North Carolina A&T Names Its Next Leader (2024)

North Carolina A&T’s next chancellor will be James R. Martin II, the current vice chancellor for STEM research and innovation at the University of Pittsburgh.

The UNC System Board of Governors unanimously elected Martin to the position Friday. He will begin August 15.

“He’s a son of the rural South raised not too far from here in South Carolina,” UNC System President Peter Hans told the board Friday morning. “Dr. Martin knows just how much higher education has done to light and lift up this region.”

“James Martin is the right leader to engineer North Carolina A&T’s continuing rise,” Hans said. “He believes in what he calls ‘impatient optimism,’ a productive sense of possibility in what can be achieved when people think across disciplines, feel a sense of shared purpose, and commit to an ambitious vision.”

Martin was one of three candidates the 13-member search advisory committee forwarded to Hans, who chose him as the final nominee to put before the Board of Governors.

Martin earned his B.S. in civil engineering from The Citadel and both his master’s and Ph.D. in civil engineering from Virginia Tech. He taught at Virginia Tech from 1990 to 2013 before becoming chair of the Glenn Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Clemson. Martin left Clemson in 2018 to become dean of the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering, and assumed his current vice chancellor position there in 2022.

Though he comes from an impressive engineering and leadership background at land grant agricultural and technical universities, three search committee members told The Assembly they had some misgivings. At A&T, Martin will lead the nation’s largest historically black college or university (HBCU) despite never having attended, taught at, or led an HBCU. Those members asked not to be identified so they could discuss the confidential search process.

“There were candidates who had that experience, of the culture of the HBCU, who were products of the HBCU,” one search committee member said. “I would not say it is disqualifying if that’s not the case. But we have had a lot of success with leaders who come from A&T and who come from the world and the culture of HBCUs.”

Search advisory board members don’t get a final vote on the nominee Hans puts before the system’s board of governors. There was no evidence this week members of the board of governors, who will take a final vote on that nominee, shared concerns about Martin’s HBCU experience.

Martin will succeed current A&T chancellor Harold Martin—no relation. The longest-serving chancellor in the UNC System, he has been at the helm at A&T for 15 years. In that time, A&T went from a beloved but struggling regional university to the nation’s largest HBCU, with explosive growth in student performance, the footprint of the campus in Greensboro, funding, and prestige.

Martin, the first A&T graduate to become the university’s top leader, also had experience in administration at the UNC System and as chancellor of another system HBCU, Winston-Salem State University.

“Chancellor Martin has been a once-in-a-generation, transformative leader for A&T and those are large shoes to fill,” said another member of the search committee. “But I believe that the new chancellor will be met with open arms by our university and he’ll have every opportunity to succeed here.”

After being named chancellor-elect on Friday, Martin took the stage at a welcome event on the Greensboro campus to a standing ovation.

In a stirring speech to faculty, school officials, alumni, and community members, Martin said he deeply understands the value of universities like A&T.

A scholarship to The Citadel was his ticket out of the small farming community of Cross Keys, South Carolina, he said, and the first step to the engineering degree that would change not just his life but his family’s.

His journey to leadership of the nation’s largest HBCU wasn’t an easy one, he said—he had to work as hard or harder than his fellow students while overcoming racism and adapting to a culture where few people looked like him or came from his background.

The resilience he developed was important, he said, but “swimming upstream is still swimming upstream.”

“And I’ve always asked myself,” Martin said, “‘boy, if I were a student and I had the opportunity to be around over 13,000 students that looked like me, that thought like me, where I didn’t have to work so hard to fit in, where I could find my place, and that was supported by an incredible hardworking faculty and talented professional staff that let me know that they were vested in my success… there is no telling what else I could have accomplished in that environment.”

A&T is that special sort of place, he said.

When he returns to his hometown now along Highway 49, he said, he thinks about how fortunate he is to be living a life he couldn’t have imagined growing up.

“The second thought that I have as I’m driving down that road is, I ask myself, ‘How much stranded brilliance is along these highways running around our communities and our state and our nation?’” Martin said. “How much untapped human potential is there out there?”

A&T has a proud history and has made great strides under its current chancellor, Martin said. It is closing in on its goal of becoming the first HBCU in the nation to become an R1 research university. Now is not the time to squander that momentum, he said.

“We will keep our foot on the gas,” he said.

Most who saw Friday’s speech said they were moved by Martin’s personal story and convinced he understands the responsibility of maintaining the “Aggie Pride” central to the campus.

“I think the new chancellor Martin is going to be great,” said state Sen. Gladys Robinson, herself an Aggie. “He’s the kind of person we need at NC A&T to make sure we continue to soar.”

When Harold Martin took the helm 15 years ago, Robinson said, the university faced financial challenges, low enrollment, and a diminishing reputation. Now it is a thriving and expanding campus attracting top-tier students from across the state, nation, and abroad. Its $2.5 billion statewide impact is the envy not just of other HBCUs but most universities in the system.

With the new chancellor-elect able to build on his predecessor’s success, Robinson said, the Aggie community should expect great things.

Greensboro Mayor Nancy Vaughan agreed.

“A&T is a gem that we have in our community,’ said Vaughan. “But it goes beyond our community. It has a national reputation. Chancellor [Harold] Martin is going to be a tough act to follow. He really set the course and changed the trajectory of this university. I believe Chancellor Martin 2.0 wants to continue that legacy.”

Councilwoman Sharon Hightower said it’s obvious the chancellor-elect sees A&T as what it is: a premier university. But its identity as an HBCU must also remain central to its identity.

“A&T hasn’t always been recognized the way it should be, for what it is, “ Hightower said. “The current chancellor made sure that it was. And you can tell the new chancellor sees it that way.”

North Carolina’s public HBCUs find themselves in an unusual position.

Last year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the use of race as a criteria in college admissions, taking away a tool the UNC System’s flagship university argued helped make campuses more diverse. The system’s board of governors, appointees of the General Assembly’s Republican majority, have targeted diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and passed policies requiring campuses and their leaders to remain neutral in matters of contemporary social and political debate.At A&T, a campus where the four students who spearheaded the sit-in movement for desegregation in 1960 are immortalized as statues, neutrality is anything but prized.

Asked about that history Friday and whether that spirit is endangered in the current political environment, the chancellor-elect hedged, saying only that the university values diversity and multiculturalism and will remain committed to them.

Hightower said she was a bit disappointed by that answer.

The outgoing chancellor was willing to go further.

“If we had been neutral in our history we would never have done the things our alums did and our students did that changed social issues in our society,” said Harold Martin. “And I expect our university students, faculty and staff to still feel enabled through our board and the leadership of this institution, to let their voices be heard.”