By SUSAN JONES

Ever since Chancellor Joan Gabel started at Pitt nearly nine months ago, she’s been talking about strategic planning and updating the Plan for Pitt. At the April 4 Board of Trustees’ meeting, that vision evolved into some very tangible goals and deadlines.

“I think it’s really important for our community to know that almost everything that’s identified in the strategic plan were things that were either already planned by the entity, person or office that’s responsible for it, or were hoped to be planned,” Gabel said in an interview before the trustees’ meeting. “I see this plan as a capture. We didn’t create these initiatives, we pulled them together.”

The initiatives range from increasing the number of distinguished national and international awards received by Pitt faculty and students to expanding the Pitt Success Pell Match program and creating ways to recognize staff excellence. Gabel said the initiatives are based on feedback from faculty, staff and students.

She said that her administration — which includes chief strategy officer Bill Haldeman, who came with Gabel from the University Minnesota — inherited “excellent work” from the 2018 plan. Being new, she was able to listen objectively and bring a fresh perspective to the plan as they asked what units were working on and when they hoped to finish the work.

Gabel presented the latest update on the Plan for Pitt 2028 to the Board of Trustees at its April 4 meeting. The board voted unanimously to support the strategies, goals and direction of the new strategic plan and to encourage the chancellor and the University community to move forward with implementation of the Plan for Pitt 2028.

John Verbanec, the trustees’ chair-elect who will take over in July, thanked Gabel and her team “for a tremendous amount of work in a short period of time. … You heard our expectations well over the continued evolution of this plan and I couldn’t be happier.”

Senate President Robin Kear said also congratulated Gabel’s and her team. “I am so pleased to see the Plan for Pitt come together in more detail as it guides us for the next four years. The dashboard and progress cards will be useful tools for internal and external conversations. In each section, I can see how much thought and background work went into the formulation of concrete targets that will position us for more success in a great variety of areas. External events will always influence what we do, it is how we respond that makes the difference for our future, and the Plan for Pitt will actively drive our decision making on what is most important.”

One of the key aspects of the plan is to make the goals measurable and transparent, with achievable deadlines, and to show how they align with the five pillars that have been identified as Pitt’s key values.

Those values, which Gabel outlined last fall, are: cultivating student success; propelling scholarship, creativity and innovation; being welcoming and engaged; promoting accountability and trust; and “It’s Possible at Pitt” — the big ideas that will benefit society.

A new Plan for Pitt dashboard on the chancellor’s website will “give us the tools to tell our story well, in an outward facing, really kind of PR way,” Gabel told the trustees. It highlights each of the five pillars of the strategic plan and addresses how Pitt is addressing the way people are talking about the role of higher education in society, including responding to some myths like “No one wants to go to college anymore.” 

A separate Progress Card, which also is public facing, shows what the goals are under each pillar, along with different initiatives, targets and deadlines to reach those goals. This will help guide administrative decisions and track where Pitt is headed over the life of the plan, through 2028.

For instance, under cultivating student success, one focus is on enrollment. The progress card shows an outcome of “Meet undergraduate enrollment targets for Pittsburgh campus by 2025 and 2028.” The baseline from fall 2023 is 20,220. The target for 2025 is 20,720, and for 2028 is 22,000. One of the key initiatives to achieve this is expanding the Pitt Success Pell Match Program. The goal is to increase the percentage of Pell-eligible students attending Pitt, and Gabel said they are already exploring ways to expand the current Pitt Success program to meet that goal.

Demand to attend Pitt is at an all-time high. The chancellor reported that the Office of Admissions and Financial Aid has hit another record, with 59,907 applications submitted for the first-time students in the fall 2024 term.

The strategic plan also addresses University finances under the accountability and trust pillar. One of the outcomes is to reduce administrative overhead. “It is a strategy of this administration and intention of this administration to operate efficiently, to think about cost management, to reduce the administrative overhead writ large, both centrally and within each of the units of the institution,” Gabel said.

She said she’ll need to work with deans, senior vice chancellors and others about their budgets. “But there’s a difference between the strategic plan and the budget. So the strategy is to be as intentional about cost reduction as possible, while also being able to be strategic around launching new programs, growing revenue, making strategic investments and what will attract new students, attract new opportunities to the institution, and doing those concurrently.”

Other initiatives

Currently, there are nearly 50 initiatives listed on the Progress Card, including many that are already underway, such as reforming the general education requirements.

One of the projects is launching the PittForce Portfolio. The goal of this initiative is to create a portfolio of degrees in teaching, nursing and more that meet the workforce needs of the city and the commonwealth. These degrees will be “a lower-cost, hybrid and applied educational experience that leverage Pitt’s strengths, know-how and subject matter expertise,” according to a description of the project. The Progress Card says the goal is to launch the PittForce program by 2026.

