By SUSAN JONES

According to his successor, Chancellor Emeritus Mark Nordenberg “stands in a very special place in Pitt’s history and in Pittsburgh’s history.”

Nordenberg, who served as chancellor from 1996 to 2014, announced last week that he is concluding his official service to the University on June 30, after 49 years in a variety of positions. He will cap his career by giving this year’s commencement address on May 3 at Acrisure Stadium.

“I think in the long, remarkable history of the University of Pittsburgh, Mark is going to go down as one of the great chancellors,” said Patrick Gallagher, who stepped into the chancellor’s role in 2014.

Nordenberg came to Pitt in the summer of 1977 as a visiting assistant professor of law “with a nine month contract and no prospects,” he said.

Within two months, he was invited to move into the tenure stream, and from there the “University kept finding things for me to do.”

He was named interim dean of the law school before before serving as dean from 1985 to 1993. He was interim provost from 1993-94, then was tapped as interim chancellor in 1995 and a year later, after a national search, was named chancellor. He held that role until 2014, when Gallagher replaced him. Since then, he has led Pitt’s Institute of Politics and the Dick Thornburgh Forum for Law and Public Policy.

“Until I became chair of the Institute of Politics, I never had a job at Pitt that was not preceded by a tryout,” he said.

Nordenberg knows that for many faculty, in order to move up you have to move on.

“Pitt gave me the opportunity to do all of those things within the institution that I already loved and felt a deep sense of obligation to,” he said.

Chancellor Joan Gabel said at the March 26 Senate Council meeting that Nordenberg’s announcement “signals his complete retirement, which is almost hard to imagine, actually. But here we are.”

Leadership of the Institute of Politics and Dick Thornburgh Forum, Gabel said, will be passed on “appropriately, into the experienced hands” of Samantha Balbier and Paul Supowitz, respectively.

“Everything will continue to run smoothly, but this will be the first of many times that we publicly say, on behalf of a very grateful University, we so appreciate Chancellor Nordenberg, and we look forward to hearing his thoughts and perspectives that he’ll share with our graduates in a few weeks.”

A long legacy

Nordenberg said he sees pieces of his legacy all around the University, including the dramatic increase in the undergraduate application pool and the move from top 25 in NIH funding to top 5.

There also are physical reminders of his time as chancellor. The Petersen Events Center and Biomedical Science Tower 3 were built during his tenure, along with the residence hall named in his honor. The University also was involved in the conversion of Schenley Plaza from a parking lot back to a green space.

He's also really proud "of what we did with the regional campuses, too. ... I really love the regional campuses. ... The changes we were able to make in Greensburg and Bradford really were dramatic."

“I think the two things that matter most to me are that I was able to assemble a really incredible team and without the leadership efforts of those people, progress would not have been made at the same rate,” Nordenberg said. “And second, I think we were able to change the feelings and attitudes of the people of Pitt. Having moved in following a time that wasn’t so good for the University, we helped nurture pride and a sense of institutional ambition that really made a difference.

“Our collective progress really is an accumulation of individual achievements throughout the campus, by faculty, staff, students, alums, and so I think this sense that we were really moving and moving forward together was very important to me, because I think people should be proud of their University.”

Nordenberg became chancellor following the troubled tenure of Dennis O’Connor, who many criticized for a lack of fundraising and a decline in academic mission.

“I think what hasn’t been emphasized is kind of how bleak things were at Pitt when Mark took the helm,” Gallagher said. “The early 1990s was a period when Pitt was kind of in trouble. The region was struggling. The steel industry decline kind of reached its peak, but Pitt was struggling with enrollment issues, with reputational declines, and it was not in good shape financially. There were mismanagement and scandals.

“There were increasingly vocal calls for change at the University, and Mark was tapped first as an interim chancellor, which is really hard, not even with the permanent role, and what follows is one of the most remarkable stories of not just repairing the problems at the time, but in setting Pitt up for some of its most historic success stories.”

Post-chancellor career

When Nordenberg stepped down as chancellor, he didn’t slow down.

He took over as director of the Institute of Politics and facilitated the move of the Dick Thornburgh Forum into the institute and became its director. The forum has focused on programs about good governance and preserving democracy.

He’s also been involved in many policy and civic initiatives, including:

• A decade-long effort that he co-chaired with former U.S. Attorney Frederick Thieman (Law ‘77) to reduce the population of the Allegheny County Jail and address racial disparities across the county’s criminal justice system.

• Initiatives designed to address the public health crisis tied to opioids and to develop governance alternatives for financially distressed municipalities.

• An independent committee created by the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh to disburse some $6 million of undesignated donations following the Tree of Life synagogue attack. He worked alongside the late Carnegie Mellon University President Jared Cohon to help establish the Collaboratory Against Hate, a joint Carnegie Mellon-Pitt research initiative.

• As chair of the state’s Legislative Reapportionment Commission, following the 2020 Census. In that role, he led a process that produced a redistricting plan that was adopted by a bipartisan vote within the commission, unanimously upheld by the state Supreme Court and widely praised by good government groups.

• As co-founder, with his former student Laura Ellsworth (Law ‘83), of the Eradicate Hate Global Summit in the wake of the Tree of Life attack. The summit has earned both Nordenberg and Ellsworth the Pursuers of Peace Award from the Rodef Shalom congregation and the Righteous Among the Neighbors Award from the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh and the LIGHT Education Initiative.

He also recently was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which recognizes leadership and excellence across disciplines and divides.

What’s next?

Nordenberg said he’s been carrying forward a leave since 1993 when he stepped down as law school dean.

“I was supposed to have one, and then the chancellor asked me to be interim provost,” he said. Then I was supposed to have one, and he asked me to chair the search committee for the senior vice chancellor for the health sciences. Then I was supposed to have one, and I became interim chancellor. Then I was supposed to have one when I stepped out as chancellor and Chancellor Gallagher and Provost Beeson asked me almost immediately to chair the search for the new business school dean.”

He took a half-year leave while he chaired the state Reapportionment Commission, but still has six months left. So he’ll leave his current positions at the end of June, but won’t formally leave the University until the end of the year.

In the meantime, he’ll be helping Balbier and Supowitz “to the extent they want. …  and also wrapping up some other projects.”

Much of those six month will be spent on archival work. “The (Pitt) archives have all of my papers from my service as dean and my service as chancellor, but they’re very interested in things that I have done the last 12 years, like reapportionment and criminal justice reform and voluntary municipal disincorporation and opioids.”

He wants to spend more time with his wife and other members of the family, and “I am looking forward to seeing if I can crack the habit of getting up at 5:30 in the morning.”

But he’ll still be visible on campus. He said he’s probably the only chancellor who moved out of the chancellor’s residence and closer to campus — to a house in Schenley Farms. “I typically walk our dog on campus early every morning, which I will say, was really nice during COVID, because the people we saw were the people who could not work remotely.”

Just because he’s “retiring” doesn’t mean Nordenberg is stopping all his work.

“I suspect that I still will be involved. I remain involved in a number of civic activities, and I’ve had people calling me since the first of the year asking me to do other things. I’m just going to be much more deliberate about what it is that I do.”

And he’s very grateful for his time at the University.

“Pitt and Pitt people have been so nice and supportive of me, and they have given me so many opportunities and so much help in pursuing those opportunities successfully, that clearly my heart is at the University of Pittsburgh, and I always will have strong feelings of gratitude about the chances that I was given to do such worthwhile work here.”

Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.

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