By SUSAN JONES
Joe McCarthy, who came to Pitt nearly 26 years ago and has served as interim provost since last July, is set to remove the interim tag and take over the position permanently, Chancellor Joan Gabel announced on March 6.
“Dr. McCarthy is an accomplished academic leader and scientist with a proven commitment to putting students first,” Gabel wrote in a message announcing the appointment to the Pitt community. “I’m excited to officially welcome him to the University’s senior leadership team.”
McCarthy will be Pitt’s ninth provost and senior vice chancellor, after being approved by the Board of Trustees as an officer of the University at its April 5 meeting. He took over as interim provost when Ann Cudd left for Portland State University last year.
Gabel pointed to McCarthy’s accomplishments already during his time as interim provost — “launching the University’s Academic Leadership Team structure, leveraging his cost management expertise to address the value proposition of higher education, and representing Pitt on the state’s Higher Education Task Force, helping the University to amplify how we fit into the overall state funding model.”
As chief academic officer, McCarthy will continue to oversee undergraduate, graduate and professional education; the colleges, schools and academic units across Pitt; academic and research programs and policies; promotion and tenure; and faculty development.
“I am both honored and grateful to have been selected to serve as Pitt’s provost,” McCarthy said in a news release from Pitt. “Having been at Pitt for more than 25 years — indeed my entire career — I am deeply committed to doing everything in my ability to support the diverse and talented community of scholars and professionals that comprise this exceptional University.”
Robin Kear, University Senate president, said in the news release that McCarthy “is an outstanding choice to lead Pitt’s efforts to build on the existing excellence of our faculty, teaching, research and academic programs. His commitment to leading during transition exemplifies his dedication to the University, and for several years he has been a driving force behind the advancement of our academic mission. I look forward to continued partnership with him through shared governance for the benefit of all students, staff and faculty.”
The national search for a new provost was led by Anantha Shekhar, senior vice chancellor for health sciences, who said that he was “delighted with the selection of Dr. Joe McCarthy as Pitt’s next provost. His experience and knowledge, combined with a proven track record of creative and successful academic leadership, make him the ideal candidate to lead Pitt’s academic mission.”
Before becoming interim provost, McCarthy had served as vice provost of undergraduate studies since 2017.
McCarthy has been at Pitt since 1998 as a professor in the Swanson School of Engineering’s Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering. “I’ve been at Pitt for so long that people thought I was a student when I first started here,” he told the audience at a Staff Council “Coffee and Conversation” event in November. “I was 27 when I came to Pitt back in 1998 … and have seen a lot of change in 25 years.”
His family moved to Pittsburgh from Long Island, N.Y., when McCarthy was in high school so that his father could work for the Hillman Corporation, whose work fueled the Hillman Foundation and funded Pitt’s main library. He attended Fox Chapel High School, where he met his wife before attending Notre Dame for college.
He told the Staff Council gathering that he was a “reluctant administrator, to be honest. It’s fun for me to admit now that I got into administration actually because of research efforts devoted toward education.”
In the early 2000s, he wrote a successful grant that brought more than $1.5 million to revamp his department’s curriculum. The success of this work also brought a call for him to run it as the school’s undergraduate coordinator.
Given “the positive impact that that curriculum had on hundreds and hundreds of Pitt students over the years,” he said, “I just really got inspired to continue to have an impact on Pitt as an institution,” but still it never would have occurred to him to apply for the vice provost of undergraduate studies position.
But a call from the provost’s office convinced him to consider it. “Immediately it clicked for me that the impact that I was having on roughly 600 students at a time (in engineering) would be amplified by orders of magnitude … and so I stepped up and have been in the provost’s office ever since.”
McCarthy also served as interim dean of the David C. Frederick Honors College in early 2021 and led the University’s decennial evaluation with the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, between 2020 and 2022.
As a Pitt faculty member, McCarthy has earned a number of accolades, including the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award, James Pommersheim Award for Excellence in Teaching in Chemical Engineering and Carnegie Science Award for Higher Education. He has a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Notre Dame and a Ph.D. in the same subject from Northwestern.
When he was named interim provost last year, McCarthy said he wasn’t sure if he would throw his hat in the ring for the permanent provost position. He said then that he was going to wait and see how he and Gabel worked together and how their priorities aligned. “If all of that lines up, and I think it’d be beneficial to Pitt for me to apply, then I’ll consider it.”
One of the challenges he’ll face as provost is filling several key positions, including vice provost of undergraduate studies, which Amanda Godley has taken on in the past several months in addition to her role as vice provost of graduate studies. A search also is underway for a new vice provost for student affairs to replace Kenyon Bonner, who left in January.
Search committees also are working to find new deans of the Swanson School of Engineering and the School of Education. In addition, a search is upcoming for dean of the School of Law.
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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