University of North Carolina Wilmington Chancellor Gary Leon Miller sat down to talk with GWBJ about his career path and his recent installation as the university’s fourth chancellor and seventh leader.

“(The installation) was very emotional, really . . . I spent a lot of time with students over the last couple weeks and months. I tell you, if you have doubts about the future of this country, you have to spend time with students at universities. They have a lot to learn and sometimes they are naïve. But they are incredibly bright. They’re caring.

… We were talking about how a biologist becomes chancellor. I don’t know if this is totally true, but I don’t think anybody who’s a university president or chancellor in America sets out to do that. I think what typically happens, and this is what happened with me, is as you move through your academic career, you’re offered opportunities to contribute to the university in a different way than scholarship and teaching . . .  Some folks just find that interesting and I’m one of those.

As an undergraduate, I was pretty sure early-on that I wanted to be a scholar. What that meant to me was I wanted to have some kind of career where I could do research and think and write and teach.

My parents were not college-educated. My mother had a couple years of college and served as a teacher and substitute teacher. But my dad didn’t go to college. We were from a middle-class, working family. I was not really surrounded by people in my community who were college professors. My parents were very clear to us that we were going to get a college education. But their idea of it was that it was a job training opportunity. So they figured we’d become doctors or lawyers.

When I got to college, it was a small set of professors who really engaged me early in my career at William and Mary. I saw what they were doing and that looked like the kind of career I wanted. I probably knew by the time I was a sophomore or junior in college that I was going to get a graduate degree and try to become a college professor. That path had some twists and turns.

I did finish a doctorate in ’82 and at that time it was really hard to get a job in the academy. People were just not hiring. So I took a position at Mississippi State in the etymology faculty in a non-tenured position, teaching and doing research. I kept that position for three years while we were trying to get a tenure-track position somewhere in the country. That eventually happened, but it took a lot longer than I thought it would. I ended up in my first, real permanent faculty position at Weber State in Ogden, Utah – fabulous place. But it was not a research university. While I loved living there, it was hard to conduct research there. So when we had the opportunity to come back to the University of Mississippi, that’s where we went back and I had most of my career there.

It was in those 14 years at Ole Miss that I went through all of the stages of new professor, getting promoted, getting tenured, developing a laboratory, training doctoral students (and) master’s students and teaching in that field and gradually became more involved in university-wide activities. From an administrative point of view, my breakthrough was early-on in my career at Ole Miss. The university had a big accreditation challenge with the SACS (Southern Association of Colleges and Schools) because that was the beginning of the assessment era . . . I was appointed to chair a large university committee with the provost on it. Our job was to essentially solve the assessment problem at Ole Miss before the SACS got there.

I resisted getting out of research. I loved the graduate students. I loved my laboratory and the undergraduate I had working there. But you really can’t do it unless you’re investing full-time in it. At least I couldn’t . . . My research as a biologist was great, but a lot of it was empirical work that required a lot of field work and a lot of long hours in the laboratory making behavioral observations and taking care of animals. It was pretty solitary in many ways . . . So when I got these opportunities to do these things in the university, what I discovered was I really like solving problems with people and I got more interested in having a job that was more social.

It turns out that being a biologist or scientist really is an advantage -- at least, that’s my perspective -- in this work. One of the reasons is I’m not particularly intimidated by complexity. It’s ok if I don’t understand every nuance of every issue as long as I understand where the big picture is. And I can often see more than one path.

. . . There was a lot of administrative work, more university committees to serve on and toward the end of that time, I was just at a place in my life that I felt like administration was something I wanted to do full-time. That’s when we sought a dean’s position and we went to the University of the Pacific [in Stockton, Calif.].

I’ve always wanted to do as much as I can in my career, so these logical steps from provost to chancellor, you get to the point where [my wife] Georgia and I talk about it and assess our skills and our ambition and the amount of energy we have. You ask the question, ‘Could you do something bigger in a different position?’ And, it turns out we could find a great provost position at Wichita State and then on to here. So, that’s the story.”