Dominican University’s President Nicola Pitchford on Place, the Professoriate, and Justice Conversations in American Universities
President Nicola Pitchford. Photo credit: Martin Klimek
By Elissa Johnston
Where do ecology, justice, writing, and administrative labor intersect? In the work that President Nicola Pitchford, former professor of English at Fordham, is doing as a thinker, writer, and leader of Dominican University of California.
Dr. Pitchford has served as the president of Dominican University (a small comprehensive university in Marin County, California) since 2021. This April, she sat down with English News to discuss her work as an administrator, teacher, and researcher at Fordham and beyond.
Dr. Pitchford expressed love and gratitude for the Fordham English community, particularly the opportunities and support she received during her time here. “Fordham’s English Department, along with the Comparative Literature program, were great places to come through the tenure system. I felt so supported by colleagues; it was, for me, a very collegial experience in the department, including as a woman, and I was very grateful for that.” She also expressed gratitude for the enduring friendships with faculty and students that developed during her time here.
Dr. Pitchford’s record at Fordham features a remarkable amount of administrative service. During her time here, she served as Director of Graduate Studies in English, Chair of the English department, Co-Director of the Literary Studies Program, and Associate Vice President and Associate Chief Academic Officer. But as Dr. Pitchford shared, she didn’t start out thinking she would have such a talent for administrative labor: “I was told by my mentor when I was a grad student never to take on administrative positions like DGS or department chair if I could help it because my scholarly work would suffer so much. She was right, but I’m not sorry about those trade-offs,” she told me, laughing a little.
When she did take up an administrative role, though, Dr. Pitchford took to it rapidly. “During my time in Fordham’s English department, there really was an understanding that everyone takes their turn,” said Dr. Pitchford. “When I took my turn as department chair, in particular, I discovered that I was quite good at it, to be honest. There was a gratification in being able to make things happen for colleagues. I also found that I had pretty strong opinions about how things should be run.”
Dr. Pitchford cited the establishment of the Living Writers of Color reading series as one of her most gratifying achievements as English department chair. “There were some very kind donors, and the dean of the college thought, ‘I bet the English department could think of something to connect these donors with in terms of their interests,’ and that was fabulous – we were in the right place at the right time.” The Living Writers of Color series now lives on as the Reid Writers of Color series, which hosted Angie Cruz on April 19th for its 2023 event.
“There’s always a kind of seductive flattery about discovering you have a certain talent or capacity for something,” Dr. Pitchford shared. “That lured me further into administrative work, and then we had at the time a provost at Fordham who said, ‘You seem to have a lot of opinions about how things you should be done, so why don’t you come and serve as Assistant Provost?’ which I think is a very canny way of silencing your critics!” she said, laughing. “Part of the attraction for me as well, to be honest, was that my partner and I knew that we didn’t want to stay in New York forever. And if you’re a tenured faculty member and you’re not a star, which I was not destined to be, it’s hard to move unless you have that administrative [experience]. That was another reason that I was interested in building that part of my portfolio.”
Dr. Pitchford also attributed much of her success to the mentorship of the Provost who offered her the position of Assistant Provost. “That particular provost, Stephen Freedman, who is unfortunately no longer with us, was explicitly committed to fostering women leaders throughout his career. I’ve met at least half a dozen women who are now provosts or presidents at their universities who say, ‘Oh, yeah, Stephen was one of my first mentors.’”
Dr. Pitchford reflected on how her experiences as a teacher and as an administrator continue to motivate her decision-making as someone responsible for the functioning of the entire university. “It’s really hard to avoid spatial metaphors for university hierarchies: as you rise up the ladder, you do find it harder to see the crucial details of everyday teaching and research and service life. There’s no question: it’s not within your eyesight so often. But you do get a different view—not necessarily superior, but more of an overview of the university and its functioning. And when you’re provost or president, you’re responsible for that, as well. I’m so glad that I have a strong faculty ethos… I know the difficulty, the challenges, and the extent of faculty work, so much of which is largely invisible to people who are not part of it.”
This appreciation for the work that faculty members do on behalf of students, Dr. Pitchford said, works in tandem with her “overhead” view of the functioning and mission of the university. “I also see the absolutely crucial work that so many staff do in student affairs, the Registrar, IT, and so forth. And, of course, I see the importance of trustees and donors, whose vision of the university is always from a very different point of view. But one of the nice things about being president at a small, teaching-oriented university is that I’m not that far removed from students and faculty and the classroom. I meet and chat with students almost every day. They are still the only reason we are here.”
Dr. Pitchford also shared how reorienting her career from research to administrative labor allowed her to explore writing that wasn’t exclusively academic. “Once I made that decision, I was to some extent freed from the boundaries of traditional scholarship, and I had the privilege of being able to shift to writing for a mixed audience, popular as well as potentially scholarly.” And place-based writing—a singularly appropriate theme for Earth Month—is one of Dr. Pitchford’s main threads of interest in her scholarly and popular writing.