Under the “We will be welcoming and engaging” pillar, one of the goals is to be an employer of choice. “We are a large employer, we want everyone who works here to feel a sense of opportunity, of optimism,” Gabel said at the board meeting. Initiatives under that goal include:

Launch New Employee Engagement Survey by 2025:. Work is already underway by the Office of Human Resources and others to set the scope and goals of the survey, which will provide insight into employee engagement.

Complete Staff Recognition Plan by 2025: Gabel said Staff Council has been a “really strong advocate for the critical role that the staff play in the excellence of the institution.” There’s always been clearly defined structures to recognize work by faculty and students in higher education, but there’s not a similar structure for staff. The plan would work with Human Resources to create that structure.

Labor Relations Initiative: This initiative recognizes the importance and evolving nature of labor relations at the University, with the Union of Pitt Faculty negotiating its first contract and staff hoping to vote on unionization soon. The plan is to develop this initiative over the course of the next year.

Other goals tackle everything from sustainability and the life sciences, including the new BioForge project, to promoting the free exchange of ideas and amplifying Pitt’s story.

Gabel said one of the goals of the plan is to close the gap between Pitt’s already strong reputation and “the even stronger excellence you see when you’re here. …. If the plan is working, that gap will close and everyone would know how wonderful things are here in the classroom, as a place to work and learn, as a community, and as a place where knowledge is created and expanded.”

Some notable initiatives include:

Launch IP Revenue Plan by 2025: Increase intellectual property output as part of a broader strategy to elevate overall tech commercialization and innovation ecosystem.

Launch Health Sciences Innovation Initiative by 2026: This will leverage the strength of Pitt’s health sciences, including BioForge, to elevate an innovation ecosystem that translates into commercial opportunities and transactions, like patents, disclosures, licenses, startups and IP revenue.

Launch Digital Future Initiative by 2024: This will help create the future of education by responsibly and ethically embracing digital technology across the University. It will connect the dots for things happening already and resources from dozens of offices across Pitt. The goal for the Digital Future Initiative is to highlight, leverage and connect Pitt’s momentum and substantial resources in the digital landscape that are emerging or already activated, and elevate Pitt as a digital leader.

Launch Wellness Concierge in summer 2024: Led by Student Affairs, the program will offer a comprehensive approach to student well-being by emphasizing self-awareness, goal setting and personalized support to foster a holistic and thriving University community.

Launch Pitt Housing Plan by 2025: The housing plan will work in tandem with the campus master plan work that is just starting. This plan will address both on-campus and off-campus housing options with the goal of increasing undergraduate enrollment.

Gabel said after the Board of Trustees meeting that some of Pitt’s increased enrollment would be online or hybrid, and wouldn’t increase the population density on campus. But Pitt is working with a firm on master planning that will look at increasing student numbers on campus. “We give ourselves a certain number of years before we even want to hit the target so that we have time to make sure that we can create the environment to allow for that number of students to arrive comfortably.”

What’s next?

The chancellor said her role puts her “in a unique position to see where things are intersecting, to hear about all the different things that are going on at the same time and to create this structure for other people to see that and to communicate about that. … And also to create support. Some of that’s financial, some of that is structural. Some of that is, I think, emotional. And some of that is whatever the person says they need. It’s not necessarily up to me to decide what kind of support people need. People need to tell me what they need, and I need to listen to them. And some of it is for me to create all that and get out of the way.”

Gabel said this summer will be the first phase of execution of the plan. She will start with a retreat with her office staff and then more broadly with the senior leadership team. “And I would expect the provost to go with the deans and I assume vice chancellors would be doing it within their teams, so they know the things that they expect to get done that year.” The Haldeman will start checking with each of the units on how it’s going.

“We have this natural set of deadlines over the next five years,” she said. “It gives us some ability to predict what we would prioritize year after year. It gives us some room now to anticipate what we would be working on and then also to make room for the unknown — we don’t know what they are, but we know they’ll come.”

Liaisons with different board committees also would be checking on the timing of when things would be presented to the board, “so they understand the real impact of a decision that they’ve made.”

The chancellor hopes that the initiatives create pride in the Pitt community. “While we do want to be able to show that what we’re doing is happening, and it’s real, what we hope is that it makes you proud; that it is more qualitative. I think the way that you create buy-in in a community of thinkers is more by testimonial and example.”

Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.

Have a story idea or news to share? Share it with the University Times.

Follow the University Times on Twitter and Facebook.