By SUSAN JONES
The Board of Trustees selected Joan T.A. Gabel, president of the University of Minnesota’s System and Twin Cities campus, on April 3 to be the 19th chancellor and the first woman to lead the University of Pittsburgh.
She and husband Gary also are parents of a Pitt student, but that’s all she would reveal at a press conference after the board voted, “or else I risk not being invited to dinner tonight.”
This connection to Pitt has given her and her family “a behind the curtain look at what a wonderful place this is — for the value of academics or the quality of the faculty and staff, but also for how we meet our students where they are in the classroom and beyond the classroom and take advantage of this amazing location in this amazing community to create the best opportunity for what higher ed is and what it can be.”
Gabel, 55, who will start on July 17, has been the leader at Minnesota since 2019, where she was also the first woman to hold that position.
“It's not the first time that I am a first and I'm delighted to know that I'm joining a very rapidly growing cadre of university leaders who represent a wide variety of identities,” she said.
The Board of Trustees’ Compensation Committee set her base salary at $950,000 (see related story) in a vote Monday afternoon.
Before Minnesota, she served as executive vice president for academic affairs and provost at the University of South Carolina from 2015-19, and dean of the College of Business at the University of Missouri from 2010-15. She began her academic career at Georgia State University in 1996, then moved to Florida State University as chair of the Department of Risk Management/Insurance, Real Estate and Legal Studies.
She has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Haverford College, which she entered at age 16, and a law degree from the University of Georgia.
Why Pitt?
Gabel is coming to Pitt from a public university system spanning five campuses with more than 68,000 students — roughly double Pitt’s enrollment. Much like Pitt, Minnesota has seen a drop in enrollment at its branch campus but an increase at the main Twin Cities campus.
Minnesota operates on a responsibility center management budget model, which is what Pitt is switching to for the 2023-24 fiscal year. Minnesota’s operating budget for the current year was $4.2 billion, while Pitt’s was $2.7 billion. Nearly one-fourth of Minnesota’s budget comes from tuition revenue, while about 17 percent comes from state appropriations, according to The Minnesota Daily.
“The size of the university is really not the critical factor, at least from my point of view,” Gabel said. “I’m really focused on what the campus is doing in terms of research, where the voice of constituencies are in terms of shared governance, how the governance works in relationship to the board, and what the student experience is like.”
Pitt’s funding from the National Institutes of Health ranks third in the nation with 1,270 awards in 2022 totaling more than $675 million, while Minnesota is 19th on the list with 763 awards for nearly $433 million.
During her time there, Minnesota developed its first systemwide strategic plan and completed a 10-year, $4 billion capital campaign. She also helped establish a partnership between the university, the Mayo Clinic and Google to develop new and novel platforms for higher education.
Facing issues
Late last year, she was criticized for joining the board of directors of Securian Financial, which is paid $4.6 million annually by the University of Minnesota, through affiliate Minnesota Life, to provide basic life insurance for its employees, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. She went through the university's conflict management processes before accepting the paid position, but decided in January to step down from the Securian board.
“I wouldn't call it a controversy,” Gabel said. “I would say (some people) didn't like it, and it became a distraction, and so I stepped down.”
At the news conference, Board of Trustees Chair Doug Browning said he and the search committee fully vetted this issue. “We felt we had a satisfactory response. And what you need to know is what happened in that instance is not unusual. Right now in Chancellor Gallagher's contract, there is a provision that allows him to serve on nonprofit and for profit (boards) with the approval of the (Board of Trustees).”
She spoke about a few other issues at the news conference:
Unionization: “I will say, that is happening on almost every university campus in one way or another around the country.” She said she is a big believer in shared governance, “And I think that the stakeholders and constituencies and shared governance should be able to come to the table, so to speak, in whatever form and with whatever voice they choose, and then our job as the administration and in the governance is to meet people where they are.”
