Carol Folt

Carol Lynn Folt (born 1951) is an American academic administrator who is the 12th President of the University of Southern California. She assumed her duties on July 1, 2019. She was previously the 11th chancellor, and the 29th chief executive, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was previously provost (chief academic officer) and interim president of Dartmouth College and was the first woman to lead UNC. On January 14, 2019, she announced her resignation as UNC chancellor.

During her term as Chancellor, Folt had to deal with the controversy over the monument Silent Sam, which at times included demonstrators outside her office. Folt resigned as chancellor on January 14, 2019, effective end of the spring semester, stating: "There has been too much recent disruption due to the monument controversy". In the same letter, she ordered the remaining plinth (pedestal) to be removed, as a threat to campus safety. Later, the University of North Carolina system Board of Governors made her resignation effective January 31.

When the Wainstein Report was released in 2014, Folt acknowledged "It is just very clear that it was an academic issue with the way the courses were administered, and it is clearly an athletics issue." The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, the regional accreditation body for UNC, took the nearly unprecedented step of placing UNC on a year of probation, wherein any further missteps would lead to the university's accreditation being removed, effectively dooming the entire university. Folt brought forth reforms on several levels, and the probation was consequently lifted with no further sanctions after a year.

Folt was chosen as UNC's chancellor by the Board of Governors of the UNC System to succeed Holden Thorp, who resigned the position in June 2013 amid allegations of widespread academic fraud. She described her selection as "the honor of a lifetime" and vowed to ensure that UNC's students "don't simply learn what we know but they learn how to create what will be."

Folt joined Dartmouth's administration in 2001, when she was named dean of graduate studies and associate dean of the faculty. She became dean of the faculty in 2004. She was tapped as acting provost in 2009, and appointed provost in 2010. When Dartmouth president Jim Yong Kim was named as president of the World Bank in July 2012, Folt was named acting president.

A native of Akron, Ohio, Folt is the granddaughter of immigrants from Albania. She graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1976 with a bachelor's degree in aquatic biology. She earned a master's degree in biology from the same institution in 1978, and a doctorate in ecology from the University of California, Davis in 1982. After conducting postdoctoral studies at the Kellogg Biological Station at Michigan State University, she joined Dartmouth in 1983 as a research instructor in biological sciences, and has conducted extensive research in metal toxicity. Since 2007, she has held an endowed professorship in biological sciences.