
Dr. Kimberly van Noort
1/13/2025 | 26m 46sVideo has Closed Captions
Dr. Kimberly van Noort, chancellor of UNC Asheville, talks with PBS NC’s David Crabtree.
Dr. Kimberly van Noort, UNC Asheville’s ninth chancellor, discusses leading the university, the effects of Hurricane Helene and her vision going forward with David Crabtree, PBS North Carolina’s CEO.

Dr. Kimberly van Noort
1/13/2025 | 26m 46sVideo has Closed Captions
Dr. Kimberly van Noort, UNC Asheville’s ninth chancellor, discusses leading the university, the effects of Hurricane Helene and her vision going forward with David Crabtree, PBS North Carolina’s CEO.
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship[bright thoughtful music] - Hello, I'm David Crabtree here at UNC Asheville.
Join us for a conversation with the chancellor, Dr. Kimberly van Noort, as we discuss her leadership, her vision for the university, and what it's like to lead a generation of students.
- [Announcer] Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.
[bright thoughtful music] [bright thoughtful music continues] - Dr. van Noort, thank you for taking the time to talk with us today.
- It's a pleasure, David, always.
- There are a lot of things I wanna cover, including the history of this terrific university, as well as the history of your journey that led you here.
But first, here we are in Asheville, near the site, almost the epicenter, of what happened with Hurricane Helene.
Let's talk about, first, how this has impacted the university, how it's impacted faculty, staff, and the chancellor.
- It's had a great impact, David.
So I was here in this house, in this room actually, during the hurricane in communication with folks on campus.
And at about 8:10 that Friday morning, I got the call that no chancellor wants to get.
The campus was entirely blocked, there were no accessible roads, and I had 1,300 students on that campus.
If we'd had a fire or a medical emergency, we wouldn't have been able to get help up there.
And we also had to call back the saw crews because it was too dangerous.
There were trees falling, so we were not able to clear anything.
And so, that moment, I realized we are in a very serious situation.
We knew it was gonna be serious, but it wasn't until we actually saw the rainfall that we'd had the night before, the power of the winds, and then everything that happened after that.
But what was truly amazing was the way that our entire community came together.
So they got my road cleared at about 2:30 that afternoon.
In the meantime, the teams on campus had managed to feed those 1,300 students with no cafeteria workers.
They went into the refrigerators and the freezers, found what they could.
That night, for dinner, we pulled out camp stoves and grills, we borrowed some propane tanks from the art department, and we fed those students.
Fortunately, we had ordered about 10,000 bottles of water and 20 porta-potties earlier that week, 'cause we knew things were gonna be bad, because we lost power and then we lost water.
But most importantly, we lost communication.
We had no communication on campus.
We were using walkie-talkies, literally.
I happened to have one here at the chancellor's residence that I was able to use to communicate during those hours.
And so for the next three, we had one focus and one focus only, which was to make sure we knew where our students were on campus, make sure that we were feeding them, giving them water, and making sure that they were mentally in a good place.
And so we had teams of people.
There were probably 40, 50 people who spent 24 hours for probably five days on campus, sleeping overnight.
But the students showed up in ways that I had never imagined.
When you don't have cell phone service, and you don't have the ability to call people, you have to communicate in different ways.
And they did that.
They helped each other.
They played games.
They volunteered.
Whenever we had a supply truck to roll up, there would be students there helping us unload that truck.
There were students who volunteered in the cafeteria.
It was absolutely amazing.
Then there were students who helped us...
When we decided it was important that we needed to relocate the students, we needed to get them into a different region in North Carolina, helped us writing out directions.
Students who had no GPS; they didn't know how to even get to the highway, so we equipped them with a handwritten map, $20, and made sure they had at least five gallons of gas in their tank.
We had parents, we had community members who came, picked up their children, and leave with four other kids.
We had a parent land a helicopter on our track to pick up her son and took the roommate away, too.
And so the ways that the community came together and the ways that we were able to connect with the greater city of Asheville and the county of Buncombe, constant communication.
I've never seen a community in a region come together like this.
