When Chancellor Patricia A. Sullivan announced her retirement to the UNCG Board of Trustees before a crowd of well-wishers and a battery of TV news cameras, she ended her remarks with a special thank you.

“That's my husband and faithful partner, Charlie. Serving in a position like chancellor takes a great deal of time and focus. And I could not have been able to dedicate myself fully to this task without his constant guidance, his support and his love. And his criticism when he didn't like the way things were going.

“He'd always remind me when I came home at night that I wasn't the chancellor at home. He has shared with me a wonderful enthusiasm for UNCG, and has been willing to do everything I have asked him to do to help support our joint work. I'm so grateful to you, Charlie.”

The two smiled at each other. Then the meeting moved on as the trustees worked through their agenda. Charlie Sullivan ducked out.

People who meet Charlie Sullivan usually address him as “Mr. Sullivan,” unaware that he holds both a master's and a PhD in electrical engineering from New York University. They also don’t know that he had a 25-year career in the corporate world with General Electric and Texas Instruments, where he worked on the analysis, design and computer simulation of semiconductor devices and fabrication technology and the development of semiconductor engineering software.

That's OK with Sullivan, who says he is comfortable with “Charlie” in nearly all circumstances. Over the past 13 years, people have known him as the genial co-host of hundreds of UNCG special events that have taken place on campus or at the Bryan House, which serves as the chancellor's off-campus residence.

He's a lean, tall northerner who grew up on Staten Island, N.Y., coincidentally, just up the block from Patricia Sullivan. In their teen years, she was a candy striper who considered going into medicine, but, ultimately, became fascinated with biology. He was interested in science and math, and engineering satisfied that urge to understand how things worked. They began dating in college, after they met at the Manhattan Engineers Ball when he was a junior at Manhattan College. They were married in June of 1966, which will make it 42 years this year.

Since their arrival in Greensboro in 1995, people in the Triad have been hearing their anniversary message, “…celebrating 39 years,” ”…celebrating 40 years,” “celebrating 41 years of marriage” on WFDD-FM, the NPR affiliate in Winston-Salem.

The long road to Greensboro
As with any dual-doctorate couple, they had career decisions to make in order to put all that education to work. Opportunity rewards talent and ambition, but there are always trade-offs, and the Sullivans followed a long, looping path between New York, Texas and the Triad before they settled in Greensboro.

That journey began after graduate school, when Charlie took an engineering job with General Electric in upstate New York and she began teaching and doing research at Wells College. There, they discovered that for people who enjoy sunshine, the winters in upstate New York aren't much fun. “It was the fact that from the end of September to the following May, you hardly saw the sun,” he says. “It seemed like winter lasted half the year.” They stayed a decade.

Texas was their next stop, when he went to work with Texas Instruments, one of the nation's leaders in developing and commercializing semiconductor and computer technology. She joined Texas Woman's University, but was only there two years as a faculty member and director of the Biology Honors Program.

Then she was hired as dean of Salem College in Winston-Salem. That started six years of commuter-marriage as Charlie stayed with Texas Instruments and caught many Friday evening flights to Greensboro on what was then Piedmont Airlines. There was good return service on Sunday evenings. “It wasn't every weekend, but we made it work,” he says.

They found themselves together again when she returned to Texas Woman's University as vice president for academic affairs. Her boss was Dr. Shirley Chater, who would eventually become President Bill Clinton's Commissioner of the Social Security Administration. When Chater left, Patricia Sullivan handled the president's duties at TWU for a year. The experience helped position her for UNCG's top job.