The Pima Community College Governing Board has selected a new chancellor for the school.
The board chose Jeffrey Nasse, the current provost and senior vice president of academic affairs and college operations at Broward College in Florida. Nasse is expected to begin work here on Aug. 5.
“Dr. Nasse brings a wealth of expertise and a profound commitment to advancing PCC to new heights of excellence,” Governing Board Chair Theresa Riel said in a written statement Thursday.
Nasse will be paid a yearly salary of $350,000. A chancellor is the chief executive officer of a community college system, and generally sets direction for the academic, fiscal and administrative programs on campus.
“I am deeply honored and humbled to join the Pima Community College family,” Nasse said in a statement. “This institution holds such an essential place in the Tucson community, and I accept this role with great pride and a tremendous sense of responsibility.”
The other finalist for the chancellorship, Veronica Garcia, president of Northeast Lakeview College in Texas, is a Tucson native and an alum of PCC.
Broward College, where Nasse now works, has multiple campuses and serves more than 50,000 students.
Before he began at the Florida college, Nasse was a faculty member at Maine Community College, East Carolina University and Florida Atlantic University after receiving an honorable discharge from the Marine Corps in 1994. He also has experience working in construction and as a bartender.
PCC’s announcement Thursday of his hiring cited Nasse’s “aptitude for forging highly effective teams that have generated tangible student success results, including improved student outcomes in computer science, health science, and education programs, scaling accelerated online and flexible learning modalities for students and increased graduation rates.”
Nasse has experience working with the sixth largest school district in the United States while at Broward College, he said in his candidacy talk at PCC earlier this month.
While at Broward, Nasse worked with a special teacher incentive fund to provide “great pathways and opportunities” for paraprofessionals working in local schools, he said. The program provided money to pay for those workers’ tuition and “create a pathway for them to earn their degree.”
Also under his leadership, the college graduated its second largest nursing cohort of 450 nurses.
Since his start in 2017 at the college, Broward steadily increased its graduation rate.
Currently, Dolores Duran-Cerda serves as interim chancellor at PCC.
The community college’s former chancellor, Lee Lambert, left last August for a post in California. His annual salary while helming PCC was $348,935.
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