Outgoing Pitt Chancellor Patrick Gallagher reflects on tenure filled with challenges, growth

When Patrick Gallagher became chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh in 2014, higher education institutions already were staring down falling enrollments and growing questions about the worth of a college degree.

Then the covid-19 pandemic hit, shutting down campuses for months.

Now, with Gallagher’s tenure in its final days, Gallagher and others point to classroom, research and financial numbers suggesting that Pitt has largely weathered the storm.

In an interview with the Tribune-Review, Gallagher said enrollment — at least, on the main campus in Oakland — is rising even as Pitt becomes more selective, with record-high applicant numbers and an average incoming student grade-point average exceeding 4.1.

Branch campuses at Bradford, Greensburg, Johnstown and Titusville, though, saw average enrollment losses of 29% on Gallagher’s watch, part of a wider trend affecting regional public campuses.

Pitt now generates more than $1 billion in sponsored research annually — a record — and its $5.5 billion endowment is the nation’s 26th largest, according to the latest NACUBO-­TIAA Study of College and University Endowments.

Meanwhile, on the construction front, Pitt has expanded the medical school’s Scaife Hall and is planning to build a $255 million recreation center and spend another $240 million on the Victory Heights athletic center project on its Oakland campus. It also completed a Life Sciences Building at Pitt-Greensburg and an engineering and information technologies hall at Pitt-Bradford.

“I feel great about the university’s momentum and position,” said Gallagher, 60. “Pitt has really focused on being a university of impact and taking (on) its responsibilities as kind of an anchor for the region … whether that means reaching out and partnering with our neighborhoods or partnering with the local schools.”

Gallagher expressed frustration with what he said may be his biggest unresolved challenge — a problem not of Pitt’s making, but one his and other universities have failed to solve.

“I think for me the most frustrating was the loss of confidence in the American system of higher education,” he said. “Since World War II, we have enjoyed a nonpolitical, bipartisan, strong consensus that our universities play an incredibly important role, both individually by giving the students who go there a pathway to more opportunity and a better life, but also collectively that the engine of knowledge that these universities have created fuels our economy.”

Despite the successes of U.S. higher education, which other countries are spending billions to emulate, Gallagher said, “We’ve kind of lost our mojo, right? We’ve kind of started to question what we’re doing.”

Turbulence ahead?

Gallagher is preparing to pass the baton to Joan Gabel, president of the University of Minnesota system and its Twin Cities campus. She was hired in April as Pitt’s 19th chancellor after a nationwide search. Gallagher’s last day is expected to be July 16.

He will leave behind some key fundraising decisions, unfinished labor negotiations and strained relations with parts of the campus community.

Pitt has not undertaken a universitywide capital campaign since Mark Nordenberg, Gallagher’s predecessor, raised more than $2 billion through 2012. Gabel told the Tribune-Review in April that a new drive will be among her top priorities.

She also will inherit what at times have been acrimonious negotiations with the United Steelworkers for an initial contract with 3,000 full- and part-time faculty. Several thousand staff members are now in an organizing drive with the same union.

Another task will be advancing Pitt’s plan to purge its fossil fuel investments by 2035 — campus activists had pushed for immediate divestiture — and to become carbon neutral by 2037.

This spring, events hosted by conservative student groups discussing transgender rights drew angry street demonstrations from students and others who saw it as hate speech.

Pitt was criticized, both by those who said letting the events go forward showed indifference toward the LGBTQ community and by event organizers who said Pitt’s actions, including condemning their message, encouraged protests.

Fallout from those events reverberated to the Capitol in Harrisburg, where Gallagher was asked to explain Pitt’s stance during a state House hearing. Gallagher said diversity, equity and inclusion are vital to Pitt, but the university also “is a place of dialogue, and, in fact, both constitutional and academic free speech are things I am obligated to support.”

That did little to assuage almost 12,000 signers of a petition created that month by Pitt senior Nicholas Demjan of Whitehall. In it, he said even considering allowing events promoting “transphobia and hate” on campus “violates multiple principles and policies the University of Pittsburgh states that it stands for.”

Others, though, saw the episode as reflecting political and societal turmoil nationally that Gallagher’s administration had to navigate. That included dealing with the fallout from the killing of Black man George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police and the unrest that followed; health, classroom and budgetary upheaval from the pandemic; and polarizing Supreme Court rulings overturning abortion rights and affirmative action in college admissions.

Those challenges and the state’s complicated funding relationship with its public universities have made what Pitt accomplished under Gallagher all the more impressive, said Chris Bonneau, a political science professor and past president of Pitt’s University Senate.

“He navigated those issues, I thought, with a lot of thought and a lot of patience,” he said.

While Bonneau said he “found it odd” that Pitt has produced two strategic plans but conducted no capital campaigns during Gallagher’s tenure, he added, “As an institution, we are demonstrably stronger at the end of his tenure than at the beginning.”

Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald, an ex-officio member of Pitt’s board of trustees, said Gallagher has been “a tremendous partner” with neighborhoods and organizations beyond campus. The chancellor promoted economic development and helped to keep talent in the region, Fitzgerald said.

“What Pat Gallagher has been able to do is really grow the life sciences, the research, the AI (artificial intelligence) and robotics, partnering with Carnegie Mellon University,” he said. “It’s almost been like having another economic development arm working in the county.”

Those research aspirations are continuing with Pitt BioForge, a cell and gene therapy manufacturing facility planned in Hazelwood and aided by $100 million from the Richard King Mellon Foundation, the largest single-project grant in the foundation’s history.

The faculty contract talks that Gabel will inherit are continuing almost two years after the Steelworkers won the right to represent faculty and nearly six years since the organizing effort was announced in January 2018.

The pace of those talks has been an irritant to faculty, as were money spent by Gallagher’s administration on legal fees amid that drive and an attempt to organize graduate assistants that fell short.

The Pitt-published University Times reported in 2021 that the administration spent more than $2 million on the legal fees, though Pitt insisted that matters beyond unions were included in those fees.

“Gallagher himself has always been positive about unions, in general,” said Melinda Ciccocioppo, a teaching associate professor in the Department of Psychology and chair of the Union of Pitt Faculty’s communication and action team.

“I would imagine parents of students don’t necessarily want their tuition money going to that,” she added, referring to legal fees.

Last month, Pitt acknowledged that bad advice from a campus adviser led to 17 students in an accelerated education program for aspiring teachers having their degrees pulled back. They were notified nearly two months after they crossed the commencement stage.

Pitt vowed to pay for their additional courses and expressed regret. Gallagher addressed the matter on June 23 after his final board of trustees meeting.

“The right way to respond to a case like this is by sitting down with each student and their family,” he said. “We want them to complete and meet all the objectives they have and undo the harm that was done with the bad advice.”

Another major issue on all U.S. campuses is tuition and indebtedness — especially in Pennsylvania, which has some of the nation’s priciest public universities. Average debt among borrowers leaving public and private campuses is $39,375, behind only Delaware and New Hampshire, according to the Institute for College Access and Success.

At Pitt, the base tuition on the main campus during Gallagher’s tenure reached $19,760, up from $16,872 when he arrived. His administration advanced efforts to aid needy students, including a need-based federal Pell Grant match of up to $7,395.

Still, Pell recipients represented just 17% of undergraduates at Pitt in fall 2021, according to a U.S News & World Report survey. That was the seventh-lowest percentage among 38 public research campuses in the Association of American Universities.

Pitt is expected to adopt its tuition rates for the 2023-24 academic year this month.

Hail to growth

Pitt’s main campus enrollment grew 2% under Gallagher. It stood at 28,617 after Gallagher took office in summer 2014 but is up to 29,178 today.

Pitt is projecting that it will receive more than 58,000 applications from students looking to enroll at the main campus this fall. That’s up 90% from Gallagher’s first full year in 2015 and up 9% from a year ago.

The share of out-of-state students on the Oakland campus also is increasing. As of last fall, 43% of the main campus students were from outside Pennsylvania, compared to 36% in fall 2014 and just 23% two decades ago. It’s expected to reach 47% this fall.

Minority enrollment also is growing on the Oakland campus, standing at 39% of the total enrollment as of 2021. It amounted to 31% the year Gallagher arrived.

In his interview with the Trib, and in recent remarks on campus, Gallagher warned that as colleges emerge from the pandemic, demand nationally has split into distinct branches: one for highly selective, high-enrollment schools, and another for less-selective, under-enrolled schools that have not yet recovered from the pandemic.

“For less-selective schools, there is intense competition … for a smaller and smaller pool of students,” Gallagher said. “For the more selective schools, there is intense competition … among the students who are competing with their applications to get into this small number of selective institutions.”

He said Pennsylvania’s smaller, regionally dispersed campuses will face hardship if they rely solely on demographics without help from the state.

“If Pennsylvania doesn’t try to compete and create opportunity and attract people to the state, then we’re going to ride the demographic wave, and it’s not going to be pretty,” he said.

“We shouldn’t be ceding that competitive advantage to the Sunbelt just because they get more sunshine. I just think that’s silly,” he said. “And if you drive migration to Pennsylvania, then those demographic trends don’t matter as much.”

Gallagher announced in April 2022 that he was stepping down as chancellor, but he will remain a presence on campus. He plans to teach physics on campus in the fall of 2024. Gallagher said he intends to join the faculty union.

On June 23, as the last board meeting he will attend as chancellor adjourned, Gallagher took a moment to look ahead.

“It certainly feels like a transition now. What I like about it is this is the part where people stop looking back on what you did and start to anticipate what’s coming,” he said. “That’s what I think is most exciting.”