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About the Provost's Office
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Mission
Our mission is Opportunitas. Pace University provides to its undergraduates a powerful combination of knowledge in the professions, real-world experience, and a rigorous liberal arts curriculum, giving them the skills and habits of mind to realize their full potential. We impart to our graduate students a deep knowledge of their discipline and connection to its community. This unique approach has been firmly rooted since our founding and is essential to preparing our graduates to be innovative thinkers who will make positive contributions to the world of the future.
Pace will always seek to relate its programs of professional education to the most important currents in those professions, capitalizing on its location in and around New York City to offer students real-world experience through internships and co-operative work experiences, using community service as a learning tool and employing problem-solving and other teaching techniques that reinforce the relationship between a student’s university experience and professional challenges and satisfactions.
The University is committed to diversity in both its educational and work environments by providing equal educational opportunity and a commitment to hiring and retaining a diverse and exceptional faculty and staff.
Meet the Provost
Ali Carr-Chellman, PhD
Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs
Welcome to Pace University! I am so happy to welcome you to your future through opportunities at Pace. You have found one of the most amazing universities in the United States today. Here, you will chart a path and will have the support of many professionals to help you make the most of your own resilience and determination so that you can achieve your goals. Whether you plan to study business, health professions, performing arts, liberal arts and sciences, technology, law, or some combination across disciplines, Pace has outstanding academic programs taught by highly qualified faculty with a strong focus on hands-on and experiential learning that will prepare you for careers, advancement, leadership, and life as a colleague and citizen. I’m particularly proud that Pace has been recognized by Carnegie Foundation as a Community-Engaged, Research and Opportunity College. Pace is one of only 33 institutions, and the only one in New York State with these three designations demonstrating not only our high quality and excellence, but also our community rootedness.
Dr. Alison “Ali” A. Carr-Chellman is Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Pace University. Provost Carr-Chellman works across campuses in New York City, Pleasantville, and White Plains. She has more than 20 years of progressively responsible higher education leadership
Ali hails from Columbus, Ohio, and has leadership experience at multiple institutions, including Penn State University, the University of Idaho (both land-grant public institutions), and the University of Dayton (a private institution).
Her experience at the executive and enterprise-wide levels includes academic portfolio management across comprehensive undergraduate and graduate studies, student success, research, faculty/staff development, and external funding. During her time as Dean of Education, Health & Human Sciences at Idaho, and Dean of Education and Health Sciences at Dayton, she had extensive experience in program prioritization, strategic planning, cascaded planning, enrollment-aware decision-making, and net tuition growth. She has worked at the unit level on online, certificate, and new markets toward increased enrollment at both institutions.
Ali has developed successful outreach and partnerships with hospitals, public and private schools, clinics, community groups, state departments of education, state-level health care advisory committees, and community groups such as the United Way. While at Idaho, she increased external funding by 28% and increased Dayton's funding from $50K to multi-million-dollar annual expenditures for grants and contracts.
Her leadership style combines innovation, a strong entrepreneurial focus, collaboration, and respect for shared governance. She is a leader-in-service with an ongoing scholarly trajectory and teaching throughout her administrative positions.
As Provost, Ali is continuing Pace’s ongoing transformation efforts. Her priorities within this post include:
- A clear focus on student success, including retention, resilience, timely graduation, and job placement.
- Strong positive work culture for all faculty and staff across the academic enterprise, including development as future leaders.
- Providing a model for scholarly and teaching excellence
- Increasing external funding, fundraising to support scholarly initiatives, and community partnerships.
- Supporting a positive culture for faculty and administration to work together toward productive decision-making. Ideally, Pace will serve as a model for effective shared governance.
- Careful stewardship of resources with a focus on the student experience.
- Ensuring strong academic and instructional quality and increasing Pace’s rankings while maintaining Pace’s Carnegie classifications.
- Enacting Pace’s mission and creating a culture of opportunity across the student experience.
Ali has a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science from Syracuse University. By trade and training she is an instructional designer and has published widely on educational technology with several awards from the Association for Educational Communications and Technology. Ali earned her PhD from Indiana University, Bloomington in Instructional Systems Technology, and earned associate and full professor at Penn State where she also served as a program chair for 8 years and department head for 6 years.