Aswani Volety, chancellor of UNC Wilmington, joined High Point University President Nido Qubein in the Power List interview, a partnership for discussions with influential leaders. The interview was edited for clarity.
Aswani Volety grew up in a one-room home in India and started school before turning 3. He graduated from high school at age 15. He then earned a bachelor’s degree from Andhra University, followed by a master of science in zoology at the same school in 1990. It is a coastal campus, on India’s south coast.
In 1990, he entered a doctoral program at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, where he earned a Ph.D. in marine science in 1995. He later moved to Florida Golf Coast University as a professor and later interim dean for the college of arts and sciences.
He joined UNC Wilmington in 2014 as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, helping implement new programs and attract a $5 million corporate donation that was a record at the time. In 2019, he moved to Elon University as provost, and vice president of academic affairs.
Three years later, he was selected after a national search to become chancellor of UNC Wilmington. Since July 2022, he has helped the campus expand various academic opportunities and its student support services.
The university completed a $131 million fundraising campaign. It enrolled 18,848 students last fall, about 3,500 more than a decade earlier. They came from about 45 states and 50 nations.
He and his wife, Ai Ning Loh, have two children. Loh is an associate professor of Earth and Ocean Sciences at UNCW.
Chancellor Volety, your story is amazing. You started school at age 2 and graduated high school at age 15. That makes me feel like a total failure. Tell me, how does someone start school at age 2?
My mom tells me I was getting in trouble with all my cousins. I grew up in a large extended family, I was reading and writing. She said, “You’re better off going to school and learning something than getting in trouble at home.” So she sent me off.
Kidding aside, I had some amazing mentors. I had a very caring family who helped provide some great opportunities. I was the first in my family to go to college.
And you came to America in 1990 to do your best at William and Mary?
Yes, I did. After graduation, I worked at William and Mary for a couple of years on a post-doctral fellowship. Then I had a National Academy of Sciences fellowship. It was a fairly prestigious fellowship to work in a federal lab.
After that, I went to Florida Gulf Coast University, which was a brand-new university in the state system of Florida. It was on the coast, enabling the kind of marine work I was doing. That was a great location for me. I worked on projects such as Everglades restoration and Deepwater Horizon oil spill work.
Why did you leave Florida Gulf Coast after 15 years?
The Wilmington opportunity was similar, with both programs focused on students. UNCW has a very large marine science program. And that’s what attracted me to Wilmington as the dean of the college of arts and sciences and then as chancellor.
How does an immigrant, who grew up with a lot of adversity, manage to focus so directly, so positively and with such determination?
I want to say it’s because of my hard work, and I’m smart, but that’s not true. There are a lot of very hard-working, very smart people who are smarter than I am who don’t have the opportunities that I have. I’ve always said the three things that made a difference in my life are, education, mentors and the opportunities this great country affords.
Without mentors and the opportunities that this great country afforded me, I wouldn’t be where I am. That’s what I tell myself every day. I want to make sure that every student that comes to UNCW has experiences similar to mine that made a difference in my life, and I want them to be even more successful than I am.
Why is educational attainment so strong in many Asian nations?
That is true. The family unit is very strong. The focus on education has always been a primary force in Asian cultures. In India, perhaps education has been one way to get ahead economically and financially, and to help your family progress.
There is so much discussion that is not very respectful about higher education. People are talking about the value in going to college, and does it really pay to do that? That must not resonate well with you?
That shouldn’t be a conversation, yet It is. Studies have shown that an individual with a college degree makes over $1 million more than what a high school graduate makes. With the graduate programs, it’s even more when it comes to professional programs.
It’s somewhere in the range of $3 million to $5 million. Yet, somehow, we talk about the false narrative. There are individuals who didn’t have a college degree that are very successful, and individuals who have college degrees who aren’t as successful as measured by economic terms. I think as an industry, higher education hasn’t done a good job of communicating the value of education.
And it is for the long run. As you know, the technologies are evolving. People are living longer. The skill sets that employers are looking for are changing very quickly. Unless you are training students to learn how to learn, adapt and acquire the next set of skills, they probably won’t be employed in the long run.
