WSSU announces 14th Chancellor
Bonita J. Brown has been named the 14th Chancellor of Winston-Salem State University. She was elected by the University of North Carolina Board of Governors, following her nomination by University of North Carolina System President Peter Hans.
Brown will assume her role on July 1, 2024. She will succeed Interim Chancellor Dr. Anthony Graham, who was appointed in July 2023, and who previously served as the provost and vice chancellor for Academic Affairs at Winston-Salem State University.
Brown recently served as the interim president at Northern Kentucky University. During her tenure, she led the campus through a leadership transition and in navigating significant financial challenges and declining enrollments.
Prior to being interim president, she served as the vice president and chief strategy officer for Northern Kentucky University, where she led the campus in implementing Success by Design, the university’s strategic plan solely focused on student success. From this work, retention and persistence rates increased by over five percent.
She previously worked as the vice president of network engagement at Achieving the Dream, a national nonprofit leader that champions evidence-based institutional improvement in community colleges across the country. In this role, Brown was responsible for supporting a network of over 220 community colleges in 41 states as they work to implement sustainable, campus wide student success efforts.
She also served as director of Higher Education Practice with the Education Trust in Washington D.C. At the Education Trust, she created and led an initiative entitled Optimizing Academic Success and Institutional Strategy (OASIS), which was a national network of regional, comprehensive, minority-serving institutions that enroll large numbers of low-income students and students of color. She also worked with the institutions in assessing data and implementing national best practices for improving student success and closing completion gaps.
Previously, she served as the vice chancellor and chief of staff, and as assistant secretary to the Board of Trustees at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Over the course of her career, Brown served also as chief of staff at the University of North Texas, general counsel at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and assistant attorney at Winston-Salem State University from 2004-2006. She also served as assistant to the president and attorney at two private HBCUs in North Carolina – Livingstone College in Salisbury and Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte.
She was most recently chosen as one of 11 national Designers in Residence to reimagine the role of Higher Education in closing racial and economic opportunity gaps by the Education Design Lab.
In the past, she served on the boards of United Way of Denton County and Presbyterian Hospital in Denton, Texas, and on the board of the Greensboro History Museum in Greensboro, NC. She has participated in the HERS Leadership program, the AASCU Millennium Leadership Initiative and is a graduate of the Harvard Institute of Educational Management.
Brown’s parents, Bern and Freda Hairston, are both WSSU alumni. Her mother was a junior at WSSU when she married her father, who later graduated from WSSU as an adult learner.
Brown received her Bachelor of Arts in history from Wake Forest University and her Juris Doctor from Wake Forest University School of Law. She is married to Wesley Brown, and they have two children, Joshua Brown and Myliah Brown, and one granddaughter, Angelic.
