WHEN DESCRIBING JAMES MILLIKEN’S LEGACY as chancellor of the University of Texas system, his supporters point to a plan that, starting this fall, allows many additional undergraduate students to attend tuition-free if their families earn $100,000 or less annually.
Milliken, who on Aug. 1 will become president of the University of California system, pushed through the policy to fully cover tuition and fees for those in-state students, greatly expanding a previous version that gave the benefit to students with families who earned up to $65,000.
The policy sparked an outcry from some Republican state lawmakers in Texas, who claimed a decision of that magnitude required legislative approval and threatened to cut the system’s budget. But it was also celebrated as a drastic improvement to affordability for the system, with campus presidents calling it a game-changer for their students.
As of this fall, at the system’s Arlington campus, for example, 65% of undergraduate students will attend tuition-free, said President Jennifer Cowley. “That’s a huge accomplishment and an outstanding opportunity for our students and students across the system,” she added.
Milliken’s former colleagues say he has regularly championed college affordability and other core tenets of higher education, such as scientific and medical research. Although the tuition policy in Texas ruffled some feathers, Milliken, throughout his career, has developed a reputation for being a savvy relationship builder, using that skill to secure significant funding for his universities.
However, at times he has garnered some criticism, including from faculty at the City University of New York, who said he did not push back strongly enough when then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo proposed a significant budget cut in 2016.
How Milliken performs at the helm of UC will have major consequences for the gigantic system at a very difficult time. As president, he will oversee the system’s 10 campuses, each of which has its own chancellor, as well as its six medical schools and three national laboratories. The president also serves as a university leader and spokesperson in engaging and negotiating with the regents over governing policies, and with legislators and the governor over funding for the system.
Leading UC will be arguably his most demanding job yet due to the system’s size and prestige. UC enrolls nearly 300,000 students and six of the system’s nine undergraduate campuses are among the top 15 in the latest U.S. News & World Report rankings of public universities.
Milliken, familiarly known as JB, will inherit major challenges, including antagonism from the Trump administration on a number of issues. Several UC campuses are under federal investigation, including over alleged antisemitism and racial bias in admissions. Fewer financial aid options will soon be available to both undergraduate and graduate students due to cuts to federal loan programs in the Republicans’ recently enacted spending package.
Locally, other issues include possible tuition hikes, a tight state budget and pressure to enroll more California residents, even though out-of-state and international students bring in lucrative tuition revenue.
UC staff said Milliken, 68, was not available for an interview. Milliken’s initial contract with UC is for five years, and he will earn a base salary of nearly $1.5 million. That’s up from $1.3 million earned this year by Michael Drake, UC’s outgoing president.
Those who have followed his career say he is well-prepared to lead UC at such a pivotal moment.
“He will make a difference in California and continue to make a difference in our higher education world,” said Tim Clare, who sits on the University of Nebraska’s board of trustees and served a stint as the chair when Milliken was president. “I would say they probably couldn’t have found a better guy.”
‘Relationship builder’
Milliken grew up in Fremont, Nebraska, now a city of about 27,000. His father was a local banker, and his mother taught at an elementary school. He would eventually earn a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Nebraska and a law degree from New York University.
His path from a relatively small town in Nebraska to getting multiple college degrees is what inspired his “belief that universities exist to serve all people, not just the privileged,” said Jeff Raikes, the former CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Raikes is also from Nebraska and first met Milliken in the late 1980s.
After law school, Milliken worked as an attorney on Wall Street. He got his first gig in higher education in 1988 at the University of Nebraska, where he would return in 2004 to take the top job after spending six years as a senior vice president at the University of North Carolina.
Early on, as the University of Nebraska system’s president, Milliken launched a fundraising campaign that sought to raise $1.2 billion.
The university ended up raising about $1.8 billion by the time Milliken left the system in 2014, including $265 million for student scholarships, fellowships and other supports. Among the campaign’s most significant initiatives was a $370 million project — a combination of private and public money — to create a cancer research and treatment center, which eventually opened in 2017, the likes of which the state had never seen.
