Pitt's new chancellor begins her tenure with some questions for students, staff

College and university leaders who are new in their job almost always arrive on campus promising some form of a listening tour to take the pulse of the place.

At the University of Pittsburgh, Chancellor Joan Gabel is taking things a bit further in her first week.

She emailed Pitt’s entire community, inviting its 34,000 students and 14,000 employees to offer name-optional written responses to four online questions she posed.

They are:

• “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?”

Gabel could come away with some keen insights from the replies — and maybe a little eye strain, sifting through them all.

“I will read your answers and we will then summarize the themes that emerge in a future message that we’ll send out to the community as the onboarding continues,” Gabel said in an introductory video message to campus in which she stood outside the Cathedral of Learning.

She plans a series of upcoming face-to-face conversations.

“I look forward to hearing from you and seeing you around campus soon, this summer or this fall,” she said. “I’m really filled with optimism as we head into this important next chapter at the University, and I can’t wait to get started.”

She added, “Hail to Pitt.”

On Monday, Gabel, 55, officially became Pitt’s 19th chancellor and the first woman to lead the 236-year-old institution. Pitt’s Board of Trustees in April hired her away from the University of Minnesota, where she was president of the system and its Twin Cities campus.

Gabel begins her tenure with the Pennsylvania Legislature and governor still in a standoff over the Commonwealth’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2024, a document already almost three weeks late.

Caught up in the standoff are the appropriations for Pitt, Penn State University, the 10-university State System of Higher Education and Temple University.

Trustees for Penn State, the State System and Pitt are expected to vote on 2023-24 tuition rates starting this week. Temple already approved a tuition increase of about 4.2%.

Gabel was not available to be interviewed.

It was not immediately clear from Jared Stonesifer, a Pitt spokesman, what kind of response she is getting. One faculty member Tuesday said he was impressed by the gesture.

“It’s a great idea in that it signals that Chancellor Gabel is starting with an orientation to shared governance,” said Scott Kiesling, chair of Pitt’s Linguistics Department. “Of course, it mostly depends on how she responds and whether or not she responds positively with action and dollars to issues that the University community raises.”

He added, “I haven’t finished the survey, but it’s nice that the survey begins with an opportunity to articulate what we see as making Pitt ‘special, unique, or distinct.’”

Gabel, a New York City native, has an education career spanning nearly three decades, serving as a professor, dean and provost on campuses in multiple states. She has a son who attends Pitt. Since 2019, Gabel had led Minnesota’s system with five campuses and 68,000 students.

Days after her hiring, Gabel discussed her likely top priorities in an interview with the Tribune-Review, among them hiring a successor to Provost Ann Cudd, set to become Portland State University’s next president, and mounting a capital campaign at Pitt to propel the institution’s mission.

She went into greater detail on some issues in a more recent interview with the Pitt-published University Times. She talked about topics from campus safety, to how she and her husband, Gary, were settling into the chancellor’s residence near campus.

Gabel told the campus publication that arriving with experience running another large public university has advantages, “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.”

Regarding the state budget standoff, Gabel told the U-Times she has had phone-call meetings with Gov. Josh Shapiro and heads of legislative committees.

“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 will inherit ongoing negotiations with the United Steelworkers, the union representing about 3,000 full- and part-time faculty on the main Oakland campus as well as Pitt-Bradford, Pitt-Greensburg in Hempfield Township; Pitt Johnstown and Pitt Titusville. Staff are also organizing with that union.

In April, Gabel said she is used to working with campus unions and supports shared university governance.

“I’ve seen really tremendous things happen only because of unions in the course of history in this country,” she said. “I’m hopeful that in the course of this very historic first collective bargaining agreement that we end up with a faculty that feels supported.”

She reiterated that in the U-Times interview. She also addressed the fact that Pitt’s trustees started her off with a $950,000 base salary on a campus where faculty are pushing for a $60,000 full-time minimum salary.

It is $250,000 more than Patrick Gallagher, her predecessor, made when he stepped down this month after nine years with plans to teach on campus.

“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 told the Times. “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.”