- Wow.
Once any trauma passes and the adrenaline rush fades a bit, and reality really sets in, it can become difficult.
Did the students make their way through that as you transitioned into remote learning?
- That's a really good point, because I cannot say enough about our faculty.
Our faculty, who had pivoted on a dime during COVID, did it again, and in ways that just astounded all of us.
As they were dealing with their own families, their own traumas, their own house issues, their housing issues, they were able to make adjustments, reach out to their students.
And that, I think, was key that we identified; we made contact with every single one of our students and got them in contact with their faculty members.
And so the ability to have that personal communication, understand who needed help, how we could help them, knowing that there was gonna be a trauma response after our initial response period as we moved into the recovery period.
So it was very important to make sure everyone was coordinated, and everyone had the kind of training and the kind of information that they needed to help the students.
Our Health and Counseling Center set up operations the day after the storm.
They set up in our student union.
They had no internet at their other building.
They were operational the next day, and they were on-site, helping the students, talking to them.
Our UNC sister institutions opened the doors of their universities to our students.
So, if someone had relocated to Wilmington and needed counseling, they could go to UNC Wilmington's Counseling Center.
It was absolutely amazing the way that the UNC system showed up for us.
- Will they be back in the spring?
- Yes, they will be back in the spring.
- [David] Do you expect all of the students to come back?
- We never have every student come back in the spring.
That's just... Life happens, right?
- Right.
- We are tracking registrations.
We are on normal track.
We have the normal returning number of students.
We're actively in registration right now.
We're in contact with those students, and we have every reason to believe that we will have a very normal retention rate for the spring.
And we have some really important financial assistance packages for our students this year.
The North Carolina General Assembly has provided funds to enable us to pay for students' tuition if they don't already have scholarships.
We have emergency grants of up to $2,500.
We have other supports that are coming in.
Our amazing friends, parents, and alumni, we raised almost $500,000 for immediate grants right after the storm.
So we're doing everything to make it possible for those students to get back.
And the students are back.
We have many students coming back to live on campus, and they're so excited to be here, and they're so excited for the spring semester.
- One more question about- - Sure.
- Just the experience of going through the storm itself.
You were here at the residence, as you said, as the worst of this happened.
What was that like for you?
- It was amazingly interesting.
So, I grew up in Nebraska; we'll talk about that later.
And we had a lot of tornadoes.
And the big thing was, during a tornado, you always went outside to watch the weather.
So I had trouble staying inside [laughs] because I wanted to see what was going on.
But the erraticness of the wind was strange.
So it was a fascinating time.
It was a frightening time.
I knew that, you know, anything could happen.
Trees fall down, and I saw lots of trees around the residence fall down.
But it was also a time of sort of mental preparedness, thinking about what needed to happen, what we needed to do in the next few hours, what the next five hours looked like.
I have an amazing team at the university in emergency management.
They've been thinking about this.
That's all they do.
That's all they think about.
And I trusted that they had a good plan for us.
In times of crisis like that and disaster, you have to trust the people who are the experts in the field and who know what they're doing.
And I have an amazing person, and I just said, "Matt Petty, you take this and tell me what to do."
- So here we are on this campus, the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
98-year history of this now-university that did not start as this.
- [Kimberly] No, not at all.
- Tell us a little about the history.
- So, yeah.
So the university was founded in 1927 as a junior college.
And it remained a small college, eventually becoming Asheville-Biltmore College throughout most of its history until the early 1960s when it became a university, a four-year university.
We awarded our first four-year degrees in 1964.
We joined the UNC system, and then, under the consolidation in 1972, we became part of the UNC system.
But our history is different from many of the other universities in the UNC.
We moved a lot.
We only came to our present location here in North Asheville in the early 1960s.
Our first few buildings were built.
It was a very small campus, and then it began to grow and grow as the area and the region began to grow.
And we had a series of very, very visionary chancellors who really imagined what this university could become.
Its role as a public liberal arts institution, which is where it sort of landed in the 1960s after being primarily a junior college up until then.
And so, you know, just building on those strengths, building on that strong core liberal arts experience has been the cornerstone for the university.
