The UNC Board of Governors voted unanimously to approve Carol Folt, interim president of Dartmouth College, as the University’s next chancellor.
Folt will assume her new role July 1 as the first female to hold the University’s top leadership position in 224 years. She addressed the board after she was elected.
“It is deeply humbling to be the 11th chancellor of the first public university in America, with its history of excellence, its living profile of accomplishment and its immense promise,” she said.
Folt was one of three candidates presented to the UNC Board of Trustees, and then to UNC-system President Tom Ross, by a 21-member search committe that formed in October to help select Chancellor Holden Thorp’s successor.
Thorp announced in September that he would resign at the end of the academic year, and said he had plans to return to the UNC faculty. But in February, Thorp announced he will take the provost position at Washington University in St. Louis starting July 1.
Folt joined Dartmouth in 1983 as a faculty member in the Department of Biological Siences and became interim president at the college after its former president, Jim Yong Kim, left to serve as president of the World Bank. Folt held a number of other positions at the college, including provost and dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Folt will be faced with a very different institution as chancellor at UNC, including a student body almost five times the size of Dartmouth’s. UNC is also the state’s largest and first public university, whereas Dartmouth is a private Ivy-League.
