By SUSAN JONES
When Julia Meade went through the promotion process from assistant to associate professor of pediatrics last year, she began thinking about how she could contribute to the larger University.
So when the call came last fall for volunteers to run for University Senate offices and committees, “I checked every box except president,” she said.
When she learned she had been nominated for vice president, her first thought was “What have I done?”
She fought the urge to back out and decided to lean into shared governance, eventually winning the Senate vice presidency and becoming the first pediatrician in one of the Senate’s top two jobs.
“If this is the universe giving me the opportunity to do great things, I shouldn’t say no when it offers,” said Meade, a pediatric neuro-oncologist and a faculty member in human genetics in the School of Public Health.
New to shared governance
Meade is joining Senate Council as a true newbie. She’s been at Pitt for seven years and heard peripherally about the work of shared governance, but has not been involved previously.
“When I looked at how I fit into the larger Pitt ecosystem, it made sense for me to pursue this leadership position,” she said. “Not everyone is going to have the same vision. We need people who interface with the larger Pitt ecosystem differently.”
She’s received congratulations from her colleagues and also some head scratching about what exactly this new role means. Many in the School of Medicine are very removed from the University as a whole, she said.
“When we think about who does the Senate represent and whose voices are missing, I think a lot of people are not participating … because they don’t understand how it fits into their ecosystem,” Meade said. “I’m hoping to be able to collect a lot of opinions and stories and voices, so that the leadership can appreciate perspectives that have not always been heard in the past.”
Meade echoed the sentiments of new Senate President Kris Kanthak that they had an instant connection. “There are people that you recognize as good people,” she said. “I felt that connection instantly with Kris and Robin (Kear, outgoing president).”
She recognizes that the Senate and its officers are, in the end, advisors to the University at large, particularly the chancellor and the provost. “And my hope is I will earn their trust and respect. That when I speak on behalf of the faculty they will deeply take that into consideration. I think that is my goal for this position in the first year — to add value to that position and help it reflect a wider audience than the arts and sciences.”
The Senate has had leaders from the School of Medicine in the past, and current Senate Secretary Penny Morel is a professor in the Department of Immunology and Department of Medicine.
Faculty unionization has changed some of the dynamics of the Senate, because there are issues that the Senate previously debated that now fall under collective bargaining. But the School of Medicine faculty are not part of the faculty bargaining unit and more of the policies discussed in the Senate will still apply to them.
Challenges ahead
The Senate and the University face several challenges, from dealing with federal funding cuts and changing priorities to adjusting to a largely unionized workforce and coping with rising costs.
“Some of it is a reckoning of the fact that higher education as a business is a dynamic business,” Meade said. “How do we remain nimble and how do we capitalize on these changes so that they continue to work for the people we serve and in some ways our business model.”
For people in higher ed who aren’t willing to pivot and make adjustments, “that’s going to be challenging,” she said.
“My job coming in as vice president of the Senate is understanding where we as an institution can be flexible and our employees can be flexible and where they can’t be,” she said. “If everyone can bend a little bit, … under this new framework, we can still move forward and accomplish a lot of goals that line up with our Plan for Pitt. …
“My wish for everybody under these trying times is that we help people continue to do what matters to them both personally and professionally.”
Meade said one of the biggest challenges she sees in shared governance, and to many relationships, is defining appropriate expectations.
Even in the first month she’s been participating in meetings, she’s recognized “that expectations of faculty, students and administration are different. And when we have different expectations for what somebody else does … and somebody isn’t meeting that standard, it leads to conflict.”
She sees this on multiple levels at the University. “There are expectations that are not being met on both sides, and it’s leading to resentment, frustration, the airing of grievances. And it is important for myself as a leader and my colleagues who are in leaderships, who volunteered for this, to understand that we need to recognize the expectations being put on us and then understand how we either meet those expectations or reframe those expectations into something we can meet. I think that’s how we achieve progress.”
Preparing for the fall
Meade says she’s preparing for her new role by reading a lot of books about leadership, including the biography of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel. She’s particularly interested in “how do we handle criticism, and how do we respond to crisis.”
She’s also getting to know past members of leadership, in the Senate and the School of Medicine, and creating some visibility about who she is and what she can offer.
“I’m preparing my children and family for the fact that I’ll have a greater presence now and I’ll be attending things like convocation and graduation,” Meade said. It’s important, she said, for her children — daughter, 10, and sons, 9 and 17 — to see “that you can be a doctor and provide direct patient care but you can also be an advocate or changemaker.”
She and husband were a double recruit to Pitt. She’s a pediatric genetic oncologist, who takes care of children who have a genetically increased risk of cancer, identifies those risks and implements screening programs for early detection. She came here to build out that program, which had just launched.
Her husband is a transplant hepatologist, who takes care of people with advanced liver disease.
“Pitt was a natural fit for both of us,” Meade said, because of its excellent reputation in advanced liver disease and liver transplant and the top 10 children’s hospital here.
Meade said she’s “approaching this time with curiosity and using it as an opportunity for growth.”
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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