Graham tells of academic journey

Anthony Graham was not traveling on a smooth academic path as a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

It was a Friday in May 1996. Graham was notified in a letter from the registrar’s office that he was academically suspended with a term grade-point average of 1.685 and cumulative GPA of 1.892.

“I’m at UNC Chapel Hill, and I don’t understand how this university works,” Graham testified to University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff supporters on Feb. 21 when he made his public case to become the school’s next chancellor. “I’m asking people for help, and I’m struggling. I’m saying to myself, ‘Figure it out on your own,’ because that’s what a man would do. Figure it out on his own.”

He then ran into Harold Woodard, the director of academic advisement at UNC. (“It was meant for me to stumble into him that day,” Graham recalled to the UAPB audience.) Woodard and Graham engaged in a conversation — and quite honestly, Woodard began to hold Graham accountable for his educational outcome.

“Education became more relational for me than transactional,” Graham said Friday, after the University of Arkansas System Board of Trustees appointed him UAPB’s next chancellor. “As I began to form new relationships with faculty and staff, people across the campus, people in the community, things just turned for me.”

One year after that fateful meeting with Woodard, Graham earned a bachelor of arts in English from Chapel Hill. He went on to earn a master’s degree in education from UNC Greensboro and K-12 teaching license in English in 1999, and a Ph.D. from UNCG in 2003.

Not bad for a young man who endured frequent suspensions through third grade and absences through seventh grade. Graham identified as a student with special needs and finished high school with a 2.8 GPA and 740 on his SAT.

The lesson Graham learned at UNC was that he wasn’t on his own.

“In many ways I put myself in a box believing I had to do everything by myself,” he said. “As I was going through these struggles, I didn’t talk about it with my roommate. I didn’t talk about it with my professors. It was this belief that I have to figure this out on my own.”

Graham is presently provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina, where he served as interim chancellor during the 2023-24 school year. A 25-year veteran in higher education, Graham works at a liberal arts institution but has a heart for land-grant institutions such as one where he worked for 18 years, North Carolina A&T State University.

“I enjoyed my time there,” Graham said. I enjoyed the ability to make connections throughout the campus by preparing our students and connecting them to the corporate world and larger communities. The land-grant mission speaks to me in ways that are significant.”

Hence, Graham decided to apply for chancellor at UAPB, Arkansas’ 1890 land-grant institution and one of 19 in the country. Such schools were established under the Second Morrill Act of 1890, named after Vermont Sen. Justin Morrill, that required states to either establish campuses to provide instruction in agriculture and mechanical arts to Black students or demonstrate that the schools established under the First Morrill Act of 1862 did not discriminate based on race.

The more Graham read about UAPB’s alumni and present students, the more excited he became about the opportunity.

“I love all of our HBCUs; let me start there,” Graham said, referring to historically Black colleges and universities. “But, really, what separates the HBCU as a land-grant is the commitment to the research component. It really is about connecting to community, connecting to the agricultural (and) aquacultural world, and what we do by way of education and research into those spaces but also having those spaces feed back into the institution so that we are in this relationship. It is about the cultural and technical, but we are in this research component and extension component that really commits us to engaging community, corporate businesses and so forth, and then hopefully having those entities invest back into us.”

That said, Graham has made a career of linking corporate America to institutions. Among gifts and scholarship opportunities he’s secured are:

$57 million from the UNC System to renovate a 1,600-seat auditorium with state-of-the-art design at Winston-Salem State;

A $30 million gift from MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to be used at Winston-Salem State’s discretion;

$22.1 million from the UNC System to renovate a music hall at WSSU;

$4 million from the Adobe Foundation ($1 million per year from the 2020-21 school year on) for scholarships, digital literacy, a laboratory and faculty fellowship at WSSU; and

$3 million from the Tom Joyner Foundation to prepare Black male teachers for K-12 public schools in the Piedmont Triad, a portion of western North Carolina covering Winston-Salem, Greensboro and High Point.

“It’s immensely important to what we do moving forward,” Graham said. “As we engage more of that research, then we begin to make more of that impact by way of economic development, it’s my belief that fundraising will come back to the university and benefit what we do at the institution.”

Kelly Eichler, president of the UA System Board of Trustees, met Graham for the first time during Friday’s hybrid video conference. Graham appeared over Zoom.

“He’s very well-spoken,” Eichler said. “He comes across very organized. I know he impressed (system trustee) Kevin Crass, President (Jay) Silveria and (trustee Nate) Todd in the search process as being focused, organized and ready to take on the chancellor responsibilities.”

Graham said he took away from his interim chancellorship at Winston-Salem State the importance of building a team that is “philosophically aligned” with a student-centered vision, a mission he’ll begin to take on at UAPB by July 1.

“The first thing I want to do is, obviously, get there and meet the people, get a feel for the community, get a feel for what’s occurring, what has occurred, what has transpired over the years and get a sense of where the institution is going,” Graham said. “I know we have a new strategic plan in place, so I want to get familiar with the direction of the institution and any tweaks and adjustments we need to make there. Really, for me, it’s just the next 90 to 120 days just immersing myself in the environment, in the culture and the history and just getting to know the people.”