Joan Gabel has been named 19th chancellor of the of the University of Pittsburgh.













Wonder how much the Securian board backlash prompted this?

Seemed like a “this is done plenty of other places and not really a big deal” that was made a big deal out of by some.
 










Hire a president who is sympathetic to the deemphasizing of big money college athletics and/or behaves adversarially towards the athletic department??

Is that not obvious?
She tied Coyle's hands and destroyed Men's basketball. She brokered a corrupt deal to hire a regent as Duluth's president. She terminated the MPD contract, and helped make campus less safe. She took a paid BoD job at Securian, which was in direct conflict of her job duties as President. She can't properly forecast her revenue, and is embarrassingly coming back to the legislature for her failure to manage money.

I could go on. She's been a disaster and left the university in a much worse place.

Good lord, wake up people!

We have 4 new regents starting soon. Let's hire someone who is at least competent. I prefer someone who excels, but competency would be an upgrade at this point.
 

Hire a president who is sympathetic to the deemphasizing of big money college athletics and/or behaves adversarially towards the athletic department??

Is that not obvious?

Bingo. It wouldn't be the first time...
 

She tied Coyle's hands and destroyed Men's basketball. She brokered a corrupt deal to hire a regent as Duluth's president. She terminated the MPD contract, and helped make campus less safe. She took a paid BoD job at Securian, which was in direct conflict of her job duties as President. She can't properly forecast her revenue, and is embarrassingly coming back to the legislature for her failure to manage money.

I could go on. She's been a disaster and left the university in a much worse place.

Good lord, wake up people!

We have 4 new regents starting soon. Let's hire someone who is at least competent. I prefer someone who excels, but competency would be an upgrade at this point.

You understand no one is arguing against any of those points, and that they are not relevant to the point being made either.

Both these things can be true:

1) she is awful and the U needed her gone

and

2) someone worse in many ways can be her replacement

This is not either/or...no one is saying we need her around because most of us are happy she will no longer be here. That doesn't mean though it will be an upgrade and the wrong hire could really screw the athletic department up. It has happened before and it can happen again. I hope it doesn't but I never trust the people making these decisions I have been around too long (and my family longer so I know the full history) to not know how this can go. Hell it isn't even unique to us plenty of schools have made the same mistake over the years.

Ultimately whoever they hire has to balance a lot...I dont envy them.
 



In terms of academic reputation, I believe this is at best a parallel move and many would say that is a downward move.
I was on the faculty at Pitt many years ago and we loved the city.
Some of the faculty would tell me Pitt was"The Harvard of the Midwest".
My response was Pitt is not Harvard and Pitt isn't in the midwest".
I suspect there was some pressure on her because of her ill-advised membership on a BOD and the pressure of saving the medical school hospital from the Sanford group.
 





What's so bad about the athletic department? The football program is in its best run of sustained success since the 1960s. Men's hockey is the #1 seed in the Frozen Four after winning the Big Ten by a wide margin. The wrestling team recently had the baddest man on the planet, and tons of non-revenue sports are nationally ranked.

Yeah, the men's basketball team is down bad, but seems like some of a certain bent want to blame both Gabel and theories about why the basketball coach was hired and claim everything in Gopher Athletics is a disaster.
 

I don't pay attention to university politics, so pardon my simplified take on this. I never got the impression that she did any harm to the football program and hasn't seemed to do anything to preventing the football program from being successful. I got the impression that the regime/s that Mason/Brew/Kill coached under were directly conflictive with the idea of athletic programs as revenue generating entities within the university. I hope we don't get someone who doesn't like football and creates a culture that will push PJ towards a university that is the opposite. That's all I've got.
 





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