Garikai (Kai) Campbell

Dr. Garikai Campbell is the Deputy Director for Strategy, Planning, & Management for Postsecondary Success and supports the Postsecondary Success 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 holding several positions of academic leadership across a variety of liberal arts institutions—private and public, endowment driven and tuition driven, majority White and HBCU. Beginning his career as a mathematics faculty at Swarthmore College, he earned the highest teaching award for early career teachers from the Mathematics Association of America before going on to serve in a number of administrative roles developing new systems for managing student, leading the student affairs office, and helping to develop a comprehensive strategic plan for Swarthmore. As Provost at Morehouse, Knox and UNC Asheville, he led efforts to diversify faculty, develop programming for scholarships, academic programs, and student success efforts, and most recently, led the campus through the myriad of COVID challenges.

Dr. Campbell has also shaped, administered and taught in 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.