“He is a really good relationship builder. He listens, he’s very smart and he’s very high integrity. So he does a great job of building trust.”
Jeff Raikes, former CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
“We’ve got one of the top cancer programs in the world and much of our state now has access to that health care,” said Clare, the Nebraska trustee. “And it was through JB’s leadership and his relationship with the governor that we were able to put that together.”
That fundraising prowess could be especially helpful for Milliken amid UC’s financial problems at both the state and federal level. The Trump administration has already canceled millions in National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants and other research grants for California universities.
“He is a really good relationship builder. He listens, he’s very smart and he’s very high integrity. So he does a great job of building trust,” Raikes said.
Among the key relationships Milliken developed in Nebraska was one with Heath Mello, who was then a member of the state Legislature. When Mello became chairman of the Legislature’s appropriations committee in 2013, Milliken gave him a book about Johnny Goodman, a golfer from South Omaha and the last amateur to win the U.S. Open. Mello, who is also from South Omaha and golfs recreationally, called it “one of the most meaningful” gifts he received during his time in the Legislature.
“You just don’t get things of that nature,” Mello said. “So it’s that kind of uniqueness about JB. He’s a very special leader in that sense.”
Milliken’s relationship with legislators helped later that year, when he negotiated and won the Legislature’s approval for a 4% budget increase for the university in exchange for freezing tuition for two years — the first tuition freeze since 1990.
“It wasn’t easy to find a way forward, because there are a lot of other budget challenges,” Mello said. “But JB was willing day in and day out to work with us on finding a way to get it done.”
Navigating New York
Building those relationships was more challenging when Milliken arrived in 2014 at CUNY, a highly complex university system. CUNY has 25 colleges, including community colleges, four-year colleges and graduate schools.
CUNY also has a unique funding model, getting dollars from both the state and New York City. That further complicated the job, particularly because Andrew Cuomo was governor and Bill de Blasio was mayor, two politicians with a history of feuding with each other.
Milliken came under some fire in 2016 when faculty leaders were frustrated with what they felt was a “muted” response to a proposed $485 million cut to CUNY’s budget by Cuomo, said Jen Gaboury, the vice president of the faculty union, though the cut was ultimately restored.
Gaboury acknowledged, though, that Milliken is credited with improving graduation rates at CUNY. His crowning achievement was expanding an initiative that gives students in two-year associate degree programs extra support toward graduation, including textbooks, tutoring and even MetroCards for subway and bus rides. Participants graduate at a rate of more than double that of students not in the program, according to the university.
When Milliken took over as chancellor, the program, known as ASAP, served about 4,300 students across seven colleges. “The rap on ASAP was that it was expensive and that it couldn’t be scaled up,” said Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education. “And JB took that as a challenge.”
By the following year, Milliken and CUNY secured a $42 million commitment from the city to expand the program to 25,000 students by 2018. The ASAP model has since been replicated at colleges across the country, including Skyline College in San Mateo County. Milliken in 2015 also launched a similar program for CUNY students seeking bachelor’s degrees.
A focus on research
In addition to growing the University of Texas system’s free tuition program, Milliken helped establish a program to provide campuses with more funding for research.
For the system’s El Paso campus, the program is allocating $12 million annually for the campus to hire 69 new researchers, a mix of tenured faculty, research faculty and postdocs.
Heather Wilson, the campus president, called it “a significant investment in research here.”
Wilson and others interviewed for this story unanimously said they expect Milliken to continue being a staunch advocate for research, especially amid the Trump administration’s efforts to diminish federal research funding. All of UC’s campuses are in the highest category of research schools.
When the Trump administration earlier this year announced it would slash so-called indirect funding for NIH grants, Milliken traveled to Washington, D.C., to voice his displeasure with the decision, according to Jochen Reiser, president of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.
The proposal has since been blocked by a judge, but the Trump administration has appealed that ruling.
“He argued very strongly why this is not a good idea,” Reiser said, which he said indicated to him how passionate Milliken was on the issue.
“I think he will do the same for the University of California system and even become a voice for research in the entire nation,” he added.
This story originally appeared in EdSource.
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