Fayetteville State names new chancellor - noteworthy news - T.J. Bryan appointed chancellor at Fayetteville State University

Black Issues in Higher Education, July 17, 2003

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C.

A new chancellor has been named at Fayetteville State University and the person filling the post will be the third woman and the first African American woman to lead a state university.

The University of North Carolina Board of Governors voted last month to name Dr. T.J. Bryan as the 10th chancellor at the historically Black state university. She took office July 1 after chancellor Willis McLeod retired on June 30. McLeod will take a leave and return as a professor.

Bryan, 57, is vice chancellor for academic and student affairs at the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. She will have a three-year contract and earn $187,000 per year.

"I am confident she is the right person to lead FSU through a period of dramatic growth and transformation," says UNC President Molly Broad.

Bryan, whose given name is Thelma Jane, is a native of Scotland, Md. She is the third woman to be elected chancellor of one of the 16 member institutions of the University of North Carolina during Broad's tenure.

Dr. Marye Anne Fox was named chancellor of North Carolina State University in 1998, and Dr. Rosemary DePaolo will take office at UNC-Wilmington this month for a three-year term.

Bryan is the first Black woman chancellor in the university system, board member W. T. Brown of Fayetteville said.

Bryan taught English at Coppin State University in Baltimore for 20 years. As a dean and department head at Coppin, Bryan said, she always created and directed programs that connected her with students.

She said she was a first-generation college student in her family and she tried to help her own students as her professors had nurtured her at Morgan State College in Baltimore.

"Our professors--indeed the whole university community--let us know that we were expected to excel," she says. "Within this community, I was nurtured, but never indulged."

She said she liked coming to Fayetteville State because "historically Black colleges and universities have been at the core of my adult life."