The second line band’s brass instruments gleamed in the morning sun as they led nearly a thousand first-year students out of the Vadalabene Center arena. The festive New Orleans style procession wound its way across Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s campus, past the towering Cougar statue where students would soon gather for their traditional class photo. Parents lined the walkway, some having extended their stay just to witness this moment—their children’s ceremonial entry into college life.
Among the crowd, one mother approached Dr. James T. Minor with tears in her eyes.
“That’s my son,” she said, pointing to a young man adjusting his position for the photo. “This is so great. I can’t believe what you’re doing. I’m so proud of him.” 
Dr. James Minor talking to a SIUE student.
A Detroit native with a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a distinguished career spanning federal government, the California State University system, and scholarship in educational policy, Minor brings both academic rigor and practical experience to his transformational vision.
“This is as close as I get to what’s truly special about university communities,” he reflects on the school’s most recent convocation. “You’ve got thousands of young people who have made a decision about their life—that they’re going to pursue a college degree—and the university has a responsibility to facilitate that.”
But behind this celebratory scene lies a story of dramatic transformation, one that has seen SIUE emerge from serious fiscal challenges to become a model for how regional public universities can thrive in challenging times.
A $18 Million Wake-Up Call
When Minor arrived on campus in March 2022, he brought credentials that positioned him uniquely for the challenges ahead. As the 10th chancellor in SIUE’s history, his appointment followed distinguished service as deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Education, where he administered more than $7 billion in federal higher education programming. His most recent role as assistant vice chancellor and senior strategist at California State University—where he helped achieve the system’s highest graduation rates in history and secured hundreds of millions of dollars for graduation initiatives—prepared him for the complex work of institutional transformation.
But even this impressive background couldn’t ready him for what he discovered within his first 45 days: an $18 million structural deficit that had been masked by years of poor budget practices.
“I was giving a university budget presentation that was not particularly pleasant,” Minor recalls of those early days in his tenure. “That was not on my list of things to do in the first 100 days—to organize and understand this structural deficit, communicate it to the university community, and then lay out a plan for managing it.”
Dr. James T. Minor at commencement.
“We had available cash sources and other things that we could manipulate to cover it,” Minor explains. “We operated that way for a number of years before I arrived, but we all know that’s not sustainable.”
The solution required what Minor calls “environmental responsiveness”— the ability of institutions to expand and contract according to changing conditions. This meant making hard choices about class sizes, graduate assistantships, and operational efficiencies that some within the university community initially resisted.
Fast forward to September 2025, and Minor will soon announce to the campus community that SIUE has effectively resolved its structural deficit, maintains one of the best cash positions among Illinois universities, and accomplished this transformation without spending a single dollar from its cash reserves.
Building a Culture of Student-Centered Data
Perhaps even more significant than the financial turnaround has been Minor’s campaign to make SIUE fluent in its own student success metrics. When he arrived, he was stunned by what he discovered during informal surveys of faculty and staff.
“I would walk into a room and ask, ‘Who here can tell me our four-year and six-year graduation rates?’” Minor recalls. “These are people who presumably should have an idea— people who work here, not people shopping at Target or in the grocery store. I would ask about our first-to-second-year retention rate, and it wasn’t meant to embarrass people. It was to underscore the lack of awareness we had as a university community about the most important thing we do.”
Today, when Minor walks into any room on campus, hands shoot up when he asks those same questions. “People expect the question,” he says with satisfaction. “I have promised them, I don’t care if we’re talking about the paint in the stairwell, I will start every conversation here at the university about our student outcome data.”
Dr. James Minor meeting students on campus.
Dr. Robin Hughes, dean of the School of Education, Health and Human Behavior, sees Minor’s unique combination of scholarship and leadership as precisely what SIUE needed.
“Chancellor Minor is by far what most institutions look for and want in an organizational leader,” Hughes observes. “He is a distinguished scholar whose work focuses on the study of higher education organizations. He is also an experienced organizational leader who brings both academic insight and institutional expertise to his work. A strong advocate for students, he makes organizational decisions that positively impact their success both during their studies and beyond.”
Dr. Jessica Harris, acting chief of staff and vice chancellor for Anti-racism, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, chaired the search committee that brought Minor to SIUE.
“I remember reading his cover letter and saying to my mom, ‘I think this is our next chancellor,’” Harris recalls. “Every accomplishment he talked about in his career was about how it positively impacted or transformed the experience for students. That was a consistent thread throughout his cover letter.”
