By SUSAN JONES

Pitt begins a new era today with its 19th and first female chancellor, Joan Gabel, starting her tenure.

Unlike her predecessor, Gabel has a long history in higher education as a law professor, dean, provost and most recently as president of a large public university. But like outgoing Chancellor Patrick Gallagher, she had some personal as well as professional reasons to come to Pitt.

While Gallagher is a Pitt alumnus, Gabel brings a different perspective as the mother of a Pitt senior.

“When this is your life, when this is your good fortune to be in this work, you ask yourself, ‘Where do I want to hitch my wagon? What kind of a place do I want to be?’” she said. “And oftentimes you’re making that decision very blindly. You’re looking at research productivity and student demand and the balance sheet. But I had a glimpse into the heart here, and I liked what I saw. So when Pat announced (he was stepping down), I was interested, and yes, my son and his experience here were definitely part of that.”

Gabel and Gallagher had become friends through the Association of American Universities (AAU), which Gallagher chaired from 2021-22 and Gabel was a member of as the University of Minnesota’s president.

Coming to Pitt with experience running another large public university has advantages, she said, “but I don’t think there’s really anything from Minnesota that I just want to do here. I don’t want to turn Pitt into anything other than Pitt’s best self.”

Gabel sat down with the University Times last week in a wide-ranging conversation as she prepared to take the helm at Pitt.

Transitioning into the job

Since she was named as Gallagher’s successor in April, Gabel has been far from idle.

“It’s been very exciting. It’s a very invigorating thing to look at a next opportunity with a lot of optimism,” she said. “It is busy because obviously I was very committed to a smooth transition in my previous post and that takes time and attention, while also wanting to learn as much as I could so that I could hit the ground running here. I’m very grateful to Pat because he did, I think, everything one can do to ensure that things were ready for smooth transition on this side.”

She also brought with her Bill Haldeman, who was chief strategy officer at Minnesota and worked with Gabel at the University of South Carolina. He is serving as vice chancellor for strategic initiatives at Pitt.

“He is going to help us tell our story in a strategic way — take Plan for Pitt, which is an excellent plan, and think about the way in which transition allows us to consider the future,” she said.

Gabel has a strong interest in strategic planning. She led Minnesota in developing its first systemwide strategic plan — MPact 2025 — and is happy to not be starting from ground zero on a plan for Pitt.

“We have an existing plan, which is great, because they take a lot of time, and there’s been a lot of really deep dive shared governance that went into developing that plan,” she said. “I feel like that gives me a running start, rather than a standing start, in thinking about how to bring that plan to life and how to have it inform our decision-making priorities and opportunities going forward.”

At Minnesota, she very early on reorganized the office of the president — eliminating the chief of staff role and instead having two special assistants for operations and strategy. She doesn’t anticipate doing that here.

“One of the lessons that I learned while I was at Minnesota,” she said, “was that one of the best ways to do this job well is to keep all of the plates in the air, and that is a team sport.” Gabel said she was rather glad the chief of staff role — filled by Kevin Washo, who also headed the transition team — existed here in a way “that felt very integrated. It made a lot of sense to me. And so I think I’m going to keep it the way it is here.”

Challenges and opportunities ahead

Gabel knows she’ll have to talk to and listen to Pitt’s constituents to learn all the issues and opportunities the University faces, but “I think Pitt is going to face the same headwinds that everyone is facing,” she said, including the upcoming demographic cliff, which will mean fewer students coming out of high school into higher education.

“Higher ed is changing in really, I think, almost existential ways,” she said. “The way in which the pandemic introduced technology into our classrooms, the changing demographics, we are in the crosshairs politically in ways we’ve never been before or haven’t in modern times been before. And there’s a lot of competition.”

The cornerstone challenge for higher education is demand, Gabel said, “and being prepared to express what makes you distinct and what creates the best opportunities for your students and … the faculty and staff, in order for the university to thrive. I’m not worried about that here, by the way. I just think it’s one of the challenges.”

She said Pitt also needs to make sure that whatever it does to confront this challenge is accessible, “and that’s hard.”

The state budget

Gabel may be new to Pitt, but one of the first problems she’ll face is an old one — waiting on the state to pass its budget, along with the appropriation for Pitt and the three other state-related universities.

As of July 17, there was no end in sight to the impasse that caused lawmakers to again miss the June 30 budget deadline. And none of the funding bills for Pitt, Penn State and Temple have been able to get the votes of two-thirds of lawmakers, as required.

“Ideally, the budget would have been finished and we would have transitioned with that set,” Gabel said. “That’s not going to happen, and this is the nature of the work. … It’s not like these things don’t happen. I think my role (on the budget issues) will depend on the decisions that are made in Harrisburg around what they’re going to do to get the budget over the finish line. We’ll respond accordingly — just pick up the baton wherever they place it and go from there.”

Gabel has had phone-call meetings with Gov. Josh Shapiro and some legislative committee chairs, “and everyone’s been lovely,” she said.

Shared governance and unions

From the moment she was announced as Pitt’s next chancellor, Gabel said she is a big believer in shared governance, no matter what form it takes.

