By SUSAN JONES
Almost exactly a year after she started as Pitt’s 19th chancellor, Joan Gabel said her first year was anything but boring.
“It was a very, very full year,” she said. “With as much as what happened this year, I cannot express enough how grateful I am for the support of this community in my first year. And I know I speak for my husband as well, that even in our most intense moments, I have felt very supported by this community. Even when people were distressed by the decisions, that was expressed in kind and compassionate ways. And I'm grateful for that.”
It's been a year that’s included everything from work on an updated strategic plan, progress on the BioForge life sciences hub, ratification of Pitt’s first faculty union contract, hiring of several senior leaders and numerous protests over the situation in Gaza.
While there have been no big surprises for Gabel, who was very familiar with Pitt — her son is a student here — she said there have been some “pleasant discoveries” about some ongoing projects.
This includes a deepened understanding of “what BioForge brought to the table. I understood the BioForge concept, but I didn't understand how it tied into the community engagement centers, for example, how extensively it was connected to the neighborhood,” she said, “what that meant for life sciences ecosystem in its three dimensionality.”
Similarly, she was pleased with the shared governance process that went into the Plan for Pitt 2025. She said that plan and the work that went into it prepared the new leadership team and the whole University “for what could happen in a forward-looking way.”
Gabel noted she is happy the strategic process for Plan for Pitt 2028 is underway and “that we hit our deadline that the board asked us to hit,” and she has “a blanket expression of appreciation … for everyone who participated, which was a lot of people with a lot of other things on their plate.”
The other accomplishment Gabel is pleased about in her first year is being able to “elevate some really long-standing members of the team who've been here, and also attract some really exciting new members of the team at the same time. I think (that) reflects really well on the institution,” she said. “I think people should feel pretty optimistic about where we're going.”
Chancellor Gabel spoke to the University Times on June 27 about a wide variety of issues:
On priorities for 2024-25
Gabel said the way the Plan for Pitt is now framed means that everything has a schedule.
“If you look at the plan, there are 2025 initiatives and they're articulated,” she said. “And you can also look ahead to 2026, because you start those things in 2025.”
Those initiatives can be found on the Plan for Pitt Progress Card on the chancellor’s website, which was released in April. The ones for 2025 include meeting undergraduate enrollment targets for the Oakland campus, updating the campus master plan, launching a new employee-engagement survey, completing a pay equity analysis and a staff recognition plan, along with several more.
She’s also looking ahead to the BioForge project being well underway in 2024-25 and for the new budget model to come to full fruition under Dwayne Pinkney, the newly hired executive senior vice chancellor for administration & finance and chief financial officer.
On protests around campus
The recent pro-Palestinian protests and encampment on the Cathedral of Learning lawn have brought renewed attention to freedom of speech issues on campus, but Gabel noted there is a long history of protests at Pitt.
“We are fully capable of having a vibrant and functioning university life while also having protest, so long as our policies are followed,” she said.
She once again pointed out that during the Cathedral encampment in early June, “the only people that we heard from who identified themselves as leaders, were not students.” Since then, the administration has heard from a small group of students asking for Pitt to change some of its behaviors (such as divesting from Israeli-related companies), and it has heard from people who both support and oppose those students.
“As you might imagine, I've heard a wide variety of opinions,” Gabel said. She stressed that the University supports the right to protest, no matter what side of this or any other issue is being represented.
“We fundamentally believe in the right to protest and the right to free speech,” Gabel said. “And, in fact, it isn't even something to believe in — it is a constitutional right. … ”
“What we are working on is how to support our community in the event of protest, with the hope that the protests occur within the content-neutral guidelines that we have available, so that the University can function and classes continue and life continues when protests are happening.”
The University needs to do “an even better job than we have done with educating our community on what our time, place and manner policies are,” Gabel said. There also is room for more faculty-led events that give historical context to controversial issues and help build compassion between all sides.
“This is not a substitute for protest, but this is a channel for a variety of ways in which our students faculty, staff and community can engage so that their desire to be engaged doesn't reach a level of frustration that it necessitates the protest crossing outside of the multitude of ways that one can express their desire to protest within the … policies that we have available.”
As for the protesters’ demands that Pitt divest, Gabel said Pitt has an Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Investment policy for the endowment. The Board of Trustees also has a Statement of Governance, Investment Objectives, and Policies for the consolidated endowment fund set by the trustees' Investment Committee to clarify the investment goals and objectives of the fund and to outline the investing philosophy. Gabel said the policy “delegates that authority to the Office of Finance, which is run by our chief investment officer, and that's not me.”
Nationally, she said she knows of a couple universities, such as Brown, that have said they would consider divesting, but that number hasn’t gone up in the past several months since the protests started.
At national conferences she’s attended, Gabel said “The conversations have been around how do we support our students? How can we create productive avenues for expression of constitutional rights to free speech, while ensuring that our campus remains safe in every way in which you define that word — physically safe, certainly, but also where students feel safe in their identities. And let's not forget we have an election coming up, and that that is likely to create some intensity as well.”
On faculty and staff unions
Since the faculty union ratified its first contract in May, Gabel said she hasn’t heard much about it, “which I take as a very good sign.”
“I was very happy to invest in our faculty. And I was very happy to finish (the contract),” she said. “We would like to think that the things that were most important to the faculty, we were able to do, and that was really important to us.”
The contract specified flat fee raises for this and next fiscal year, along with a salary floor of $60,000 for any full-time faculty. Bringing everyone up to at least $60,000 “is the single biggest lift, financially speaking,” Gabel said, and it was one of the reasons the contract took so long to negotiate. With money being spent on those raises, it means the University needs to look at what it “can't do in other spaces.”
The 2024-25 University budget is working its way through the Board of Trustees and will likely be approved at a July 12 online public meeting of the board. Gabel said because of the contract and other issues, “we were only willing to say yes to things that were fiscally responsible as the administration.”
Also looming are decisions by the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board on elections for a staff union and graduate student workers union. Gabel said that the administration’s stance now is, “We meet people where they are,” whether through unions or through shared governance. During past graduate student union efforts, the University took a strong stance against unionization, but Gabel said that was in the past, not now.
On enrollment and FAFSA
The Plan for Pitt 2028 progress card sets a goal of increasing undergraduate enrollment by 500 for fall 2025 and another 1,280 by fall 2028 — for a total of 22,000. It also sets a 15 percent increase target for graduate students from a baseline of 9,268.
This will create some “pinch points” on Pitt’s infrastructure, such as housing, staffing and some specific types of classroom spaces, and that’s part of the reason the University also is working on revising its campus master plan. That work started earlier this year, and there will be multiple opportunities for community input and engagement beginning this fall.
Gabel said Pitt once again set a record for applications for the incoming class this fall, and the Office of Admissions and Financial Aid will be working particularly hard this summer to prevent students who have been accepted from changing their minds.
This year has been a particularly hard one for the office because of the problem surrounding the revised Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).
The chancellor had nothing but praise for Marc Harding, vice provost for enrollment, and his team. “The students or potential students who were most affected … by what happened with the FAFSA were the most vulnerable students, with the highest economic need, who were least likely to have family member/mentor/model/support.”
The OAFA team put those students first, Gabel said, by calling them, answering questions and being supportive. The result is “we're going to have another really strong first-year class that is going to reflect our commitment to Pell-eligible and similarly representative incoming students. And that is a high touch, hardworking, committed human admissions team of really lovely people who did that.”
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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