Pitt Chancellor-elect Joan Gabel faces array of challenges as she prepares to take helm

Once Joan Gabel arrives in July from the University of Minnesota, the success of her tenure as University of Pittsburgh chancellor might hinge on the same unforgiving metrics that were used to judge her male predecessors.

Fundraising will be key among them. Even with its $5.5 billion endowment, a thriving research complex and rising student profile, Pitt has not completed a universitywide capital campaign to feed its aspirations since the end of the Mark Nordenberg administration a decade ago.

Gabel, 55, hired Monday, likely will hear from students and parents, as did her predecessors, that Pitt is too expensive. Faculty and staff, meanwhile, say they are underpaid relative to peer public campuses in the Association of American Universities.

Some in both camps might question how paying the new chief executive a base salary of $950,000 (36% more than current Chancellor Patrick Gallagher) will improve either situation — even if such pay is now the going rate for top-tier universities to attract and retain a successful leader.

Add in a state Legislature that questions what it spends on its public universities, a faculty union pushing for its first-ever contract and public skepticism about a college degree’s worth, and it’s easy to see potential minefields.

Chris Bonneau, 47, a political science professor and past president of Pitt’s University Senate, said it will be important for Gabel to stay focused on excellence.

“Pitt has a lot of things going for it right now,” he said Thursday.

Gabel needs to “get people excited about our direction” and build upon recent successes in cost and debt remediation, including the Pitt Success Pell Grant Match Program for lower-income students and the loan forgiveness and financial wellness programming in the Panthers Forward initiative.

Naming a provost to succeed Ann Cudd, who is headed to the presidency of Portland State University, “will be her most important hire,” Bonneau said of Gabel.

The person chosen for that role will oversee Pitt’s academic arm and most directly influence faculty issues. “She’s got to get that one right,” he said.

Bonneau said he is aware of criticisms in Minnesota over her pay. He said he doesn’t think her salary is out of line for someone who already has led a major university and has been a provost and dean, among other academic posts since the mid-1990s.

“You can think everybody gets paid too much, and that’s fine,” he said. “What good does it do if Pitt says, ‘We’re not paying a penny over half a million’?”

In 2021, Penn State University hired Neeli Bendapudi as its president and set her base salary at $950,000. She is the first woman to lead that institution, as Gabel will be at Pitt.

Pitt’s Gallagher and top officers had until December not taken a base pay increase since 2019 — before the covid-19 pandemic hit in March 2020. His current base salary is $698,202. He is stepping down in June after nine years in office and plans to teach on campus.

Bonneau says Pitt’s Board of Trustees needs to back efforts to secure faculty and staff raises, a view shared by the Union of Pitt Faculty, part of the United Steelworkers, which represents more than 3,000 full- and part-time faculty on the Oakland main campus and branches at Bradford, Greensburg, Johnstown and Titusville.

About 200 faculty members protested outside a trustees meeting in February over the pace of contract talks.

“Our concern is not really what the chancellor is being paid,” said Melinda Ciccocioppo, 42, a teaching associate professor in the Department of Psychology. “Our concern is really what faculty are being paid.”

She and other union organizers want a $60,000 pay floor annually for full-time instructors across the bargaining unit, prorated for those who are part time. She noted that most are not in the tenure stream and earn well below the AAU median.

“I think parents have every right to feel tuition is too high,” she said Friday.

But she argued that tuition increases aren’t translating into better pay for those who most directly impact the education of Pitt’s 34,000 students through their teaching and mentoring.

“Our cost-of-living adjustment has not even come close to keeping up with inflation,” she said.

Ciccocioppo said faculty want a collegial relationship with the new leader. She said that as the first woman to lead Pitt in its 236-year history, Gabel will be under a keen microscope and hopes she is judged as a leader in the same way men are.

One of Gabel’s three children is a Pitt undergraduate, paying out-of-state tuition, and she said his experience added to her interest in the institution.

During a news conference Monday after she was hired, Gabel said that what she learned about Pitt as a parent further cemented her favorable view of the place, its faculty, staff and leadership.

“It’s a very big part of why I wanted to be here,” she said.

Trustees Chair Douglas Browning said the search drew 300 candidates, including a field that he said included 60 viable leaders. The field eventually narrowed to two. The secrecy of the search drew criticism on campus in recent weeks, as did the search that brought Gallagher to Pitt in 2014.

Bonneau said things ultimately worked out well with Gallagher, and time will tell if this search was effective.

In Minnesota, Gabel stepped down from a seat on the Securian Financial board of directors in January amid complaints of potential conflict of interest. The entity holds $1.3 billion in retirement plan assets for the university’s employees, according to Inside Higher Ed, which cited reporting from the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press.

Inside Higher Ed reported that Gabel said the board seat included $130,000 in compensation beyond her university salary at Minnesota, but she later said she had voluntarily waived the compensation.

Bonneau said taking the position showed “poor judgment” given questions that would inevitably arise about Securian’s dealings with the university and potential conflict of interest. That aside, Bonneau said he felt Gabel was transparent and noted that she had received her board’s approval to take the board seat before stepping down as criticism mounted.

“She handled it the way she was supposed to handle it,” he said.

A New York City native, Gabel grew up in Atlanta, receiving an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Haverford College in Pennsylvania in 1988, officials said. She went on to earn a law degree from the University of Georgia and worked at a law firm before taking a job at Georgia State University in 1996 to begin a nearly three-decade career in higher education.

She served as a department chair at Florida State University and was dean of the University of Missouri’s Trulaske College of Business. She was the first woman to hold that deanship and later became the first woman provost at the University of South Carolina.

She became Minnesota’s 17th and first woman president in July 2019, months before the covid-19 pandemic struck, shutting campuses and driving instruction online.

She said she assumed that her decades working in higher education would steel her for the moment when her own child left home for college.

“Then you sit there with your baby, no matter how big they get, and watch them make one of the most transformative choices they will ever make,” she said.

She said that, as a parent, it made her feel both hopeful and vulnerable.

“All you want is for your child to learn well and be happy and get what they need and have opportunities,” she said. “That’s what my child has had (at Pitt). I’m grateful.”