Gretchen Ritter

Gretchen Ritter is an American political scientist and academic administrator who is the current vice chancellor, provost and chief academic officer of Syracuse University. She was previously the executive dean and vice provost of Ohio State University's College of Arts and Sciences from 2019 to 2021.

From 2019 to 2021, she served as the executive dean and vice provost of Ohio State University's College of Arts and Sciences. Ritter officially left her positions at Ohio State in August 2021 and became the vice chancellor, provost, and chief academic officer of Syracuse University in October 2021.

In 2014, Ritter interviewed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the New-York Historical Society.

From 2009 to 2013, she was the vice provost for undergraduate education and faculty governance at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2013, she became the first woman to serve as the Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University, a position she held until 2018.

Ritter grew up in Upstate New York. A "third-generation Cornellian", she graduated from Cornell University with a BS in government in 1983. She later earned a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ritter is the author of two books, The Constitution as Social Design: Gender and Civic Membership in the American Constitutional Order and Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonology Tradition and the Politics of Finance in America, 1865–1896. She is a co-editor of Democratization in America: A Comparative and Historical Perspective.