By SHANNON O. WELLS

Both Senate President Robin Kear and Chancellor Joan Gabel began their reports to Senate Council on Oct. 12 with heartfelt comments about the crisis in Israel and Palestine (see related story on Pitt’s response), before moving onto more routine items.

“As much as I sometimes wish the world would pause, it does not,” Kear said. “There will be other developments, and it marches on. And so I still have another few, more less consequential topics to update you on in my role.”

Provost search committee: Kear thanked the faculty members who ran for the slate and those who voted and supported the administration of the election, including the nominating committee. She congratulated those who were elected to the search committee:

• Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences: Abdesalam Soudi (Linguistics) and Lenore Thomas (Studio Arts)

• Professional schools: Jennifer Murtazashvilli (Center for Governance and Markets) and Frits Pil (Business)

• Health Sciences: Doris Rubio (School of Medicine)

• Regional campuses: Paul Adams (Greensburg; Political Science)

“We have tenure stream, both associate and full and non-tenure stream represented among those who were elected,” she said. “So we met all our requirements, which is a sigh of relief.”

Grad student health care: Work is proceeding through shared governance on the short-term Student Health Insurance Task Force, which is chaired by Carla Panzella, associate vice provost and dean of students; and Melissa Kluchurosky, director of benefits in Human Resources. In addition to student representatives, who Kear called “the driving force on that,” the task force includes representatives from Staff Council and the Senate Benefits and Welfare committee.

Kear clarified a misunderstanding she said she “unknowingly perpetrated last week in my lack of understanding about HR issues.”

The need for a student health plan to be approved by the state of Pennsylvania is based on a move from a self-insured health insurance plan, “which is what we have now,” where employers pay all costs of the plan, Kear said, to a fully insured plan where employers pay a fixed premium. “That is the difference there: Fully insured plans need to be approved by the Pennsylvania Insurance Department. So, I had that clarified for me.”

Benefits and Welfare Committee Chair Linda Tashbook is working with Human Resources and met with a Student Government Board representative, Kear said, adding that the Pitt Student Health Insurance Medical Hardship Assistance Fund is in place to assist students with costs through August 2024, up to the $4,200 deductible maximum for this year through August.

Because there is an expectation now that the Student Health Insurance Task Force will continue beyond one year, Kear said she and James Gallaher, vice chancellor for Human Resources, agreed that “this group for students should run in parallel with the Medical Advisory Committee for Non-Represented Faculty and Staff under the Human Relations Advisory Committee,” Kear said, of the umbrella group Gallaher just started.

Executive Committee: The expanded group, including Senate officers, chairs and co-chairs, met on Oct. 6, and had a discussion about committee functions, “especially for a couple of new committee chairs,” and free speech vs. hate speech at the University.

“After that discussion, we decided to join broader educational efforts that are in place this year, including the provost’s Year of Dialogue & Discourse, and will be in place next year,” she said, including the Campus Call Out for Free Expression, she said. “If you have any ideas for these, please let me know. I’d be happy to talk about that and I would welcome your thoughts and potential ways to fulfill that.”

Chancellor’s report

Gabel said she’s been actively involved in the Carnegie Reclassification of Institutions of Higher Education conversation “that’s going to go live, so to speak, in November … The whole group is looking at the meaning of R1 and also thinking of new classifications around social mobility, which I think will be very interesting and helpful for (Pitt) and for higher ed in general,” she said, noting there will be more to come on that soon.

As for her tenure at Pitt so far, Gabel said, “We’ve been very actively engaged. … It’s 90 days in, so still lots of first meetings, but (we’re) also developing a rhythm around shared governance meetings with Senate, faculty, Pitt student government, and I’m meeting with Staff Council in a few days. I’ve been out to Bradford, Greensburg and I’ll go to our other regional campuses soon.”

Gabel also congratulated Pitt-Greensburg, which celebrated its Founders Day on Oct. 18.

Other items Gabel reported on:

Alumni meetings: “We met with the AAA, the African American Alumni Council, yesterday; the board of the Alumni Association, and then a couple of days ago, we had a cookie table, which I’ve decided is perhaps my favorite Pittsburgh tradition,” Gabel said. “So why not launch it as a way to just bring the community together. We’ll do more of those. We’re calling them pop-ups because we don’t really have a plan for when.”

Board of Trustees / Plan for Pitt: Gabel attended her first Board of Trustees meeting on Sept. 29, which included a presentation of the annual report. “If anyone can’t sleep one night and wants to watch it from beginning to end, the video is available,” Gabel noted. “But there’s also a pretty robust discussion there around strategic planning, very similar to the discussion that we had in the last (Senate Council) meeting.”

Gabel also presented an update of the University’s strategic Plan for Pitt, which University Times reported on in its Oct. 6 edition. Under the plan’s measure for Pitt to be “welcoming and engaged,” Gabel clarified that as the “idea of this being a great place to work. And that would include the quantitative sides of that whether you work here, regardless of your identity, feeling a sense of dignity and appreciation,” she said, “but also, our community is shifting right now in how it wants to come to the table and how it wants to express its voice across different employee groups.

“And we really need to think about how we meet that moment and how we meet people and collective groups of people where they are,” she added. “So that is very much in consideration in the context of all of this.”

The timeline calls for presenting a proposed set of measures and outcomes in the February 2024 Board of Trustees meeting for discussion and then adopting the targets and measures for this strategic plan chapter in June 2024, which would be tied to the next fiscal year budget.

“Now we start to think about how we take all the just infinite number of things that we measure as an institution and move toward having those measures help us learn whether we’re making progress in the areas that we want to make progress,” Gabel said. “And I want to be really clear that I see measures as guideposts, as information, and have been very committed to — and if I may say, successful — in not letting measures become weaponized.

“I know that it can feel that way as you shift from an absence of measures into an environment that includes them,” she added, “but measures help create clarity, and that’s the way in which we’re going to do it here. We’ll work together and talk about that very clearly as we go through all of this.”

Provost search committee: Gabel thanked “all of you who were willing to be nominated. … We’ve finished the votes there. So we have those members of that committee identified. … We have the search consultant identified (and) now we finish composing the committee and move to the next step.

“And we have our other dean searches sort of queued up to go in sequence after the provost search,” Gabel added.

Funding news

• A research team from the School of Medicine and the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences received a five-year, $3.3 million grant from the National Institute on Aging to investigate a new means of protecting brain cells from neurodegeneration associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

• Angela Stewart, assistant professor with the School of Computing and Information, received a $1.3 million Racial Equity and STEM Education Award from the National Science Foundation.

• Two members from the School of Medicine’s Department of Surgery and Critical Care, “who received funding to lead a very large clinical trial on blood transfusion, $34 million over five years,” she said, “which is amazing.”

• Pitt received a $25 million gift from Orland Bethel, “a grateful patient,” to establish the Orland Bethel Family Musculoskeletal Research Center.

• The School of Nursing received a $2 million gift to create the Joanne and William Conway Nursing Scholarship Program.  

• Medical student Adi Mittal is a finalist for the National Inventors Hall of Fame’s 2023 Collegiate Inventors Competition for inventing a cerebral aneurysm test. “Adi will present to a panel of National Inventors Hall of Fame inductees, so a very exciting opportunity there,” Gabel said.

Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.

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