Meet Todd Pfannestiel
UC’s new provost on his long and winding road to Utica and his student-centered plans for the future. You can learn a lot about Todd Pfannestiel from even the most cursory look around his office. The Godfather is well represented, as are comic books and the Beatles. Autographed photos of Rat Packers like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin are proudly displayed. The walls showcase hockey jerseys and sticks, memorializing his favorite team (the Pittsburgh Penguins) and favorite player (Mario Lemieux). The mementos have followed Pfannestiel throughout his long academic career, most recently at Clarion University
in Pennsylvania, where he spent more than 20 years in a variety of roles and planned to spend several more. Clarion, he explains, felt like home. He and his wife, Aimee, a philosophy professor and Clarion alumna herself, had built strong relationships in the community, and Pfannestiel was an integral part of the University’s growth over the past two decades as a faculty member, then dean, and later provost and vice president for academic affairs. But starting in 2015, Pfannestiel couldn’t seem to escape news about Utica College. The tuition reset was “on everyone’s lips in academia,” he recalls. “I was at a national conference, and people kept talking about Utica College and this big thing they did with tuition. I thought ‘wow, now that’s a remarkable move.’ I admired an institution that was bold enough to carve out a path and find a way to follow it.” And then there were the students. The more Pfannestiel learned about UC’s history, mission, and unique student population, namely UC’s many first-generation college students, the more his interest grew. “I saw myself in UC’s students,” he says. “My parents didn’t go to college. They always encouraged me, but I had to find ways to pay for my own education. I had to figure it out.” Even as he continued his work at Clarion with no real interest in leaving, Pfannestiel kept tabs on UC in the years following the tuition reset, including the addition of new
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