Especially these days with the advent of artificial intelligence, it is mind blowing how quickly things are changing. You may have a job today as a high school graduate. But the question one should be asking is, are they prepared to adapt and evolve and be in the next job with the right skill sets with a high school degree?
It’s the long run where higher education provides the opportunity for individuals to be successful in what’s coming next.
What doctoral programs does UNCW offer?
We have doctoral programs in marine biology, psychology, nursing practice, education and pharmaceutical chemistry. And our most recent program, a doctorate in applied coastal ocean sciences.
Let’s talk about marine science for a moment. How do you define it?
Marine science is the study of the oceans and how the oceans impact us. It involves biology, physics, geology and chemistry. But more importantly, it also involves modeling and resource economics. What is the value of a certain fishery? What is the value of tourism? What is the value of all the economics of recreational activities? All these things are broadly defined as marine science. It’s a very broad area.
How important is it that UNCW is located next to an ocean?
UNCW is the only UNC System university that is on the coast, and we have a very large marine science program. In all the areas that I talked about, the researchers investigate the deepest parts of the ocean and the organisms that live there, collecting samples from the deepest oceans. They actually send remotely operated vehicles, all the way to the deepest parts.
Tell me what that looks like.
Imagine a robot with propellers and arms that can collect samples. They’re all geo-referenced. In other words, you know exactly the point, relative to Earth, where you picked up the samples, literally sending a machine to the deepest parts of the ocean, and you’re controlling it remotely.
Our sediment samples are first samples or anything else from the deepest oceans that are brought to the surface.
Our researchers are also using nanosatellites. Imagine a satellite that is the size of a loaf of bread when it goes up into space and then opens up. The satellite is taking very high resolution images of the coastal areas from the air. That is used to look at how much food is present in the sea surface or how much sediment is being pushed out into the open ocean or the coastal areas. That impacts how much seagrasses will grow or not.
So UNCW researchers cover anywhere from space all the way to the deepest parts of the ocean and anywhere in between.
And how do such studies impact my life?
More than 70% of the world’s population lives less than 100 miles from the coast. So whether we are relying on the coastal areas and the oceans for food, recreation, pharmaceutical applications, etc., we know that humans have traditionally had a very close relationship with water.
All civilizations revolve around water, including oceans and rivers. There is also fun, transportation and fishing. When you think about oceans, a good amount of seafood for human consumption comes from the ocean. In addition to wild fisheries, you’re also farming the ocean.
What is happening in the coastal areas is also a precursor of what is likely to happen to us.
The pollution going into coastal areas, whether it is rivers, estuaries, oceans, if the animals are not doing well and we are closely interacting with that environment or consuming those organisms, sooner or later, it’s also going to impact our health.
So looking at the health of these coastal areas is also a preview of what is likely to come and how it’s going to affect us as humans interact with this environment very closely.
Therefore, every day you’re discovering new species and you’re figuring out, how do these animals live? Under very stressful conditions. No light. Not a lot of food. Very cold temperatures. Very, very high pressure. How are they managing those things? And we are also looking at how they’re adapting and saying, can we use some of those molecular tools to better survive or modify the organisms. Agriculture is a good example of that.
I can remember when I would swim in the ocean with my children with zero worry about dangers like sharks. All of a sudden, we have concerns about that. What happened environmentally to cause that?
I think you’re more aware of those things. When you look at the number of incidents relative to the number of people going to any coastal or any beach, you have a higher likelihood of something happening when you’re driving on the road than something happening in the water, whether it is drowning, whether the shark bites, that is a minuscule percentage. But it attracts news.
If you’re building more bridges and jetties and other structures, they attract other fish. And with more recreational fishing, you’re putting more food in the water. That attracts the sharks. But sharks don’t come to humans, and try to eat them. It’s a case of mistaken identity.
What is UNCW’s Soar Higher program?
It is our strategic plan or a roadmap for the next 10 years. That is the title of our strategic plan.
It’s not just a tagline, but that is how we think in terms of doing better every day, and making sure our students are soaring higher, accomplishing greater things.
I hope to see through it and do many more, just like my predecessors have done. They’ve left me with an amazing institution, with very strong foundations. Hopefully, sometime in the very far future, when I leave, I hope to leave the institution in a much better place than I found it. ■