The student population now is a little over 3,000 students, which is about a little bit lower than we would want, but we'll get there.
We've been moving up quite a bit.
We have a lot going on.
It's a vibrant city.
We have a very strong athletics program here, which many people may or may not know about.
We have a Division I athletics program that attracts a lot of people in the community, and it's really, I think, an integral part of the city of Asheville.
- For people who really don't know about this university, what would be the biggest surprise for them if they spent time here?
- Ah, the relationships.
And not necessarily personal relationships but the learning relationships and the mentoring relationships.
Our students have very, very close working relationships with their faculty members.
In our natural sciences, for example, we have students who, as early as their second or third year at the university, are publishing with their professors.
We have chemistry students who are learning to use a nuclear magnetic resonator as a sophomore.
That does not happen at large universities.
We have experiences here that only graduate students get elsewhere.
So, it's an incredible preparation for students who are planning on going into professional schools.
We have a strong pre-health professions program.
I think they'd also be surprised at our strength in the sciences.
Our fastest-growing departments are in the sciences.
And I think that people have a vision of us being an arts and maybe humanities university, which we are very strong in those areas, but we also have a very, very strong sciences and environmental sciences program here.
- You are the ninth chancellor this university.
You've been here about a year now.
You served as an interim for a while.
Talk to us... Talk to me and the viewers about your journey that led you here.
And I will set it up by saying you did say you were from Nebraska.
- [Kimberly] Yes.
- You went to a one-room schoolhouse.
- Yes.
- And here you are as chancellor of a university in the UNC system.
[Kimberly chuckles] That is quite a line from A to ultimately B.
- Mm-hmm.
So yes, I did attend a one-room schoolhouse for elementary school.
The last one-room schoolhouses in the country were in the state of Nebraska.
- What was that like?
- It was amazing because, at one point, there were only four of us in the school, and at other points, there were 13, 15.
But the most important thing for me, and this is why I think I sort of got into teaching and education in general, is that from the time I was a kindergartner, I was hearing all the other students' lessons.
The teacher would call us to the front of the room to say our lessons.
So, as a kindergartner, I was hearing first, second, third, fourth, fifth-grade math, English, reading.
By the time I was in sixth grade, I was teaching the kindergartners how to read.
And so the pedagogical model that I had the incredible privilege of experiencing really kind of set the stage for how I believe education should function.
I also went to a very small high school.
My hometown had 524 people in the entire town.
We graduated 24 students.
Not many of us went to college.
And when I got to college, I had to take foreign language because we didn't have languages.
And so I took French because just recently my grandfather took me to Europe, after I graduated from high school, for a short trip.
So I said, "I'll take French."
And I was good at it, and I enjoyed it.
But I majored in various things and finally decided I wanted to graduate.
And so my advisor told me, "Well, if you graduate in French, you can be out by the summer."
So I said, "Fine.
Why not?"
My parents went ballistic, of course.
I then didn't have a job and had the opportunity again to just say, "Hey, we have a master's program that you might be interested in."
I continued on in that.
I began to teach.
I discovered I loved teaching.
It was the most energizing, fulfilling, amazing thing I had ever done in my life.
- Do you trace that back to being a sixth grader?
- [Kimberly] I think so.
- When you were teaching those- - I think so.
- Kindergartners how to read?
- Yeah, I do.
I don't think I made that connection at the time, but I certainly make that connection now.
And then I just fell in love with teaching.
I fell in love with the French language.
And I fell in love with introducing students to something that's entirely new to them, a new skill that they could learn and build.
I took students to France to study abroad, opening people's eyes to experiences they had never dreamed about.
I loved that.
But then I was given a lot of opportunities and I went into administration a little bit hesitantly, but I also found that I enjoyed that.
I felt like I was really impacting.
- Let's go back to your French studies for a minute.
- [Kimberly] Okay!
[laughs] People are always worried about that.
[chuckles] - This is an undergrad, grad student, and PhD work.
- Yes.
- Right?
- Mm-hmm.
- What did you think you were going to do with that doctorate?
