Campus Community Profile: Chris Purcell, Ed.D.

Chris Purcell, Ed.D., Interim Dean of Students

(he/him)

Interim Dean of Students, Chris Purcell Ed.D., discovered his passion for leadership during his first job as a Cub Scout camp counselor at the age of 14.

“It was the beginning of me learning the science, magic, frustration, and joy of leading groups of people. At that time it was 8 to 12-year-old Cub Scouts and now it’s students.  I’ve had some folks who can still tell that I was a camp counselor and I definitely still bring those elements with me. There has always been this thread of learning how to get people to work towards a common goal, and that has been something I’ve done no matter what job I’ve had.” 

After his illustrious career of camp counseling, he went on to study at Western New England University, a small university where he originally studied Government with the intention to become a lawyer.

“My favorite movie was ‘A Few Good Men,’ which is about being a lawyer, so that was always the dream. However, I found myself feeling lonely and struggling with my sexuality and I ended up really finding myself in student involvement and began talking to people in that role and looking into doing that work in the future.” Originally, he planned on his career in student engagement to be fun and surface-level, but this idea quickly shifted as he pursued a master’s degree in Higher Education and Student Affairs Administration at the University of Vermont. While there, Purcell interned at the LBGTQA Services center at the university where his focus “quickly came to be about equity and inclusion.” 

From there, he went on to work at Duke University and Berklee College of Music in various student engagement roles but found that he was missing doing equity work specifically. So, he packed up his bags and moved from the East Coast to Tennessee to pursue his Doctor of Education in Education Leadership and Policy at Vanderbilt University where he got back into equity work.

“While there, I served as the Director of LGBTQIA Life, a dean of LGBTQIA+ students of sorts, where I did policy advocacy work that included getting trans-inclusive healthcare for employees, getting pronouns on class rosters, and helping students navigate gender and sexuality issues in general.”

While Dean Purcell loved his time spent at Vanderbilt, he found himself wanting to return to the kind of small community that he found as an undergraduate student. “Coming from a small college where everyone knew who I was and where I truly valued those relationships, Chatham just made sense. It’s been a cool transition.”

Although he is not looking forward to another winter in Pittsburgh after moving here in the midst of a snowstorm last January— “I keep moving to the south to escape snow then moving back up north,”— he feels that he has made the right choice.

“My favorite part of being back on a small campus is the students. It sounds cliché, but students here are so different from one another. They’re really inquisitive,  passionate, and appreciative; they each have some deeply-held issues or commitments that they care about and they all exist in so many worlds. It’s a unique dynamic of the Chatham students that I really appreciate.” 

In his new role, Purcell hopes to question practices to better serve students and his staff. “I am a perpetual question-asker of my staff but the questions I ask them are rarely new and exciting, it’s more of is what we’re doing for what’s best for our students, did we create these programs centering student need or administration ease, does it maintain our commitment to equity, did we communicate with the student body so they can understand what we’re doing at student affairs? Things like that.” He is particularly interested in listening and collaborating with students to better serve them implementing projects such as updating the orientation schedule and implementing modules into the Strategies for Success class for first-year students surrounding identity and equity after receiving feedback that these changes were needed.

Outside of work, he is finding time to explore Pittsburgh neighborhoods, watch football and basketball, attend local drag shows, walk his adorable beagle, Otis, and participate in Stonewall Kickball, an LBTQ-friendly kickball league where he honors his Cub Scout leadership roots by serving as a team captain.

When asked if there was anything he would like to say to the Chatham community, he responded jovially. “I’m really excited to develop new relationships.  I am very open to folks who want to talk and chat about what we can do together to make Chatham an equitable and engaging environment. I’m open to talk over coffee or lunch, get in touch any time.”

Get in touch with Dean Purcell, read on or visit the Chatham website to learn more about Chatham’s commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.