To the editor:
In a University Times article titled “Kear says she’s proud of her role in helping preserve shared governance” published on July 25, 2025, outgoing Senate President Robin Kear emphasized the contribution of the Senate in Pitt’s shared governance.
However, as an elected member of the Budget Policies Committee (BPC) of the University Senate since 2023, and co-chair of the committee from January to June 2025, I have learned that the Senate has no decision-making power. In a few meetings I have heard Senate presidents say the Senate has the power to vote “no confidence” to the chancellor. However, I have not found any legal basis for this in any of our bylaws, and it seems if even the vote takes place, it would be symbolic and has no actionable bindings.
With a little time of looking into the University’s bylaws and Senate bylaws, it is not difficult to find out that the Senate is nothing but a bureaucratic body embellishing the authoritative structure of the University with seemingly shared governance, but in reality, the Senate does vastly nothing but wasting hours and hours of faculty’s time in the committees, assembly and Senate Council’s meetings.
According to the University’s bylaws, article 4.1, all effective power is designated to the Board of Trustees, the chancellor, and the chief executive officer. Nothing in the University bylaws indicates the shared governance and the role of the University Senate.
On the main page of Pitt University Senate website, the very first two sentences say: “The Senate of the University of Pittsburgh is an official University body for shared governance. Through its various organs, it considers and makes recommendations concerning educational policies and other matters of University-wide concern.” This first statement is already contradictory. The question is how an “official body for shared governance” can govern if it has no power other than making recommendations? This means whatever we do here in the committees and various sessions in the form of documents recommending various practices to the administration, can be simply thrown away in the bin if the administration decides to and nothing can be done about it.
I know authoritarianism because I lived under the state capitalism system of the Islamic Republic of Iran for three decades, and I know how bureaucracy enables the lack of checks and balances in a system like this for the benefit of the ruling class. The authoritarian structure of the University bylaws has clearly manufactured a one-way street; orders come from the top, the lord, and the bottom, the serfs only have the right to say yes.
The University Board of Trustees should know that the University is not their private companies. The University has over 3,000 faculty who have expertise in all fields of knowledge and techniques, in addition to thousands of competent staff, and we know and can make decisions how to govern our University. We don’t need 36 members of the Board of Trustees, who are appointed undemocratically, to rule Pitt. We can and should transition to a democratic decision-making model to decentralize the power of decision making. This will allow improvements to take place through democracy.
Earlier this year in a BPC meeting, one of the Senate officers who was present in the meeting — in response to me saying that Pitt is an authoritarian entity and has a top down decision making model and that’s why so many decisions happen in secret and we don’t have the power to change anything other than making recommendations — said sometimes authoritarian system works better and that Pitt’s current model of decision making is working well for us financially. But he didn’t say who this “us” is. It seems it works for tenured U.S.-born, non-person of color faculty members, but this does not work for me and many more, and this authoritarian structure impedes us from changing it.
In January 2025, the Budget Policies Committee had a vote to choose the next chair, and since nobody came forward, I nominated myself clarifying that I wanted to probe the nature of the University’s Consolidated Endowment Fund (CEF) investments in the wake of the campus unrest following the genocidal campaign of Israel against the Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023. The committee predominantly voted me to be the co-chair of the committee.
After a few months of correspondence with Pitt’s office of finance, Dwayne Pinkney, executive senior vice chancellor and CFO, and Jeffrey Choudhry, chief investment officer, eventually agreed to attend our last committee meeting of the academic year on June 20, 2025.
To give the readers a bit of context, Pitt has a roughly $5.8 billion endowment that it invests in various sectors, using the profits to fund the University’s operation budget. Following pressure by the Pitt community — specifically by a campus group, Fossil Free Pitt, that demanded Pitt divest entirely from the fossil fuel industry — the Board of Trustees initiated an ad hoc committee in 2020 to tackle this issue, and the results was an Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) report in Jan. 15, 2021. According to the article 3.3 on page 10 of the ad hoc committee’s report on fossil fuel and ESG:
“The ESG Policy states that the University is committed to fully integrating ESG factors into the University’s decision-making processes, on the core belief that supporting responsible business practices also supports strong investment outcomes.
Though ESG factors will vary based on the type, industry, and scope of an investment, the ESG Policy outlines how the University’s investment team considers a range of factors when evaluating investment risk. Those factors could include environmental, social, and/or governance factors such as (but not restricted to): energy efficiency, hazardous materials management, climate change, water and land management, data protection and privacy, human rights, labor standards, product safety, accounting and audit standards, bribery and corruption, business ethics, and regulatory compliance.”
The report, which came out of lengthy work by a few board members in an ad hoc committee, outlines that the investment team considers a range of factors. Based on that, I made a case regarding one of the factors, Human Rights, asking the University to do a socially responsible investing (SRI) screening process on companies violating human rights and ultimately divest from them.
We all know that many protests and encampments have taken place on our campus since October 2023 in response to the ongoing genocidal attacks by Israel upon Palestinians in Gaza. Many Pitt students, faculty, staff, alumni and Pittsburgh community members demanded Pitt disclose all its CEF investments and divest from those companies and institutions who have any relationships with the state of Israel and the Israeli institutions and companies. This was a strategic demand from the University’s stakeholders to hold our University accountable about the clear human rights violations perpetrated by the state of Israel with impunity, and by this divestment, the university would materially and symbolically put pressure on Israel to stop its daily and grim massacre of the people in Gaza.