- I thought I was gonna- - French literature and French studies.
- I thought I would be a tenured professor and teach for most of my career.
And then someone asked me to take a chance on them and be their number two: Beth Wright at the University of Texas at Arlington.
And I found I had a knack for administration, and I loved working with various disciplines.
I loved learning what they did over in engineering.
I loved working with the College of Business, and I continued work there.
I loved working with student success and student advising.
I worked with veterans when I was there.
I worked with the athletic department.
And I began to be really interested in higher education in general as something that I felt deeply about, that I felt was a necessary opportunity for so many kids.
And I felt that I was needed at a certain level in order to begin to provide that access to people who needed to have the opportunity to get a college education.
- So, as you're doing that in administration, you're also teaching.
- [Kimberly] Yes.
For a while.
[laughs] - But you're actively teaching all of those connected- - Yeah.
- In administrative roles.
What and how to communicate some things, how to work with general assemblies, how to work with administrations of major universities, because there's always something to learn.
- Yes.
And a university is like a small city.
We have housing, we have a police department, we have recreation, we have dining, we have shopping, we have educational, obviously, that's our core mission.
And all of the different parts of that are fascinating to me.
And the ways in which that experience can transform lives, every day, I meet a student who is on a path that is not what they expected, but that is so important to them and is gonna be a wonderful trajectory for them for the rest of their lives.
- And isn't that fabulous about being a part of that?
- [Kimberly] Yeah.
- That trajectory for someone.
- It's a privilege - Or helping them tap into something that they may not have realized they wanted to do, and you recognize it in them.
I'm curious, Kim, when you talk with students who oftentime live into the expectations of parents, you talked about your own parents, or their friends or significant others, whomever it may be, and they're not going the direction that their heart wants them to go.
How do you unlock that for them?
- I think the most important thing, and I tell this to students all the time, is don't ever say no or turn your back on something that's intriguing to you.
Just try it.
But also begin to understand that all the experiences that you're having are building you up for whatever career it is you decide to pursue.
The key is you've got to learn to understand how your education and how your educational experiences are preparing you.
So, a class that you may think is not related at all to what career you might wanna pursue, may actually be teaching you a whole lot about individual research, collaboration, teamwork, communication.
And the more you can take that experience and say to your parents or a future employer, "In this class, I did this project, and here's what it taught me, and here's what I can now do because of that."
A lot of people worry about the value of a college education these days, and particularly about more traditional types of education, like a very traditional liberal arts degree.
"What job are you gonna get?
What are you gonna do with that?
What will your earnings rate be?"
I think the key is not so much tied to what the degree is but how we're preparing those students to go out into the world, to understand what they've learned, to understand their value, to understand how the skills that they have done...
I think you could talk to any graduate and say, "Think back to your college experience.
What were the things that you didn't realize at the time were going to be invaluable to you in your careers?"
And learn how to talk about those things.
Learn how to explain what that Spanish class did for you.
Not in terms of how well you speak Spanish, but in terms of the ways that you learn, in terms of the ways that you now know how to communicate with people of other cultures.
There's a whole lot out there that I think remains untapped when you think about how to apply what you've learned to real-world situations.
- Oh, my gosh, there's so much more to life than making money.
I remember my parents saying to me, "What are you going to do with that with that degree?"
- Weren't you a drummer?
- Well, yes, I was... [Kimberly laughing] Well, that's how I made money, was playing drums and working at a radio station.
But my studies were in English and political science, not in journalism.
But it was the impact of the professors.
- Yes.
- That actually began with my high school senior English teacher, who recognized my ability to write.
That made me curious, that led me into a career of curiosity.
But it was the foundation of studying English, studying political science, being exposed to others who thought differently than what I had traditionally been taught that opened up the world for me.
And I think that's part of the value of education that some traditionalists may miss at times.
- No, I completely agree with you.
I think the primary thing that you gain from a college education, you gain a lot of knowledge, you gain some skills, but most importantly, you gain exposure to ideas, to people, to areas of study that are completely foreign to you.
