HUSBAND w FATHER ​w HIGHER ED LEADER ​w STORYTELLER
Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive,
and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.*
BIOGRAPHY
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Dr. Garikai Campbell currently holds the position of Deputy Director for Strategy, Planning and Management for the Postsecondary Success team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In this role, he supports the team’s efforts to move Higher Education closer to being a system in which student outcomes and the quality of the student experience leverage and reflect the full breadth of diverse perspectives, priorities, and lived experiences, particularly across race, ethnicity, and income.
Dr. Campbell comes to the Foundation after most recently having served as provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at UNC Asheville, the designated liberal arts institution of the UNC System. In that role, he helped shape the overall strategic direction of the university with special attention to the academic program. Over his three years in that role, he initiated a program to diversify the faculty, most especially with respect to race; helped to make the case for and secure $2M/year from the NC Legislation to fund a new talent scholarship program; and most importantly, helped manage a residential campus through the tumult of COVID, including collaborating with several key staff to initiate new student success initiatives and dispense critical financial COVID relief support funds to students.
Campbell received his BA in mathematics from Swarthmore College, where he was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and an Academic All-American wrestler. He returned to Swarthmore as a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Fellow and upon completion of his PhD in mathematics from Rutgers University, earned an appointment to the faculty.
While at Swarthmore, he earned tenure as a mathematics faculty member, where his mathematics work focused predominantly on exploring particular properties of elliptic curves and exploiting those properties to solve select problems in number theory. He is the recipient of several awards, including the Minority Graduate Fellowship from the National Science Foundation; the Lindback Minority Junior Faculty Grant; the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship; and the Henry Alder Award for Distinguished Teaching by a Beginning College or University Mathematics Faculty Member from the Mathematical Association of America.
Campbell went on to hold several leadership positions at Swarthmore. As associate dean for academic affairs, he orchestrated an overhaul of the technology used to support advising, onboarding of first year students, and the case management of students by the deans. As acting dean of students through the Great Recession, he helped to decide and implement strategic budget cuts. And as associate vice president for strategic planning and special assistant to the president, Campbell collaborated with the president, board members, select faculty and several senior staff, to develop, write, and disseminate Swarthmore’s strategic plan.
In 2013, Campbell was appointed provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Morehouse College, and after that, served as provost and dean of the college at Knox College. At Morehouse, he facilitated the first change to the general education program in nearly three decades, enhanced the culture of shared governance, and reshaped the academic leadership. He played an instrumental role in getting resources for academic programs and broader institutional needs, including a $2.5 million gift to support STEM programs; a $1.2 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop and evaluate innovative student success initiatives; and a $1.25 million Lilly Endowment grant to strengthen career pathways for students through improved curricular and co-curricular programming, structured internship opportunities, and enhanced advising. At Knox, he helped to secure resources for a new Peace & Justice Studies program and established a summer research opportunity for faculty.
Campbell is recognized for his innovative work in shaping programs designed to engage and retain students underrepresented in STEM disciplines. In particular, he has worked with the Professional Development Program at the University of California, Berkeley to increase enrollment and improve the success of African American, Latinx, and Native American students in graduate mathematics programs; helped design and administer alternative assessments for the Vanguard Scholarship Program of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME); and taught and consulted for the Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE) Program to strengthen women’s success in graduate mathematics programs. In addition, he served on the advisory boards for the Math is Power and Figure This! campaigns, promoting math and science literacy to elementary and middle school-aged children and their parents.
In addition, he has served as a “Something-in-Residence” at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts in the Interactive Telecommunications Program, where he investigated, wrote, and served as a thought partner on topics at the intersection of technology, identity, art, and higher education.
Campbell is married and the proud father of three young men–two college graduates, each a division one soccer player, now working in different aspects of the technology industry, and one professional soccer player, a centerback for Montreal FC. Campbell’s wife, Diana Campbell, is a Senior Partner at DTSpade, a full service commercial real estate brokerage. She specializes in industrial real estate and advisory services for city and county governments.
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