President Pitchford Begins Final Year Leading Dominican

After 16 years of service to Dominican University of California, including six years as president, Dr. Nicola Pitchford will step down from the presidency in June 2027.

Throughout the 2026-2027 academic year, President Pitchford will continue working with campus stakeholders and Dominican's board of trustees to advance the university's transformative strategic vision to become a health and community wellbeing campus.

"It has been an honor and a privilege to work alongside President Pitchford and to witness firsthand her profound commitment to Dominican students," says Darryl Page, chair of Dominican's board of trustees.

"She was an original architect of Dominican's distinctive approach to student support, and so much of the institution's progress over the last decade and a half is thanks to her expert and compassionate leadership."

Dominican will launch a search for the university's next president in the coming months. The board of trustees will provide additional information about the search process and opportunities for members of the Dominican community to participate as plans take shape.

Guided by President Pitchford and her leadership team, Dominican has developed strong programs that align well with the new health and community wellbeing focus, including an undergraduate program in kinesiology and doctoral programs in art therapy and occupational therapy. The university continues to see strong demand for established programs that focus on health and wellbeing, including nursing, physician assistant studies, psychology, counseling psychology, and pre-med/biology.

"We are well positioned to continue to develop programs, partnerships, and initiatives to meet the evolving needs of our students and our community as a health and community wellbeing campus," Page said. "President Pitchford has built us a strong foundation, positioning us to proceed with confidence and purpose towards a vibrant future."

Throughout her tenure at Dominican, President Pitchford's focus on student success has been grounded in a commitment to catalyzing social mobility.

As vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty, President Pitchford co-chaired the design team that conceived the university's signature student learning model, the Dominican Experience. This wraparound approach-integrating mentoring, hands-on research, scholarship or creative inquiry, community engagement, and career readiness into the curriculum-has contributed to strong completion rates and social mobility outcomes for an increasingly diverse student body.

Dominican's four-year graduation rate consistently exceeds both the national and California State University system averages (by 11 points and 25 points, respectively).

A key focus of President Pitchford's work has been expanding access and opportunity for students. She led the university's successful effort to earn federal Minority Serving Institution (MSI) designation in 2022, the culmination of years of focused effort to close achievement gaps as the country's college-bound population diversifies. The designation also made the university eligible for federal funding to support student enrollment, persistence, graduation, and post-graduation success.

In 2022 and 2023, Dominican secured two five-year, $3 million grants from the U.S. Department of Education's Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) program to fund the undergraduate and graduate La Vida Dominican programs. The programs promoted student success through the Dominican Experience's model of specialized outreach, mentorship, and resources.

Although HSI funding was eliminated by the Department of Education in 2025, halfway through the university's grant period, the programs' impact continues. From 2020 to 2025 Dominican reduced the achievement gap between Latino and non-Latino students to less than one percentage point at a time when the statewide gap was 12 percentage points.

Today, more than 70 percent of Dominican's undergraduate students are students of color. Approximately one-quarter are the first in their families to attend college, and one-third are Pell Grant-eligible.

Dominican now ranks in the top five percent nationally for return on investment for low-income students. The U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard reports median earnings of $95,437 for Dominican alumni who received federal aid as students - significantly higher than the $60,377 midpoint for all U.S. colleges.

President Pitchford oversaw the development of The Center for the Dominican Experience (CDE) within the Archbishop Alemany Library building. Opened in August 2023 and funded through private donations, the $8 million CDE centralized key student services, including the Mary B. Marcy Student Success Center, Fletcher Jones Digital Portfolio Lab, the Susan and Dennis Gilardi Center for Community Engagement and Partnerships, and the Francoise O. Lepage Center for Global Innovation. Flexible study and gathering areas facilitate important academic and social connection making.

In recent years, President Pitchford has been instrumental in securing gifts to support the growth of Dominican's work focused on educational equity and social mobility. A $1 million grant from the Fletcher Jones Foundation provides an annual cohort of eight incoming students with tuition assistance based on demonstrated financial need, along with funding for on-campus housing and summer study abroad programs.

President Pitchford graduated cum laude from Pomona College with a BA in English and creative writing. She began her academic career as a teaching assistant while pursuing her doctorate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She earned both an MA and PhD from the University of Wisconsin in English, with an emphasis on modern and contemporary U.S. and British literature.

Before joining Dominican, President Pitchford served as associate vice president for academic affairs and associate chief academic officer at Fordham University from 2009-2011. President Pitchford joined the faculty at Fordham in 1995 as an assistant professor of English and received tenure in 2001. She also served as director of graduate studies in the Department of English, co-director of the Literary Studies Program, and as chair of the Department of English.

One thread of Pitchford's scholarship has been the history of the Booker Prize (once the Man Booker Prize). Her research has focused on the critical controversies that have attended various prize winners, as a lens through which to consider larger cultural debates surrounding contemporary British fiction. Widely published on such topics as the British novel, Black British writing, nature writing, the liberal arts, and global engagement of faculty, she is also author of "Tactical Readings: Feminist Postmodernism in the Novels of Kathy Acker and Angela Carter" (Bucknell University Press, 2002).

In 2018, President Pitchford attended the Rural Writing Institute in the United Kingdom's Lake District and has continued to study the history of Marin County and Coast Miwok land, composing her own place-based narratives.

In 2022, President Pitchford received the inaugural Nature Chronicles Prize for her essay "A Parable of Arable Land." The Nature Chronicles Prize is an international, English-language literary award that aims to find engaging essay-length works that share a commitment to truth-telling and respond to the time we are in and the world as it is. President Pitchford's winning essay weaves together personal narrative and historical analysis, in threads including the story of her father's life as a hydrological engineer who aided the development and spread of industrial-scale irrigation technologies in the late 20th century, to create a parable for the failure of the richer nations' attitudes to water, militarism, and the exploitation of nature. The essay ranges across various landscapes, from England's Lake District to the Libyan Sahara Desert, to the vast farms of California's Central Valley.

President Pitchford chairs the executive board of LEAD California, a coalition of colleges and universities that champions civic and community engagement. She has served on the AICCU Restart Higher Education Task Force (2020), WSCUC accreditation teams (2020 and 2018), and the National Fulbright Screening Committee (2008).

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