Relationship with police: The George Floyd killing by police happened in Minneapolis during Gabel’s tenure at Minnesota. “The university decided to until the university was comfortable with the Minneapolis Police Department training process and discipline process, not use Minneapolis Police for supplemental services — when you have large events and you hire extra officers. … But we also doubled down on our commitment with the Minneapolis Police to co-patrol adjacent neighborhoods because we have students, faculty and staff living right next to campus. … It was a tenuous balance to strike but one that we thought was important to strike in the aftermath of what were some obviously very difficult events and very challenging times for all of our community.”
Controversial speakers: “Free speech on campus is obviously one of the issues of the day everywhere. There's no immunity from that. ... And sometimes those people are very controversial or provocative and actually may create pain for certain members of our community,” Gabel said.
“I think one of the most important things that we can do first and foremost is follow the law. … Putting that to the side is to acknowledge and recognize when painful things happen to provide the support and sometimes the counter-position so that our community can receive balanced information, balanced opportunity to learn and work together. To make sure that we're very clear that while we respect and follow the law we don't endorse as a community what people sometimes say.”
Relationship with state: “I will tell you ‘state-related’ is an idiosyncratic status and it is part of my learning curve to fully understand it,” she said. “In terms of partnering with the state and in Harrisburg, I would like them to fund the University of Pittsburgh more and better — you might not be surprised to hear that answer. But I want them to understand the value proposition, the return on investment, if you will, and why if the university is better and better able to serve, the state is better and better able to serve.”
Student debt: “You want to start by thinking about price being competitive as a starting point, but we know that that isn't enough. And so I've been very pleased to see what Chancellor Gallagher and his team have done for students with the highest need and making sure that you start with the highest needs students, ensuring that they get what they need to reduce financial barriers to success. The very best investment in my opinion you can make is in a university or college degree. … I took on debt as a student when I went to school. It was worth it, but it was manageable. Ideally it becomes the least burden for those who have the highest risk of that burden and then you move forward from there.”
The transition
Gabel will succeed Gallagher, who announced in April 2022 that he would step down this summer after nine years in the position and move into a faculty position in the Department of Physics & Astronomy.
She will continue a long line of leaders who have come from academia, with Gallagher and just one other chancellor coming from outside higher education since the early 1900s.
Browning said that Kevin Washo, Gallagher’s chief of staff and senior vice chancellor for University Relations, will head up the transition team.
Gallagher said in January that his office had already started some transition planning. “The best thing I can do to help my successor is to make sure we’re ready,” Gallagher said. This includes operational units looking at what kind of information they will need to share.
The new chancellor will have a say in who serves as interim provost after Ann Cudd leaves this summer to become president of Portland State University in Oregon. Gallagher said recently that decision would happen under the next chancellor, likely not until May or June.
A couple other key personnel decisions — dean of the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences and vice chancellor for communications and marketing — are still undecided, and Gabel might want to be involved in those. In addition, Cudd said last year — after Jimmy Martin moved from dean of the Swanson School of Engineering to a position in the Office of the Senior Vice Chancellor for Research — that the search for a permanent engineering dean would not start until after a new chancellor was named.
The search
The search committee — 26 people from all parts of the University community — was announced in mid-September and held meetings with faculty, staff, students and alumni throughout October. The committee was chaired by Eva Tansky Blum, who served from 2015-20 as Pitt’s first female Board of Trustees chair and who led the 2013 search that brought Gallagher to Pitt. Anantha Shekhar, senior vice chancellor for the health sciences, served as vice chair.
Board of Trustees Chair Doug Browning said the search included candidates from throughout the country and oversees. He said the search came down to two finalists.
After the initial public meetings, the search committee has done its work behind closed doors. Geovette Washington, Pitt’s chief legal officer who assisted the chancellor search committee, said in February that all the candidates the committee talked to were concerned about confidentiality. In searches for leaders of large research universities like Pitt, Washington said all the top candidates are coming from good positions. Making the search more public could impact their ability to keep those jobs, she said.
Some states require that applicants and/or finalists for leadership of public universities be made public, but Pennsylvania has no such rule.
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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