WILMINGTON (August 3, 2022) – We don’t often get to ask both an educator from Brazil and an educator from India what they think of U.S. higher education.

But our interviews this summer with outgoing UNC Wilmington Chancellor Jose “Zito” Sartarelli and incoming Chancellor Aswani Volety provided just such an opportunity.

We weren’t sure what they’d say. But both grew up poor. Both said education was very personal. Both said it transformed their lives. And both brought it home to students at UNC Wilmington and what it will mean in their lives.

“I’m from a poor family,” says Sartarelli, who was born and raised on a farm in Brazil and couldn’t even go to school until his family moved to town when he was 10. “Education for me was instrumental.” 

Sartarelli dreamed first about becoming a soccer player, then a priest, and later an engineer. And in the mid-1960s, as he heard about John F. Kennedy and voyages to the moon, he won a scholarship through the American Field Service to attend a rural high school in West Texas. 

“That trip to America in 1967-68 changed my life,” Sartarelli says, describing the experience as “phenomenal.”

He went on to earn an MBA and a PhD at Michigan State University, and he later worked for three multi-national pharmaceutical companies.

At Johnson & Johnson, he was the company’s representative on the Council of the Americas, an institution formed by David Rockefeller, the CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank, to develop the economies of Latin America.

“So one time I was sitting two or three chairs apart from David Rockefeller,” Sartarelli says, “and I was thinking in the back of my head, ‘Wait a minute, this little kid 40 years ago was in a small town, on a farm…’ 

“That is the secret of education. How can you get someone like that – a child, then moving to town, moving to America, going to school – and then I realized that education is the lever.

“This is something that for me is very personal – I believe very much in the power of education,” Sartarelli says. “We have the best universities in the world – the best.”

In his seven years at UNC Wilmington, Sartarelli has awarded degrees to 30,000 graduates.

“That is very important,” he says. “We enabled 30,000 people to have a level of education to go out and face the world. And I can tell you they’re going to be much better prepared to face the world and do well for their families and improve their lot if they have an education versus not having one – critical.” 

CHANCELLOR ASWANI VOLETY shares a similar story – but one that started half a world away.

“I’m a first-generation, low-income student who grew up in India,” he says. “Education changed my life.”

Volety describes how he started school in India, then traveled to the College of William & Mary, where he found mentors and opportunities.

“Collectively, public higher education has changed my life. Not just my life, but the trajectory of my family,” he says. “My two daughters have a lot more opportunities and a better perspective than I did growing up.”

Though the best predictor of success is the ZIP code where one grows up, he says, “People like me are examples of what is possible: The transformative power of higher education in changing the lives of individuals, the trajectories of families and the region as a whole.

“Whether it is first-generation or not, I cannot think of a better investment other than education and educating people – (it) creates informed citizens, creates thought leaders, enables them to initiate and expand and grow businesses, programs that transform this whole region,” he says.

“I want to provide every Seahawk that comes through the doors similar opportunities that made a difference in my life,” Volety says. “I cannot think of a better investment than education. As a country, that should be the number-one priority.”