On Friday, April 22, Chancellor Sartarelli delivered his final address and 28th report to the UNCW Board of Trustees at their quarterly meeting. The chancellor’s retirement in June will end his nearly seven years of employment at the university, during which UNCW experienced the highest rate of growth in the UNC system. Sartarelli’s time as chancellor has been marked by both academic and economic successes as well as social backlash and controversy.

I was a shy freshman eager to build a sense of community. During high school, I attended church on both Wednesdays and Sundays, occasionally leading lessons for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes club in my high school gymnasium. I talked about how I coped with anxiety and learned to become more comfortable in my own body—practical sentiments that helped me trudge through the living hell that is high school itself. But the type of Christianity that I would soon encounter in Wilmington was a bit more intense. In the fall of 2019, I joined an organization that would change the course of my life entirely—one that furthered the doubts about my Christian faith that I had been suppressing for quite some time, far longer than I ever wanted to admit.

On March 27, 2019, UNC Wilmington hosted a lecture by Derreck Kayongo, founder of the Global Soap Project, in an event part of the university's annual Leadership Lecture Series. The Leadership Lecture...