out of problems,” Gilliam said recently.

“When you have an infinite growth horizon, therefore infinite resources, so you don’t alienate people, you say yes to everything.” Gilliam said. “The problem with that, then, is that those become fixed costs. And when you hit inclement weather, you can’t throw things overboard.”

UNCG never grew to 30,000 students like East Carolina University, Gilliam said. But between COVID, an impending demographic cliff in which fewer children born about 18 years ago is expected to lead to fewer incoming freshmen, and an increasing belief that college isn’t necessary, it was obvious they weren’t going to continue growing out of tough decisions about resources.

In 2024, he decided to eliminate 20 academic programs, cutting majors, minors, and graduate courses. It was a campus restructuring Gilliam argued was necessary to right-size the university and its offerings before the system and the UNC Board of Governors took matters into their own hands. The move led to a rare formal censure from the Faculty Senate.

Gilliam knew the move would lead to lingering ill will from the faculty. But he also believed they understood that he is an educator, longtime professor, and researcher who saw their work as much more than numbers on a ledger.

Maki, who chairs the Faculty Assembly, which includes elected representatives from across the UNC System, said what he’s heard from other schools has made UNCG’s process look much better than it felt in the moment.

“Our chancellor knew we needed to do this, to make these cuts,” Maki said. “And we were doing it kind of without a guidebook. We’re trying to figure out how to do it. But there was a lot of reaching out. Faculty committees worked on a rubric. By contrast, at [UNC] Asheville the decisions were just announced and there was basically zero faculty inclusion.”

UNC Asheville disputes that.

“We respectfully disagree with Professor Maki’s characterization of the Academic Portfolio Review (APR) process at UNC Asheville,” said Eden Bloss, the campus’ chief communications and marketing officer, in a statement. “The APR followed a measured approach in spring 2024 to evaluate current program offerings and the University actively engaged the campus community, including campus surveys, communications, and a dedicated website.”

Gilliam acknowledged he may have made some mistakes during the process of cutting programs, Bolton said, and explained his reasoning. He also emphasized his belief that faculty and its representatives should play a role in decision making.

“Obviously, there’s disagreements over individual things,” Bolton said. “But I feel that he supports overall academic values—shared governance, academic freedom, really important things that increasingly are under attack. So I think that we’re fortunate to have him here for those reasons.”

A Different Kind of Leader

In the last few years, the UNC Board of Governors has been increasingly dismissive of the traditional idea that university leadership should come from universities. Some chancellors appointed over the last few years have never held full-time faculty positions and have no previous experience in academic leadership. What they have had are strong ties to the Republican majority in the General Assembly.

In two prominent cases, the Board of Governors named its own members to chancellor positions—Darrell Allison at Fayetteville State University and Lee Roberts at UNC-Chapel Hill.

“The system, as a policy, doesn’t value those things—coming from the university, being part of the university,” Maki said. “They don’t even require a degree. They say, if you’re from the business of the political sphere, that may be fine. But from a faculty perspective, Frank Gilliam is one of the last full-package chancellors from the faculty who gets the academic area as much as he does athletics, donors, and the public.”

Bolton agreed. He highlighted the conservative-led push for university faculty to post course syllabi online as an example of the need for supportive chancellors.

Some faculty object to publicly posting syllabi for a variety of reasons, including fears that their course materials will become targets online. Several states already require universities to make syllabi public, and the UNC System has said it plans to do the same.

“What we’re dealing with right now is a lot of concern about academic freedom,” Bolton said. 

Most faculty don’t object to making syllabi public on principle, he said. But if they are targeted by online trolls or critical politicians, he thinks it will matter whether their chancellor comes from the faculty, understands their concerns, and stands up for them.

“That makes for a different kind of leader,” Bolton said.

Maki said he’s seen Gilliam in action at Board of Governors meetings and been impressed with the way he walks the necessary political line to advocate for his campus.

“That’s a high-risk environment. But I’ve seen him there, building bridges with those governors. And I’ve seen them talking among themselves, and they’ll say, ’Well, I’ll ask Frank—he’ll be able to explain it to me.’” Maki said. “He made UNCG the No. 1 university in the system in performance by that metric. So he’s really built trust with them, and that’s part of being a leader.”

Gilliam acknowledges it’s a difficult political time, not just in the nation but within the UNC System. He’s seen even prominent chancellors called on the carpet by the Board of Governors over highly political issues.

Toward the end of Kevin Guskiewicz’s tenure as chancellor at UNC-Chapel Hill, members of the Board of Governors publicly took him to task over his plan to fully cover tuition and fees for in-state students whose families earn less than $80,000 a year. Members of the board grilled Guskiewicz over whether it was a reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision banning the use of race in admissions and to say whether he agreed with conservative justices’ criticisms of racial diversity as a goal in higher education.

It was an uncomfortable moment for many of the chancellors in the room or watching remotely—and the type Gilliam has largely avoided.

“I think where chancellors sometimes get mired down is that they get involved in issues that are no wins for them,” Gilliam said. “You have to remember it’s not about your personal beliefs.”

At UCLA, Gilliam was renowned for his work on racial equity—a current target of the political right, particularly on campuses. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder he shared passionate messages about race, policing, and its impact on his life and those of his children. But he’s built working relationships with system leaders who are working to root out and eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.

He tries to remember, he said, that he can have his own beliefs and values while working within the rules of the system to benefit his university. That means not just tolerating but working with people with whom he disagrees, he said, and he trusts students to follow his example.

When the popular and controversial conservative figure Charlie Kirk was shot and killed in September, conservative students at UNCG held a vigil for him. Some people came out to protest, and the campus made space for them, but things remained peaceful.

“That’s the kind of campus we have,” Gilliam said. “If you can’t have these conversations on a college campus, where can you have them? We’re going to be a tolerant campus all the way around.”

That, Bolton said, may be one of Gilliam’s largest legacies as chancellor.

“I really feel that he has made this campus welcoming for everyone,” he said. “Maybe that’s not the most popular idea these days, but that’s what we need. We have this designation for being first in social mobility and that means that people are coming from all over, from all different backgrounds, to get an education here. They have to feel that they belong here. And as long as he’s here I think we’re committed to that.”

Kotis, the former member of the UNC System Board of Governors, agreed.

“I went to UNC Chapel Hill as an undergrad but I got my MBA at UNCG,” Kotis said. “The thing I noticed about UNCG is there are all kinds of people there—people who are different ages, in different places in their lives, people who have jobs and families, and it makes it a whole different experience. All those people feel welcome, all those people are having that experience together and feel like they belong. Frank Gilliam is a big part of that.”

Gilliam, now 70, said it’s too early to talk about when he may step down at UNCG. He still has many projects he began and wants to see through.

“I sure hope he doesn’t go anywhere any time soon,” Bolton said. “I don’t know that we could replace him.”