Taking the big chair: Pitt’s new Provost

Patricia Beeson moved about 30 feet from her old office, where she served as vice provost for… Patricia Beeson moved about 30 feet from her old office, where she served as vice provost for both graduate and undergraduate studies, to her new one as Pitt’s full provost and senior vice chancellor on Aug. 15.

Beeson is Pitt’s first female provost. She replaced former provost James V. Maher, who retired to a faculty position in Pitt’s physics department.

“I think it will be a huge move,” Beeson said in the beginning of August. “Not so much because of the hard stuff, like moving boxes. It will be the additional responsibility.”

Beeson worked at Pitt for 27 years before Chancellor Mark Nordenberg named her to the provost position. Before joining the Pitt community, she earned her doctorate from the University of Oregon, first as an assistant professor of economics, then as associate and finally full professor in 2000.

She became an associate dean of the School of Arts and Sciences in 2001, and Maher named her the vice provost for graduate studies in 2004.

Before moving into Pitt’s administration, she balanced a schedule of research and teaching, similar to many on Pitt’s faculty.

Mark Sniderman, the executive vice president and chief policy officer at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, conducted several years of research with Beeson during the ’90s, focusing on mortgage denial rates.

He first met Beeson “way, way back in the distant past. Possibly in the ’80s,” and has enjoyed working with her since.

Over the course of several years, Beeson, Sniderman and Robert Avery, a reserch economist in the federal reserve system, published more than half a dozen articles examining various factors that affect mortgage denial rates.

“She was very creative and very flexible in her thinking,” Sniderman said. “She likes to think about problems from all different angles.”

Beeson excelled at analyzing and making sense of large amounts of data, he said, a skill that will help her perform well in the top tier of Pitt’s administration.

Taking a break from research to teach several University courses provided an opportunity for her to see things from a new perspective.

When Beeson taught courses in economics, she would explain subjects to her class that previously seemed obvious to her, and when the students asked questions it forced her to re-think many points.

She brought that type of multi-directional thinking to her research, an approach that allowed her to see problems from different perspectives.

During her time as a member of Pitt’s faculty she found that the whole process can be a rich personal experience.

“When you are teaching or doing your research, it is your activity,” Beeson said. “The results are very intimate and immediate.”

For an administrator, the day-to-day work has a different feel.

“Rather than teaching the class, you are setting up an atmosphere in which faculty can teach their classes,” she said. “You have to develop an atmosphere in which faculty can excel in their research, rather than doing the research yourself.”

Her day-to-day activities typically go like this: “Come in, look at the calendar, see what meetings I have scheduled.”

And along with that, her schedule has become more regimented since she became an administrator. She said her job definitely has more aspects of management than a faculty position does.

“I’m making it sound like there are a lot of meetings, and there are a lot of meetings. I spend a lot of my time working with people, but they are productive meetings,” she said. “We actually get a lot of work done.”

She said that the past several years working in administration have given her experience in how the provost’s office works on a daily basis.

That work with Maher gave her knowledge of each school’s and each department’s progress and goals, which she said was likely among the reasons Nordenberg choose her as the next provost.

And when asked in the first week of August about the provost’s workload:

She laughed and said, “Yes, I’m getting a sense of that.”