Stepping Down, and Ramping Up
Maj. Gen. Allen Boyette, an assistant vice chancellor for Campus Operations and Maintenance, has retired from the U.S. Army after 37 years of service. He’ll continue in his position on campus.
The day after Maj. Gen. Allen Boyette ’87 retired from the U.S. Army, following 37 years of service — including 31 years in the North Carolina National Guard — he did the same thing he’s been doing on most days for the last quarter century: He came to work at NC State.
Boyette, an NC State engineering and ROTC graduate, has been working in parallel careers, one in the military and one in the facilities division of his alma mater. Since 2021, he has served as the assistant vice chancellor for Campus Operations and Maintenance, after holding other positions in facilities since he began working here in 2001. In 2017, he was named major general in the NCNG, the top non-full-time position in the guard.
“It was something I enjoyed until my last day, and I think I was still adding value to the unit,” Boyette says. “But there comes a time to move on and make way for others to have the opportunity to serve in a leadership role.”
Boyette’s service was celebrated at a Dec. 19 retirement ceremony, where he was also named to the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, the highest honor North Carolina’s governor can bestow upon an individual.
While his military career ended at the beginning of this month, Boyette has no plans to step away from his civilian duties. In fact, since he got bored when campus shut down at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, he began taking online graduate courses every semester. Now he’s two semesters and a dissertation away from earning a Ph.D. in public administration.
A Life — and 2 Careers — Devoted to Service
The common thread in Boyette’s chosen fields has been service, ever since he got the first phone call in 1996 while he was cutting a tree off his house after Hurricane Fran to find out he was being deployed statewide to help families recover from one of North Carolina’s worst natural disasters.
“Whether it’s been at NC State in facilities or in the National Guard, my jobs have been focused on being in service and support roles,” Boyette says. “With the National Guard, it was always about supporting the citizens of North Carolina and the nation. Those things have been of great interest to me.
“At NC State, what we do in facilities is support the teaching, research and learning students do on campus.”
He has found a way to make both careers work with a symbiotic relationship.
“I’ve taken things I’ve learned in the military and brought them here to NC State,” he says. “And I’ve taken what I learned at NC State with me on the assignments I had in the military.
“They were pretty complementary careers.”
While on active duty, he worked in Korea and Monterey, California, before returning to North Carolina to begin his NC State career, get married and start a family. He and his wife, Wanda, raised three sons and are now helping with two grandchildren.
His military duties and assignments included recovery work, police protection, guarding bridges, search and rescue operations, and debris removal.
“It was all kinds of weird stuff we do to help people out,” Boyette says, with a laugh evoked by memories good and bad.
During COVID, Boyette chaired a working group that helped unclog the state’s food supply chain, bringing together the state’s Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Agriculture, industry and restaurant groups, and local governments to help deliver food to those affected by the pandemic.
“It was something that was definitely not what I trained for, but it was serious stuff for those people,” he says. “Turns out, what they needed most was emergency management and organizational skills.”
Finding a Silver Lining
Boyette, a native of Wilson, never intended to earn advanced academic degrees, but through NC State’s Tuition Waiver Program for employees, he began taking graduate classes in public administration just after COVID hit.
“To be honest, with the students off campus during that time, it was kind of slow around here,” he says. “All the classes were online, so I started with one class. I do a lot of reading anyway, so it really wasn’t that much different than my daily work.”
Before long, he had reached a point where he needed to enroll in a specific program and choose a doctoral thesis.
He hopes to defend his dissertation studying the relationship between energy production and people sometime in 2027, spending the time he has gained from his NCNG retirement on a worthwhile activity.
