By MARTY LEVINE
At the beginning of her academic career, when Chancellor Joan Gabel moved from practicing law to a faculty position teaching business law and ethics, “I felt this really palpable luckiness,” she told an audience at the latest Staff Council Coffee and Conversation event on Oct. 17. “I felt very creative, probably the most open creativity of my entire professional life,” she said, as she researched and wrote in her new area of scholarship.
In her years as a lawyer, she explained, “when you are advocating for clients you can be creative (but) strictly within their needs.”
And yet, as she was developing her expertise as a faculty member, she said, “it starts to create a lane you find yourself in … which is great but is less open,” creatively speaking.
Then she was tapped for administrative roles — running a journal, and then an academic meeting — “things that involve wrangling people. Next thing you know you are an interim department chair.”
She certainly made many moves intentionally during this transition from law practice to academic work, Gabel added, but “a lot of the most interesting things that happened to me” were requests from others, to which she said yes. “It changes your perspective on how you might grow.”
Gabel, who has been chancellor since July 2023, said her parents even tried to talk her out of the career switch, before it happened: “They thought it was like a failure. But this felt like a risk worth taking.”
Her mother was actually one of her early roles models, she added. Gabel is one of four children, and when a brother was born with a disability and unable to speak, her mother was prompted to return to school to become a speech therapist. She spent the next quarter century working in public schools as a speech pathologist.
“She absolutely dedicated herself to this,” Gabel said. “It is not easy and you need to surround yourself with partners, either life partners or professional partners, who will help you” with such a career change.
A few audience questions touched on aspects of campus life for staff, such as easier campus commutes and parking. “There is a team looking at commuting” and developing a master plan for this, she said, doing everything from designing a new bus line to adding parking.
Asked why the educational benefit was not available to the spouses of part-time employees, Gabel was constrained in her answer, she said, “because of where we are in the labor process.”
She also was questioned about holding the line on tuition rates. “No one likes to raise tuition,” she said, “but it is one of the very small number of levers available to cover all the expenses of the University.
“It’s unlikely that you can hold tuition flat,” she added, “but we have been able to hold tuition below inflation” while raising salaries for employees.
Asked what lessons she has learned in her first year at Pitt, she noted that campus visitors from out of state are still surprised at the beauty of the surroundings here — and at Pitt’s capabilities and accomplishments. “As charming as it is to be on the best kept secrets list,” she said, “people should know how good everything is.”
Thus, one of her biggest lessons in her first year has been that Pitt needs to make the step from being known locally to “being seen from other vantage points.” She noted that next week she was headed to an Association of American Universities meeting of the country’s 70 top research universities, and that Pitt sits near the top of the list for research funding from the National Institutes of Health, alongside Johns Hopkins.
“That’s our peer,” she said. “People are surprised by that. We’ve been on that list for decades.” But not being more widely known for that is “a frustration. … Enough already. Let’s go. Let’s make sure that story is being told.”
November’s Staff Council Coffee and Conversation, with date, time and location still to be announced, will feature Ted Fritz, vice chancellor of public safety and emergency management.
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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