“I was a faculty senator in my own career, and I think that everything interesting that’s happened at universities — above and beyond the individual discoveries of our faculty — is a result of our process, which is shared,” she said. “That is how you create intellectual community and how you expand knowledge and how you evolve. And so I believe in it deeply. I also think it needs to evolve, and I think we see that happening in real time here.”

Collective bargaining is one of the ways shared governance is evolving, she said. “I think the unions and unionization is a reflection of different stakeholder groups wanting things to be done differently. And I think it’s incumbent on us to meet people individually and as groups where they are.”

Gabel has been briefed on the ongoing faculty union negotiations and recent moves by a fledgling staff union, but only at the highest level and has not yet done a deep dive on the issues. At Minnesota, there are several groups represented by unions, she said, including faculty at two of the university’s five campuses. She also dealt with a faculty union at her first administrative job at Florida State.

One issue that’s raised eyebrows with many on campus is the $950,000 base salary Gabel will receive, as set by the Board of Trustees’ Compensation Committee — an increase of more than $250,000 over Gallagher’s final salary. This comes at a time when the faculty union is trying to get a minimum $60,000 salary for full-time faculty.

“The board did an analysis of where chancellor and president salaries are and made me an offer, and that is the basis for my salary,” Gabel said. “And I think we need to do the same appropriate analysis for every single person within the organization and negotiate to something fair and acceptable accordingly.”

Safety on campus

Recent protests and hoax shooter incidents at Pitt have raised awareness about safety issues, which Gabel is all too familiar with from her time at Minnesota. The school’s main campus is in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed by city police officers in 2020.

Like Pitt, the campus is in the middle of the city, but is under the jurisdiction of the University of Minnesota Police Department of about 60 officers. The surrounding area, where many faculty, staff and students live and socialize, is in Minneapolis Police jurisdiction.

“After George Floyd's murder, we as a campus wanted to express our dismay with those events and decided to not hire city of Minneapolis Police for … special services (such as special events, bomb squad, etc.),” Gabel said. There were several other law enforcement agencies in the area that the university used for these overtime services. 

“The Minneapolis police chief was consulted. This was not done knee jerk,” she said, clarifying that the university never “divorced” the Minneapolis Police. “And when the Minneapolis Police changed some of their training and systems, we restored fully our relationship with them this past fall.”

Universities have a tough balance to strike between safety and public access, Gabel said. “You have concerns about access and safety, and yet you're a part of the community and you're a public place. People want to be able to come and go. We have lots of people who use and enjoy university facilities who may or may not have an ID card,” she said.

“I don't know a single university campus, whether they're within a metro or not, that isn't doing an analysis on how to strike that balance specific to their opportunities and challenges. I don't know where that analysis is here, but I'm quite sure that it's happening, and I look forward to learning more about it.

Being ‘visible and present’

Gabel said she plans to be “visible and present” on campus as she does a “pulse check” on where Pitt is, “especially the more back at it in person we are. We lost a lot of that over the last few years — all of us everywhere — and I've missed it. I think a lot of people have missed it.”

She, of course, has a strong connection to a least one student on campus, but is thinking about ways to expand on that. “Some of the things that I've done since I was a department chair, we just do at scale now. I need to see how they work here.” These include floating office hours, receptions or after-speaker talking groups. “There are all kinds of activities and things that one can do in order to be present in the community,” she said.

On her first day, Gabel released an emailed statement to the entire Pitt community, along with a video greeting. 

She is asking people to send their thoughts and ideas about where Pitt is and where it is going to her directly through a feedback form, “in anticipation of more future face-to-face conversations this fall.” 

The form asks: 

• What makes Pitt special, unique or distinct? 

• What do you think I should know about Pitt?

• Where is your favorite spot on campus? 

• Where is your favorite ice cream place?

Moving in

Gabel and her husband, Gary, are mostly moved into the chancellor’s residence on the border of Oakland and Shadyside.

“The facilities folks here have been unbelievably helpful. And my husband’s a saint,” she said. “Between those two things, we’re most of the way there where now I can find my toothpaste, and that’s good.”

One of the changes made at the house before the Gabels arrival was installation of an EV charger for their plug-in hybrid Volvo. Pitt has been expanding the number of EV stations on campus over the past few years. “If you read what all the automakers are intending and the administration is intending, we will need more plugins,” Gabel said. “For now, they’ve set me up and I’m very grateful.

The move puts them close to their one son for the short time until he graduates and in between a daughter in Seattle and a son in Cambridge, Mass. Gabel said her son wasn’t a natural target for Pitt recruiters because of where they lived. “He knew that he wanted to study computer science and had other attributes that he wanted, and wrote an algorithm, coded it, and Pitt came out on top. And that was it.”

She was familiar with Pittsburgh because a good friend from undergraduate school in eastern Pennsylvania was from here and moved back after journeying throughout the world. “I had visited her and her family, and also just felt like I knew it because of hearing about it from her, and then started coming back obviously more robustly when my child arrived. …

“I will say, Pittsburgh has a national reputation that I think people know, of being very, very nice. And I’m very pleased to learn that it’s true.”

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

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