Maria Pharr, a former Pitt Community College assistant vice president, has been selected as its new president, becoming the first woman to lead the college.
Pharr, who has served as president of South Piedmont Community College since 2017, will become the sixth president in PCC’s 63-year history, effective Aug. 13. She follows President Lawrence Rouse, who retired at the end of June.
PCC’s Board of Trustees made the announcement Friday following a vote by the state Board of Community Colleges. PCC Vice President of Finance/Chief Financial Officer Ricky Brown will serve as the school’s interim president until Pharr begins her tenure.
The announcement came about a month after Pharr and two other finalists visited PCC’s campus to meet faculty, staff, students and community members and to answer questions about their qualifications.
“I truly believe that everything in my life has led me to right now,” she said at a public forum June 20 at PCC’s Goess Student Center. “We love it here. Pitt Community College has been a part of my life.”
Pharr, who began her community college career two decades ago as an instructor at Craven Community College, was PCC’s assistant vice president for academic affairs from 2011 to 2014. The Havelock native left PCC to serve as executive director of BioNetwork and Life Science Initiatives for the N.C. Community College System before becoming president of South Piedmont Community College. Her son attended PCC and played baseball there.
“The connections that I have to to this community and this college run very deep,” said Pharr, who received her master’s degree and also her doctorate in higher education administration from East Carolina University.
“When I moved to the system office, I never left Greenville because it meant something to me,” she said last month. “I traveled 87 miles one way on that commute. But I love it here, love it so much that my husband and I purchased land here because I knew I was coming back. I would either come back when I retired or when an opportunity presented itself.”
During her tenure at South Piedmont, the college grew from 31st to 18th of the state’s community colleges in terms of enrollment. She received national recognition for using HyFlex teaching, an approach that offers in-person and online synchronous and asynchronous instructional options, to improve course completion rates.
Pharr said her years of leading South Piedmont helped prepare her for the new position. But she said she does not intend to model PCC after her former school.
“Just because we did it at South Piedmont does not mean that we pick it up and drop it in Pitt and do it just like we did it at South Piedmont because every college is unique,” she said in June. “It is about understanding the culture … and saying, ‘Where do we want to go?’”
Pharr said part of a president’s mission is to change the perception of a community college education.
“We know that we’re changing lives and we know that we do it in a way that is affordable, that is personal and that is successful,” she said.
Kennon Briggs, a consultant with the Association of Community College Trustees, a nonprofit that assisted the college with the search, said there was no shortage of candidates interested in becoming the president of the sixth-largest community college in the state. Other finalists Nicole Reaves, executive vice president and chief programs officer of Wake Tech in Raleigh and Roger W. Davis, president of the Community College of Beaver County in Pennsylvania.
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