And not only that you have that exposure, but that you learn to benefit from that exposure because that's what you carry with you the rest of your life.
It's the ability to talk to somebody, to sit down and have a conversation with someone that you may not agree with, about things that you may disagree with vehemently, but how to have a productive, mutually beneficial, and civil discussion about those things.
How do you approach new ideas and new challenges?
We have things facing us today... Just this happens.
This has happened throughout history, things happen.
New innovations come up.
Artificial intelligence is here.
We have to be able to come together, talk, use our differences creatively, use them as catalysts, use them as that kind of stickiness that actually brings innovation.
And that's what we need.
That's what students need to get from a university education: how to do that.
- I talk about this with people a lot, about finding the intersection of tradition and innovation, so you're not discounting what that tradition has been and continues to be, but you have to live into innovation.
And oftentimes, I find it, as I think you would, with students who may challenge the institutional thinking, of saying, "Well, have we tried this?
What if we do it?
What do we have to lose by trying?"
- Yes.
I'm a very solutions-based person.
I don't like it when people say, "We can't do something," or "That's too hard," or "We're not able to solve that problem."
We need to develop people who have that "Yes, we can, and we're gonna figure it out, and we're gonna use ideas, and we're gonna go looking for things.
We're gonna talk to people that we've never talked to before to see what they think, to see how they can come together."
So that's where this tradition of building certain skills in a liberal arts tradition; critical thinking, communication, interdisciplinary perspectives, all of those things can come to bear as we then take that core foundation of those abilities and bring them to meet the new innovative challenges of the 21st century.
And that's where I see we're having lots of conversations nationally about the evolution of liberal arts.
We are certainly evolving as an institution, and I think in very productive and important ways that are only gonna benefit our students and that are only gonna benefit our region.
- Think of how far we've come in just the past year when we look at artificial intelligence.
12, 18 months ago, there were so many discussions about how we feared this, how this could be misused, how we thought plagiarism was a problem for students.
Now, this is just going to make it exponentially worse.
And while some of those challenges remain, of course, we have now begun to learn how to harness this and to say, "What can we take from it based on the prompt that we give it?"
- Yes.
I hate to say this, but we, in languages, are way ahead of the game.
Do you remember back when Babbel came out?
Duolingo?
- [David] Yes.
- But also all the translation software, that happened early on in my academic career.
And all of a sudden, everyone in languages was like, "We're out of a job, because now students can use translation software, they don't even need to learn the language."
Not so.
We have seen that that's not been the case.
And so what did we do?
We pivoted from seeing it as a threat to seeing it as an absolutely invaluable tool.
We could teach students how to use the translation software, how to critique it, how to understand the shortcomings, and thereby gain a greater understanding of the language.
We found that students actually became more proficient and more confident in languages when they learned how to use, critique, and sometimes manipulate the translation software.
I think we're gonna see exactly the same thing.
We're gonna see ways of studying stylistics.
We're gonna see ways of studying ideological points of view that are made possible because AI can allow us to manipulate and look at text in different ways.
I think it's an incredible opportunity that needs to be carefully managed and understood.
- I love your optimism.
[Kimberly chuckles] Very much so.
And I thank you for this time.
- Yeah, it's been a pleasure.
- Dr. Kimberly van Noort, here at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, all the best to you.
- Thank you, David.
[bright thoughtful music] [bright thoughtful music continues] [bright thoughtful music continues] [bright thoughtful music continues] - [Announcer] Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.
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Dr. Kimberly van Noort on AI in Education
Video has Closed Captions
Dr. Kimberly van Noort, chancellor of UNC Asheville, discusses new technologies in education. (1m 15s)
Dr. Kimberly van Noort on Encouraging Students’ Passions
Video has Closed Captions
Dr. Kimberly van Noort, chancellor of UNC Asheville, discusses her approach to inspiring students. (2m 1s)
Dr. Kimberly van Noort on Hurricane Helene at UNC Asheville
Video has Closed Captions
Dr. Kimberly van Noort, chancellor of UNC Asheville, discusses the impact of Hurricane Helene. (3m 12s)
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