By MARTY LEVINE
Interim Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor Joe McCarthy thinks of himself as “kind of almost from the Pittsburgh area,” since his family moved here from Long Island when McCarthy was in high school. But he might as well be a Pittsburgh native, since he has spent his entire career at Pitt, and that encompasses nearly half his life now.
“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 Staff Council’s November “Coffee and Conversation” event. “I was 27 when I came to Pitt back in 1998 … and have seen a lot of change in 25 years.”
The McCarthys moved here originally so that his father could work for the Hillman Corporation, whose work fueled the Hillman Foundation and funded Pitt’s main library. But young Joe also had the chance to move from an all-male Catholic High School on Long Island to his first public school, where he met his wife before attending Notre Dame for college.
“My dad’s side of the family is wholly Irish,” he said, “so I grew up watching Notre Dame football as a kid with my grandpa, and read the Knute Rockne biography back when I had a biography stage in third grade or so.
“What’s been fun,” he added, “is sort of teasing with students over the years. Since I’ve worked at Pitt for so long, I used to sometimes make bets with them for the Notre Dame-Pitt game. … They would be, like, ‘how could you root for the other team?’ I said, look, if 30 years from now you’re rooting for Pitt regardless of what job you’re in, or what stage of your life you’re in, then I did my job right. My mentors at Notre Dame did their job right. Having said that, I was fully all-Pitt last week. Didn’t help very much…”
All his degrees are in chemical engineering, “mostly because I like math and applying math to do some problem solving — which has still kind of fit in with what I’m doing in the office of the provost,” McCarthy said. “I do a lot of data-based decision making.”
He returned to Pittsburgh to join the Pitt chemical engineering faculty originally, he said, because the department in the late 1990s “had some significant strength in my research area, which is flow and processing of particulate matter.”
He credits his success as a faculty member partly to the mentoring of established colleagues, who were sounding boards for some of his early research ideas and gave valuable advice about acquiring grant funding and pitching research articles to high-impact journals.
Why move from the faculty to administration? “I don’t think very many people decide they want to become a senior vice chancellor” as an original career choice, he noted. “I was kind of 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 (a post now often called director of undergraduate studies).
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.” Still, he admits, “I took a little bit of an unusual path to where I am now, because I was never a department chair, I was never in the dean’s office.” But he later added the graduate program to his oversight in engineering.
Making the next move came unexpectedly too, he said: “I probably could have walked past one of those little fliers saying, ‘Pitt’s looking for a new vice provost for undergraduate studies’ … hundreds of times and it would never have occurred to me to even apply for that job.” 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.”
Today he is proud of the work he does in teaming with many others, “in increasing access and affordability of Pitt, in increasing our retention rates and shrinking the gaps in student success rates and increasing graduation rates.
“I’m a very competitive guy,” he added, “so this will probably be the first time I’m putting this out there publicly. … Back in 2017, I set what I called the Sidney Crosby goal, which meant that I wanted our graduation rate, which at the time was 82 percent, to get up to 87 percent. That’s Sidney Crosby’s birthday and his number on the hockey team for the Penguins. This past year we were at 84 and change; I’m projecting that we’ll be at about 85 percent this year, so we’re on our way.”
Stepping in when Provost Ann Cudd left this year — a move McCarthy said he did not foresee — was a chance to “help the University make it through this transition successfully and prepare us really for what I’m hoping is going to be a really big boost that comes along with Chancellor Gabel’s leadership.”
Some of his focus this year will be on retaining staff, faculty and students, including transfer students, after successful earlier efforts to improve recruitment, as well as on the general education curriculum revision that began as part of his previous work.
“Student success is obviously going to be a very high priority for any institution,” McCarthy said. “What I’m really excited about is that focus on access and affordability is clearly continuing with Chancellor Gabel.”
He points to the recently announced Finish Mile Grants that will help selected students through their final educational steps. “We want to identify students in their third or fourth year whose plan isn’t going to get them all the way to the finish line without some additional help, and so we’ll proactively reach out to those students and offer them one-time support in the form of a grant. … We anticipate, with the amount of funds that we have available, that will impact probably in the neighborhood of a couple hundred students each year with that funding. … I think that that’s a significant number.
“I definitely see myself absolutely staying at Pitt,” he concluded. “Whether I’ll still be on the eighth floor in the Cathedral of Learning, I don’t know. I don’t know exactly what comes next, but definitely trying to find the place I can have the most impact at Pitt is what’s been my guiding light since I’ve been here, so that’s what I expect to continue doing.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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