Nearly four years into his tenure, Harris sees that student-centered focus as the driving force behind institutional change.
“One of the major shifts I’ve seen is a very clearly articulated and collective focus on student success,” she explains. “Not that it wasn’t a commitment before, but there’s a level of intentionality I didn’t see across all areas before he started. Every presentation starts with mission—this is why we’re here, these are our enrollment numbers, retention and graduation numbers. He keeps it front of mind for us.”
Dr. Earleen Patterson, associate vice chancellor for Student Opportunities, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, has witnessed this transformation firsthand.
“There’s a reason I’m still here,” she says of her longevity at the university that began in 1990. “Over the course of time, I’ve seen a lot of evolution of this journey of progress toward being inclusive, toward offering opportunities to every sector of our population.”
The results are visible in SIUE’s incoming class, which Patterson describes as having “the highest African American enrollment in the history of the university.” This fall’s freshman class includes nearly 600 Black students in the Boundless Scholars Experience alone—a comprehensive academic program designed to promote belonging, academic achievement and degree completion. At a time when voices opposing diversity, equity and inclusion efforts grow louder across the higher education landscape, SIUE has chosen to double down on its mission, letting results speak louder than rhetoric.
The focus on student success extends far beyond enrollment numbers. Patterson describes a comprehensive approach to retention that begins before students even attend their first class. The Boundless Scholars Experience moved students in early, gathering them with their families in the campus ballroom for what Patterson calls “real talk” about college expectations.
“What they saw was a room that reflected who they are,” Patterson explains. “But we let them know, come Monday, as you walk out into the university community, you may be the only one in your biology course, in your chemistry course, in your economics course. But you have a community, you have a village.”
This village includes strategic course placement with faculty who are particularly effective with first-year students, early warning systems that track attendance and performance, and support staff who can call students by name when they miss class.
“It marvels them when they come into my office, and I already know you missed chemistry on Tuesday,” Patterson says with a chuckle. “They’re like, ‘How do you know?’ I care enough to know about that—about all of these students.”
For Dominic Dorsey, president of the Black Faculty and Staff Association and director of the Access (Disability Services) Department, representation at the leadership level makes a tangible difference for students.
“We’ve been blessed not just to have Dr. Minor as our first Black chancellor, but to have a chancellor that’s an actual thought leader and transformational in the truest sense of the word,” he says.
Dorsey’s own department has seen dramatic growth, with registered students with disabilities increasing from about 650 when he arrived in 2018 to nearly 1,400 today. This growth reflects SIUE’s broader commitment to inclusive excellence that extends beyond traditional diversity metrics.
Town-Gown Collaboration
The transformation at SIUE also stretches beyond campus borders through an unprecedented partnership with the city of Edwardsville. Mayor Art Risavy, a small business owner who has served as mayor for five years after a decade as an alderman, describes an intentional effort to strengthen university- city relations.
“Early on, when I became mayor, one of the first things we decided collectively was we wanted to work on our relations with the university,” Risavy explains. “We reached out to the chancellor, and it didn’t take long—Chancellor Minor wants to do stuff pretty quickly—before we had a meeting set up.”
These conversations led to concrete initiatives: improved website integration between city and university, the Hashbrown Huddle breakfast meetings that bring students directly into downtown Edwardsville, and shared committee appointments that give the university voice in city governance.
“We want to see students in our businesses, involved in our organizations,” Risavy says. “We want them to feel comfortable downtown, going through our shops and participating in our events. This is their home for four years or five or six years.”
The collaboration extends to shared programming, with Minor and Risavy regularly attending each other’s events, from the city’s state of the city address to SIUE’s ice cream social that draws over a thousand participants.
Navigating Challenges with Bold Leadership
The success story at SIUE is unfolding against a backdrop of national political tensions around higher education, particularly concerning diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. For leaders like Dorsey and Patterson, this context requires strategic adaptation without abandoning core values.
“The way that we approach the work has not changed,” Dorsey explains. “We just don’t publicize the way the work is done. Our ancestors created an underground railroad for a reason—it’s a reason why it wasn’t an above ground railroad.”
This approach allows SIUE to continue providing scholarships, celebration opportunities, and support systems for underrepresented students while focusing public attention on broader institutional success metrics that benefit all students.
