By SUSAN JONES
The new David C. Frederick Honors College at Pitt–Greensburg was officially christened on Sept. 5 with a ceremony featuring University officials from Pittsburgh and Greensburg, and a visit from the honors college’s benefactors, David Frederick and wife Sophie Lynn.
Other dignitaries included Chancellor Joan Gabel, Pitt-Greensburg President Robert Gregerson, Frederick Honors College Dean Nicola Foote, and members of the Pitt Board of Trustees and the Pitt-Greensburg Advisory Board.
“We are celebrating the creation of new opportunities for Pitt students to discover, to learn, to collaborate, and to find new possibilities in themselves,” Foote said at the ceremony. “Honors education is truly one of the greatest innovations in American higher education. It doesn’t exist in other international educational systems, yet there is truly nothing like it for helping students maximize their potential and find success.
“We are one of the oldest honors colleges in the nation and we were recently formally named as one of the best in the nation,” she continued. “Today we get to expand that powerful and innovative and transformative model of honors education to even more Pitt students. I truly can’t think of anything more exciting, more powerful.”
Gregerson said that not only was the ceremony celebrating the achievement of bringing the honors college to Greensburg but also, “anticipating all the great accomplishments that are yet to come as faculty and students engage in the process of deep learning that a great honors college makes possible.”
Frederick, who was Pitt’s first Rhodes scholar, thanked students who gave presentations on their research and experiences with the honors college. “You’re the reason why Sophie and I have made this commitment to the University of Pittsburgh, because you exemplify those qualities of independent scholarship, independent inquiry, and what I like to think of as a thoughtful, inclusive leadership.”
He then challenged the Frederick Honors College at Pitt-Greensburg students, saying, “I want to leave you with one thing. One of the things that Sophie and I thought were really an important value was that for the students who received scholarships and fellowship opportunities, we ask them to make a moral commitment. We ask them if you have benefited from this program to help other people as your talent, your skills, your time, your resources enable you to do. I want to ask the students here who are going to benefit from this extension of the Honors College concept here in Greensburg to join me in making that moral commitment.”
New leadership
Last week, Frank Wilson, assistant dean for academic affairs at Pitt–Greensburg, was named the interim associate dean of the Frederick Honors College at Pitt-Greensburg.
Wilson was among a group of faculty — along with Sheila Confer, William Pamerleau and John Prellwitz — that helped establish the Pitt–Greensburg Honors Program in 2020.
“Dr. Wilson has been part of the core group that planned and created our honors program from the beginning,” Gregerson said in a statement. “As we began to work toward integrating our program with the Frederick Honors College, Frank was a primary driver of those efforts. He was a natural choice to represent the Greensburg campus as associate dean of the Frederick Honors College.”
Nicola Foote, dean of the Frederick Honors College, said Wilson was the perfect candidate for the associate dean role because of his knowledge of the Greensburg campus as the ranking academic officer and his experience as Pitt’s Faculty Senate president — the only faculty member from a regional campus to serve in that position — from 2015-18.
“He was leading and having to represent faculty from all the different campuses while recognizing that he had more perspective on one campus than the others,” said Foote. “He really learned through that process how to implement needs and policies that fit the University as a whole. So, with the launch of Frederick at Greensburg, that’s what we’re trying to do. We’ve got decades of experience at Frederick Honors College in providing world-leading opportunities for the talented undergraduates, and he’ll be able to adapt and tweak those opportunities for the Greensburg students.”
Wilson also played a pivotal role as one of the leaders of the Frederick at Greensburg steering committee who developed the new program over the course of 18 months, working with leadership from the Honors College and Greensburg, as well as University leadership from the Office of the Provost, the Office of Financial Aid, the Office of Admissions, and the Office of Philanthropy and Alumni Engagement.
The new partnership will give Greensburg students the same access to programming, funding, and honors-specific support as their peers in Oakland. Moving forward, more Greensburg students will have opportunities to compete for national scholarships like the Fulbright, Truman, Rhodes, and Marshall fellowships.
“We thought this was too good to be true, but it’s happening,” Wilson said. “It’s happening, and once it starts, I see continued growth and continued experimentation. I’m absolutely sure that this will be a success. I’m sure that the students who graduate from (the honors college at Pitt-Greensburg) will come back and be amazed at how it continued to grow.”
Greensburg students already have benefited from the budding partnership. In spring 2023, Kaylee Huber and Ethan Crosby became the first regional-campus students to receive Brackenridge Fellowships for research, and Olivia Petry and Madison Vogel were awarded travel funds in 2023 and 2024, respectively.
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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