Pacific’s new prez eager to build on legacy
STOCKTON — Coming in as the new president of a college during an ongoing pandemic is unlike anything else, Christopher Callahan said Wednesday at his new office on the Stockton campus at University of the Pacific.
While it was technically his first day as Pacific’s 26th president, Callahan said he’s been in the trenches full time for about a month or so.
“I can tell you that what I’ve experienced here is, as I sort of kind of parachuted in, you know, a couple months ago, is a really unbelievably dedicated team, starting with the faculty,” Callahan said of the college’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. “Our students continued getting that fantastic Pacific education through these really Herculean efforts of our faculty, and it was really quite remarkable.”
The New York native, who has two adult sons with his wife Jean, comes to Pacific from a 15-year tenure at Arizona State University, where he was the founding dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and eventually became the vice provost of the university’s Phoenix campus. He also served as CEO of Arizona PBS for nearly six years.
But Callahan’s deep roots in the news business were established long before his time at ASU.
He received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Boston University in 1982, serving as a reporting intern for two years during college at the Boston Globe, according to his LinkedIn profile. After graduating, Callahan covered Washington, D.C., Congress, politics, the Pentagon and U.S. Supreme Court, among others areas, for The Associated Press and States News Service until 1989.
In the years that followed, Callahan worked as a journalism lecturer at Boston University while earning his master’s degree in public administration from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He then went on to serve in two Capital News Service director positions at the University of Maryland College Park, senior editor of the American Journalism Review and two deanships at the UMD Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
Callahan also authored the book “A Journalist’s Guide to the Internet.”
What drew him to Pacific was the university’s long history in California, being the state’s first institution for higher learning when it was founded in 1851, and its legacy of innovation, such as being the first college in the state to allow women or establish a medical school and having the first conservatory of music west of the Mississippi River.
“That’s innovative right there . ... You have all of these firsts,” Callahan said, adding that it’s baked into Pacific’s DNA. “I think one of the things that we’re going to be doing together is pushing that forward because when you look at higher ed, I mean, it’s changing.”
Callahan describes Pacific as the best of both worlds, where students get that intimate feel of a small private college yet have access to nearly 100 majors offered across about a dozen academic colleges spread over three campuses, as well as 150 extracurricular activities and Division 1 sports.
“There is this unbelievable clarity of mission at Pacific,” Callahan said. “This is a place that is built around and for students.”
As president, his goal is to build on the strengths of that legacy by taking input from the college community itself — staff, students, faculty, alumni and employers — as well as embracing the innovation and change that inevitably comes with higher education, Callahan said.