Patterson emphasizes the importance of drowning out external noise.
“If we were to play into that distraction, we wouldn’t be able to focus on the charge that is in front of us. And these students are in front of us,” she said.
Doug James, immediate past president of the Staff Senate, describes an administration focused on “majoring on the major things” while maintaining awareness of smaller concerns.
“I think there was an appetite for honest conversation,” he says. “Let’s get in a room and talk about what are our challenges, where are we winning, what are the things we get to celebrate, and what needs our attention.”
Yet Harris points to concrete evidence of this collective effort.
“You don’t see 10 percentage point increases in Black student retention without people doing work inside and outside of the classroom. We’ve hit historic fundraising goals since Chancellor Minor’s been here. He’s helping to shift our culture. He often talks about us being first and best in class.”
Looking ahead, Harris envisions SIUE becoming “a model regional public institution with a national reputation” within the next three to five years. The university is already approaching 80% retention for domestic students and has set an ambitious goal of 90% first-to-second-year retention—a benchmark that would distinguish SIUE among institutions of its type.
“In the midst of all the challenges facing higher education, all the anti-DEI efforts, all the darts being thrown at us,” Harris reflects, “we are keeping on. We’re not deterred. In fact, we are making really great progress.”
The Price of Progress
Minor’s transformation of SIUE hasn’t come without resistance. As the first African American chancellor in the institution’s history, he acknowledges the complexity of his position with remarkable candor.
“Some people think about it individually. I haven’t,” he tells me. “I’ve thought about what it means for other people and what it means for this university community with respect to our ability to move forward.”
Quite frankly, the university community has had to adjust to new leadership and some members have experienced dissonance with the very idea that a Black man is in charge.
“Sometimes it’s passive resistance, sometimes it’s active resistance, sometimes it’s a level of questioning and verifying before we can participate or agree to move in the right direction, and quite honestly, sometimes it’s blatant sabotage,” the chancellor admits.
Yet Minor approaches these challenges with the same organizational theory perspective he brings to budget management and student success metrics. For him, institutional transformation requires acknowledging and managing all forms of resistance while maintaining a clear focus on the core mission.
Still, the significance of this representation isn’t lost on the broader SIUE community, particularly among Black alumni who lived through earlier eras of the institution. Minor recalls one particularly poignant encounter with an alumna from the mid-1960s: “She came up to me, grabbed my hand and started patting my hand as any good grandmother would do, and said, ‘Baby, I’m so proud of you. It’s so wonderful to see you in this role.’ And as she was patting my hand, she leaned in and said, ‘Now, don’t you mess this up.’”
The exchange captures the weight of expectation that comes with being a first—representing not just personal achievement, but the hopes and dreams of those who paved the way.
“For individuals from that era, that generation, I represent their hopes and dreams for equity and equality and opportunity,” Minor reflects.
A Model for Regional Public Universities
The SIUE story offers lessons for similar institutions nationwide. Minor’s approach demonstrates that even universities without massive endowments can achieve significant transformation through strategic focus, data-driven decision- making, and commitment to operational efficiency.
“Regional public institutions don’t have the margin to be inefficient,” Minor argues. “We’ve got 1960s infrastructures and boilers and aging infrastructure that we have to manage. You can’t manage that and be grossly inefficient at the same time.”
As SIUE prepares for its next chapter, the metrics tell a story of remarkable progress. The university maintains a strong financial position, has achieved record fundraising including the largest single gift in institutional history, and expects continued enrollment growth in a challenging market.
But for Minor, the real measure of success remains that moment during convocation when a parent’s pride reflects the transformative power of higher education.
“The idea that I get to help facilitate the environment in which young people have an opportunity to transform their life—it’s a dream job,” he says. “It’s not the title, it’s not the status, it’s not the position. It is having the opportunity to facilitate the environment in which young people have an opportunity to transform their life.
“I love university communities. I love the power of institutions,” he adds. “I love the idea that they could be beacons of social and economic opportunity. I love the idea that the teaching and learning environment can transform the mind, prepare people professionally in a way that changes the trajectory of their life and their children’s lives. That, to me, is powerful in its own right.”
That transformation happens every day, every semester, every academic year at SIUE. And as the second line band plays on, leading another class of students toward their futures, the sound carries a promise—that this institution, this community, this partnership between town and gown will continue rising above the noise to focus on what matters most: changing lives through education.
