President Milliken shares highlights from his conversation with UC Davis Chancellor Gary May

President Milliken shared the following post on his Substack, “The Gold and the Blue, Volume 22,” on June 29, 2026.

I recently sat down with UC Davis Chancellor Gary May as part of my ongoing series of discussions with UC campus leaders. You can watch our conversation here.

Chancellor May is an engineer by training, and it shows in useful and sometimes amusing ways. During my one-on-one conversations with each of our chancellors last summer when I started as president, his answers — and our call — were by far the shortest, but I can’t say he missed a thing. His responses were direct, data-driven, and to the point. No wasted words. Unlike me, he’s never billed by the hour. I joked during our discussion that he needed to stretch out his responses so we could learn more about him — and fill our allotted hour — and he kindly obliged.

Gary grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. His mother was a public school teacher and among the first students who integrated the University of Missouri in the 1950s. He became interested in engineering during a summer science and math program in high school and earned a bachelor’s in electrical engineering at Georgia Tech before earning his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in electrical engineering and computer science. He returned to his alma mater, Georgia Tech, and spent 26 years on the faculty, eventually serving as dean of its College of Engineering. When he arrived at UC Davis in 2017, he found “a sleeping giant”: a university of remarkable excellence that was, for a variety of reasons, reluctant to say so. He set out to change that.

Nine years later, UC Davis is no longer sleeping. It is the second-ranked public university in the country by the Wall Street Journal — its highest national ranking ever — and has achieved that while enrolling more students from all California populations at historic highs. Forty percent of students are first-generation. The average high school GPA of those students is above a 4.0. Excellence and representation, as Gary put it, are not mutually exclusive. UC Davis is proving that every day.

The UC Davis research enterprise tells a similar story. For each of the past five years, UC Davis has averaged a billion dollars in external research funding, a distinction very few universities can claim. Like universities across the country, UC Davis has also sustained losses due to the federal government’s actions, including one we haven’t heard as much about: the loss of nearly $100 million in USAID-funded agricultural and public health initiatives around the world. This has been a significant blow to the communities those programs served, and it’s a reminder of the global consequences that occur when the federal government retreats from its commitments to research.

Davis is the largest UC campus by area: 5,300 acres, or several times larger than UC Berkeley. That land reflects the university’s DNA: a world-leading College of Agriculture, a No. 1 veterinary school just endowed with the largest philanthropic gift in the history of that profession, and a wine and viticulture program that Chancellor May describes as number one in the world, though he acknowledged a few in France may disagree. I can confirm that UC Davis’s own Cabernet is very good.

I’ve been eager to hear from all our campus leaders about AI, and I appreciated Gary’s take. As an engineer, he has worked with neural networks since the 1990s. We share a bullishness about the technology, and anticipate it will not replace people, but rather those who know how to use it will have a distinct advantage. It was also good to hear about UC Davis’s research underway to address AI’s sustainability challenges, including a modular approach to data centers that could significantly reduce energy consumption.

One of the most tangible expressions of UC Davis’s ambition is Aggie Square, a roughly one-million-square-foot innovation district in Sacramento that opened last year. I recently had the chance to tour Aggie Square, and it’s remarkable. The vision brings university research, industry partners, startups, and the broader community together through housing and office space in one place to accelerate the development of discoveries in technology and health sciences. With the city of Sacramento as a key partner, 11 startups already signed on, and several larger companies in the pipeline, Aggie Square is on its way to adding thousands of jobs and half a billion dollars in annual economic activity to the region. Initiatives like this show the land-grant mission in action.

With Chancellor May’s leadership, the sleeping giant is fully awake, and the campus is charging full-steam ahead.

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