Dr. Pitchford also uses the term “nature writing” to describe her work, but she noted that while “nature writing” is a more evocative and accessible term than “place-based” writing, it also encodes some problematic assumptions about “humans” and “nature.” She said, “‘Nature writing’ implies there is something about nature that’s separate from culture, from the human world, which is highly problematic … [the term] ‘place-based writing’ acknowledge[s] a little more that nature and culture are entwined: humans are part of nature. But others right now are arguing for the idea of ‘ecology writing,’ which more aptly reflects the more complex ways in which it’s imperative that we understand our relations in the natural world.”
This concern for the complex interrelations between people and the world we live in also animates one of Dr. Pitchford’s main concerns as the President of Dominican: land acknowledgments. Dominican University stands on unceded Coast Miwok territory, and Dr. Pitchford is working to build a community conversation that addresses what that means for the future of the university, the land, and the local indigenous peoples.
“One of the ways that I started becoming more aware of the fact that we all in this country are living on indigenous lands was thinking about these hills versus the rural places where my family and I lived as a child in England, where every little hollow and hump has a name. And sometimes, people even know the history of that name. Whereas here, there are whole ranges of mountains and hills with no commonly known names. And I immediately started thinking about that erasure of local, indigenous knowledge. And when I had been appointed president at Dominican, I knew that one of the things that I wanted to do was start the process of land acknowledgment,” Dr. Pitchford told me.
The process of land acknowledgment starts with literally drafting a land acknowledgment statement, but it doesn’t end there. “[The statement] is absolutely only the very first step in acknowledging that this land is actually sacred to the Coast Miwok people,” Dr. Pitchford said. “We had shell mounds here on campus that were largely destroyed to make room for buildings and parking lots, although there were still a couple of preserved areas. I learned a lot through asking a group of faculty and staff volunteers to create an indigenous partnership circle, and the leadership of one of the groups of local Coast Miwok has been generous in being a part of that and leading us.”
“We are starting to come to terms with what it means that we are a university on unceded indigenous lands—because the Coast Miwok never signed treaties to cede their land, not that that would necessarily make it clean—and that we are also a place where our mission is to serve students from every background, including those who have traditionally been excluded from higher education, but we have only a tiny population of students who identity as Native American, and a huge population who identify as LatinX and Asian American,” Dr. Pitchford shared. Dominican is a federally recognized minority-serving institution, 70% of students identify as people of color, and many are first-generation college students. “It seems as though it’s a constant conversation about the importance of our mission, but a recognition of all kinds of ways in which our work is still built on violence, silencing, and erasure.”
As part of the ongoing work begun in this conversation, Dominican has just established a full tuition scholarship program named for Maria Copa, the Coast Miwok elder born in the mid-1800s in Marin County. This scholarship expresses Dominican’s gratitude and appreciation for the historical, political, and cultural legacies of the Coast Miwok communities specifically and Indigenous communities broadly.
As Dr. Pitchford and I wrapped up our conversation, she shared some encouraging thoughts for the Fordham English community on the value of the English major—and the university education more generally—in today’s world. She noted how challenging it can be to keep justifying the major’s usefulness: “It is so dispiriting for all of us who are working to preserve thriving liberal arts-based institutions, which Dominican is, but also specifically to advocate for specialization in the liberal arts (and in English specifically). It feels as if no quantity of facts or statistics is persuasive in the current environment, and there’s something about our storytelling that is not having sufficient impact. That’s something I think about a lot as the leader of an institution speaking to people outside of academia a lot. But,” she said, smiling, “here’s what I say.”
“Not only is having an undergraduate education still one of the most solid lifetime investments a family or an individual can make (financially speaking, quite apart from thriving and wellness and ability to have agency in society), but English majors, specifically, go on to have all kinds of successful careers, successful both in terms of meaning and of financial reward. It continues to be a field of study that can cultivate joy and critical thinking and the ability to act on the world effectively in any number of environments.”
Speaking from her experience as an administrator, where her grasp of “spreadsheets and numeracy” have proved indispensable, Dr. Pitchford highlighted that numbers cannot speak for themselves. They need storytellers to put them in narratives so that they make sense. “I never present a budget to anybody, whether that’s the campus or the board, without a narrative, and it’s the narrative that spins it. So having those storytelling skills—those critical persuasive skills—is indispensable when you’re the highest-paid person on campus.”
Finally, Dr. Pitchford reiterated her gratitude and love for Fordham in general and the Fordham English community in particular. Thanks in return to Dr. Pitchford for generously giving her time to speak with English News!