After 22 months of genocide, Israel with the full financial, military and political support of the U.S. government, has taken at least 60,000 Palestinians lives, including more than 19,000 children. They have starved Gazans for months. They have shot people waiting in line for food. This is the most well-documented genocide in human history and all credible humanitarian organizations and legal institutions have stated that Israel committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, which are clearly human rights violations. Along with many of my faculty colleagues, I am ashamed that the Pitt administration prefers profit over human misery and has not responded to calls for divestment from this genocidal state. I added a few references below, but it is not hard to find many more:
International Court of Justice: On Nov. 24, 2024, Pre-Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court, in its composition for the Situation in the State of Palestine, unanimously issued warrants of arrest for Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, and Yoav Gallant, former defense minister of Israel.
Human Rights Watch: “Israeli authorities have caused the massive, deliberate forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in Gaza since October 2023 and are responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch said in a report.”
UN: On May 6, 2025 Navi Pillay, chair of the Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, opened her statement to the 59th session of the UN Human Rights Council: “The goal of the Israeli government is abundantly clear: the destruction of life in Gaza.” She wrote: “It found that 90 percent of Gaza’s schools and universities have been damaged or destroyed by Israeli attacks — including airstrikes, shelling, burning and controlled demolitions. In Gaza, Israeli forces have damaged 53 percent of religious and cultural sites.”
By not issuing adequate warnings to civilians sheltering inside, these attacks caused extensive casualties, amounting to war crimes, including knowingly launching attacks that caused excessive and disproportionate civilian harm, and the crime against humanity of extermination.
BBC: In Jeremy Bowen’s June 26, 2025 BBC report, he covered the starvation policies of Israel and spoke to “Lieutenant-Colonel Anthony Aguilar, a former special forces veteran, who was recruited to work for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a joint Israeli-U.S. scheme replacing the United Nations food distribution operation in Gaza.” He spoke about the Israeli forces who shoot at the crowd of people who come to receive food, “I would say they (Israeli Defense Forces) are criminal. In my entire career have I never witnessed the level of brutality and the use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population, an unarmed, starving population … at the hand of IDF and U.S. contractors.” He continued: “Without a question, I witnessed war crimes by Israeli Defense Forces without a doubt using artillery rounds, mortar rounds, firing tank rounds at an unarmed civilian. There’s a war crime.”
In addition, two prominent Israeli rights groups, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHRI) recently said their country is committing genocide in Gaza.
At the BPC meeting, CIO Choudhry, in response to the case I outlined to divest from companies violating human rights, stated that Pitt has not been prohibited from investing in weapons manufacturers and these weapon manufacturers support the U.S.’s national security. By doing this, he is committing Pitt to legitimizing atrocities the U.S .has committed all over the world (such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam and many more), where its 800 military bases and facilities create threats to all living beings who do not submit to the U.S. Investing in weapon manufacturers means investing in war and killing people, destroying our living environment, and wasting natural resources to build and use weapons. (Editor’s note: At no point, did Choudhry say that Pitt was invested in weapons manufacturers.)
He also indicated, in violation of the SRI report, that Pitt would only consider financial risks when it comes to investments.
Meanwhile, Choudhry asked whether I knew how much Pitt invests in weapon manufacturers, even though he understood that Pitt’s investment list is secret, and that only a few people from the Board of Trustees and his office know where the CEF is invested. In previous correspondence with CFO Pinkney, I requested that the Senate budget committee have access to the list. We were willing to sign legal nondisclosure agreements. He would not agree to give us access. If the administration will not grant access to information that is literally under the purview of the committee, how are we participating in shared governance?
That meeting also coincided with the Israeli-initiated attacks on Iran in June, fully coordinated with, supported and participated in by the U.S., which resulted in the death of over a thousand people, most of whom were civilians. My immediate family members, my relatives, and my friends were under bombardment with U.S.-manufactured weapons. Pitt may also have profited from that war.
Earlier this year, I received an email from the University Senate calling for nominations for Senate president. I nominated myself, and if elected hoped to start initiatives and conversations about the changes that faculty want. A few weeks later, I received an email from a Senate officer stating I could not be on the ballot because all nominations were vetted by the Senate Elections Committee, which unanimously voted to nominate other individuals for this role.
According to the Senate Bylaws, the Election Committee nominates people for Senate officer positions (president, vice president and secretary) based on qualifications, but the bylaws do not specify those qualifications. So, instead of permitting the full faculty to elect officers from among a wide slate of nominees, the Election Committee restricts the ballot to a small club of known people.
The University Senate does not participate in Pitt shared governance, because shared governance happens when power is decentralized and where there is a clear system of checks and balances. We don’t need a Senate like this. Maybe we should terminate it, since we have a union that represents the faculty body democratically.
I am sure many of my colleagues agree with me that Pitt as an educational institution must not profit from war and must divest our University endowment from any harmful companies, especially weapon manufacturers which send arms and other military equipment to Israel.
To be clear, as long as we are investing and profiting from the weapons industry, we are investing in death and destruction, and we cannot expect to live in a world without wars and aggression.
At the end, I would like to ask either the University, the Senate, AAUP or faculty union to hold a referendum to all faculty members on whether they agree or not that Pitt must divest from all weapons manufacturing companies, as well as those institutions, organizations and companies that work with the Israeli government and entities.
Omid Shekari
Assistant professor of studio arts
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences