By SUSAN JONES
Even though Joe McCarthy has been at Pitt 26 years — seven of those in the provost’s office — when he took over as interim provost last July, he realizes now he didn’t completely know what he was getting himself into.
Moving from vice provost for undergraduate studies to provost, the academic veteran thought he knew the larger scope it involved, but “somehow I didn’t appreciate it anyway.”
“It was very rewarding and fun to have my well-defined and somewhat more narrow scope of responsibility (as vice provost),” he said. “And it was interesting to me how I was afraid that I might get sucked into my comfort zone, and focus too exclusively on the undergraduate mission specifically.
“But there’s so much great stuff going on across all other aspects — engaging on faculty issues, engaging on graduate student issues, trying to work with the other senior vice chancellors on infrastructure planning and how we engage with the research machine. There’s been so many other ways to have impact that I frankly didn’t get.”
After nearly a year as interim, he was formally installed as Pitt’s ninth provost by the Board of Trustees on April 4. He sat down last week with the University Times to talk about his priorities and other issues confronting the University. (Responses edited for clarity and brevity.)
University Times: Why do you think you are the best person for the provost job?
McCarthy: I don’t know that’s an answer that I can give you. … I know why I was excited for the job. I’ve spent my whole career here. I have a very deep understanding of the ethos of the place, what our mission is and how we want to impact the lives of our students, the region and the commonwealth, and those are things that drive me. I’m a bit of a bulldog and almost to a fault. I don’t give up, ever, and because I’m passionate about where we’re trying to go, I will put everything I’ve got into it. So I know why I wanted the job, why I was enthusiastic about applying and going through the process. Whether those made me the best choice or not is somebody else’s call.
UTimes: When you say you are passionate about where we’re trying to go, what does that mean to you?
McCarthy: Really, the reimagined Plan for Pitt, I think, articulates it really well. Pitt has always embraced that circular value diagram that the chancellor’s shared whenever she’s spoken about this — being in community with the region, impacting our students, the values of the University. I think that those have recurred each time that we’ve done self-examination of the University. But what I think is really inspiring about this next chapter is that we’ve distilled that into, not exactly action items, but goals. These are outcomes that we’re trying to achieve. That’s the part of where we’re trying to go that I’m really excited about.
UTimes: Is there anything in the Plan for Pitt that particularly stands out as a goal you’re excited about?
McCarthy: I worked closely with Bill Haldeman, of course, as he was leading that reimagining, and he teased me that the provost’s office touched on 90 percent of the plan. So it’s kind of like if you were to ask me which of my four kids is my favorite? I don’t think I can answer what portion of the 90 percent is my favorite.
But overarching, one of the things that I think is true about accomplishing those goals that I’m really excited about is the fact that we really want to strive for excellence at Pitt … and leverage the many pieces that we have, in some cases disparately spread across the University, and help them to coordinate, help them to coherently strive for these goals.
I’ll just kind of give you two examples of that. On the student side, we have excellent student supports in each of the units. We’ve gotten closer over the last handful of years to having Student Affairs and academic support and the design of the curriculum and the policies that guide them work together. But now that we have these clear guideposts of what we’re trying to accomplish, it incentivizes that integration of effort a bit more.
Similarly on the faculty side, we’ve had really outstanding efforts in faculty support in pockets. One example that I come back to a lot is the Faculty Staff Development Program (FSDP). But it makes me a little sad when I see “Hurry and sign up, because these spots fill up.” I love that we have this infrastructure to help lift our faculty and staff to pursue their career goals, but if we don’t have the capacity to do that for everybody, then that’s something we should address.
At the same time, we have fantastic resources in the University Teaching and Learning Center that we can deploy online education. There are ways in which we can scale the FSDP, and ways that we can integrate that with what we’re doing for faculty within each of the schools, ways that we can integrate that kind of approach with the comp mod project. Compensation modernization has these really well-defined levels and each of our new staff categories, and having those scaffolded career ladders integrated with scaffolded training, I think, is a really valuable opportunity for us.
UTimes: What is your interaction with staff? Isn’t the provost’s job more focused on faculty and students?
McCarthy: The chancellor sort of challenged me back when we started talking about me taking on the permanent role and said, “Joe, you’ve done a great job of helping Pitt knock silos down between academic units. The next frontier is knocking silos down between SVCs. We really need to be more coordinated in how we work together.”
I’ve worked closely with James Gallaher (vice chancellor for human resources), and I’m enthusiastic to continue to work closely with James. Last week, James and I met with the Staff Council leadership, for example, talking about what their hopes and aspirations are for next year. While it’s not directly within my job description, I see the synergies that we can have by working together — a little bit of that bulldog mindset. I’m not going to be contained in how I try and impact change at Pitt.
UTimes: What are your top priorities to look at right away?
McCarthy: Some of the work over the past year was chosen specifically because they’re very high priorities. It’s geared toward how do we work in collaboration to reach some goals.
We’ve put a lot of effort over the past nine months into figuring out how do we impact faculty retention? I’ve been talking with James (Gallaher) about how we can leverage some of those same strategies to impact staff retention. As a public institution, our answer is not that we’re just going to keep jacking up salaries. We don’t have the financial resources to do that. What we lean on instead is making Pitt a fantastic place to work, as a place where people can see themselves advancing. And we retain people because they want to be at Pitt. That’s one thing that we’ve hit the ground running (on) and we’re going to continue to work on.
On the student side, we’re again integrating some efforts in student success. We’ve had partnerships, I think, that have been very valuable across campuses. For example, the Academic Support Services for Student Athletes (ASSSA) is a part of the Office of the Provost; Mike Farabaugh is the director of that. We’ve had them working with the the student support team in Bradford to see what portions of their model that’s geared toward supporting 500 students can be scaled to support the 1,000 students in Bradford and achieve similar degrees of student success. That kind of cross-fertilization is something that we’ve really put a lot of effort into over the past year as well.
UTimes: How are the searches for new deans of education and engineering going? (The law school also needs a dean, but that search committee was just formed.)
McCarthy: All the searches are going according to the timeline that we were anticipating. The two dean searches (engineering and education) that we had anticipated finishing before the new academic year look like they’re on track.
We’ve had really great finalists. With the number of searches that we are involved in, and how important it is to really hire fantastic leaders, it’s been a challenge for us to schedule everybody that we want to have meet with these nascent leaders for Pitt. That’s what’s kept it a little bit more quiet than you might have otherwise anticipated, but they’re all going according to schedule.
UTimes: You told me last year that you would wait and see how you worked with the new chancellor before you decided if you wanted the provost job permanently. So how’s it been going?
McCarthy: I’ve told that story to a number of people because I didn’t realize that it was a tactical blunder on my part to be quoted as saying that, because if I had chosen not to apply it would have been an indictment of the new chancellor. I’m really happy to say I enthusiastically applied. I think her prior experience, her vision, her outcomes-based orientation aligns perfectly with the way that I like to work. I’ve been very pleased with our partnership thus far, with her vision of where Pitt should be going.
UTimes: You said last year that Chancellor Gallagher said you needed to learn about the union negotiations. Do you feel like you’re up to speed now?
McCarthy: Yeah, I had a crash course on union negotiations, but I think (Chancellor Gabel) has been extremely helpful in that regard as well, given her business background, and where she’s come from having had some unionized areas as well. I think we’re making very good progress. I anticipate that wrapping up, hopefully in the not too distant future. I know it’s been a long process for everybody.
UTimes: Amanda Godley has been serving as vice provost for graduate and undergraduate studies since you became interim provost. Will you be going back to having two people fill those jobs?
McCarthy: Amanda has done a fantastic job, both in her role over the years as vice provost for graduate studies but also in shepherding what is frankly a combination of efforts that I’m not sure we can legitimately think of as a one-person job. She’s done an excellent job in the interim role, keeping everything moving and integrated in a positive direction. I know Patty Beeson did it back in the day, but there’s only one Patty Beeson.
Given how critical that role is and how that role has expanded as we’ve built more cohort-based student support activities and how integrated our efforts are across all the campuses now in a way that they haven’t traditionally been, I see the vice provost for undergraduate studies role as really important. I certainly imagine that we’ll be hiring sometime probably over the summer in that role. As I’m sure you’re aware, Lucy Russell (provost chief of staff) is retiring, so this is naturally a time for me to think about what’s the proper configuration (of the provost’s office), with essentially two roles vacant moving forward.
UTimes: What is the status of the English Language Institute?
McCarthy: We talked about ELI like it’s monolithic, but there’s a number of components to what we used to term the English Language Institute. The planning for how we structurally achieve the necessary outcomes of what ELI had done is still a bit ongoing. This is not surprisingly tied up a little bit with the union negotiations, because bargaining unit faculty members are part of that operation. We’ve been working very closely with the Office of International Services and the Dietrich School to figure out what’s the right structure to achieve the goals of that unit. The jury’s a little bit still out on what form that takes.
UTimes: The Year of Discourse and Dialogue is set to continue. Will it take any different shape next year?
McCarthy: I certainly anticipate more projects. The projects that we’ve had thus far have been really exciting and compelling. Last week, there was a capstone event that I think came off really well. It was great for Kenyon Bonner to come back and revisit Pitt and talk about his approach to engaging in dialogue, and having Chip Carter give a fascinating lecture on the First Amendment. I’d love to see somebody pick up the mantle there and say, “OK, well now how does this translate into how we should think about academic freedom?”
Given the fact that we’ve had essentially two years in a row now where there have been difficult topics that people really wanted to engage on in a meaningful and constructive way, it seemed natural for us to continue this.
The chancellor coming in after the “Year of” was announced, and essentially accelerating what we’re doing with her engagement with the Campus Call for Free Expression out of the Citizens and Scholars group, that’s really challenged us to see, can we make Pitt a leader in this space and be an example for other universities on how we can constructively exchange across differences.
Prior “Years of” have had a really lasting impact on the institution, with creation of the Global Hub, among other global initiatives, that came out of that “Year of”; the Sustainability “Year of” has had a very long and lasting impact. And we can say that about just about every one of them. In the case of Discourse and Dialogue, one of the things I’m most excited about is that long-lasting impact, and our engagement with the Campus Call will provide us a really strong avenue for having that impact.
In terms of differences other than being two years in a row, I think that we’ll be accelerated in getting projects rolling and having a coherent vision for how that year is going to go, because we have already some significant infrastructure to support it. As we move forward with other “Years of,” I was considering stealing a page out of the Student Government Board’s playbook and have the new “Year of” announced early enough to engage with the leadership from the prior year, and really help us to hit the ground running in the fall.
This one, with all of the leadership changes, felt a little bit more like a semester of. One of the co-chairs leaving, the provost being new, the chancellor coming in and throwing in this really nice wrinkle of a national engagement, all of that meant that we were scrambling a bit in the fall and then had a fantastic spring. I’d like to have a true “Year of” moving forward.
UTimes: How do you think Pitt is weathering the difficult discourses that are happening on campuses?
McCarthy: I honestly think that our community members, whether we’re talking about faculty and staff or students, have really been remarkable in the way that they’ve engaged. They have taken different tacks to how they want to have their voice be heard, but almost across the board, with very few exceptions, they’ve been incredibly tactful and respectful in making sure that their voice is heard. I expect that will get even better as the “Year of” continues to bear fruit, but we’re certainly starting from a very Pitt-centric way. I think that our sense of community here at Pitt, how inclusive and respectful our community members are, has really shone through.
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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