Skip to Navigation
University of Pittsburgh
Print This Page Print this pages

May 15, 2003

Advisory committee sought on fitness facilities

Having given up — for now — on faculty and staff gaining access to exercise at the Petersen Events Center’s Bill Baierl Student Recreation Center, University Senate leaders are asking Chancellor Mark Nordenberg to appoint an advisory committee that would promote recreational services and physical fitness on the Pittsburgh campus.

Economics professor Herbert Chesler, who chairs the Senate benefits and welfare committee that proposed the new committee, said: “I see this committee as giving faculty and staff a voice in the decision-making process with regard to recreation and fitness facilities and programs.

“I also see this as a way to hold the administration accountable for what they do and what they don’t do” in making exercise facilities available to employees, Chesler said.

The advisory committee should include faculty and staff representatives from the Senate’s benefits and welfare committee, according to a resolution that Faculty Assembly approved May 6.

According to the resolution, the advisory committee’s domain would encompass facilities, equipment, development and maintenance of recreation sites, scheduling hours of availability, programming and activities, instruction and staffing, and long-term planning and budgeting.

Administrators responsible for decision-making in these areas should consult with the advisory committee and seek its advice regularly, according to Faculty Assembly; also, an annual update on recreation/fitness activities should be reported to the Assembly.

Senate leaders have asked Chancellor Nordenberg to appoint the advisory committee by this fall.

Nordenberg said the administration will look at how faculty and staff currently are involved in campus recreation and fitness activities to make sure a new advisory group would not duplicate existing committees and lines of communication.

“I do think that recreational facilities on campus are important,” the chancellor told the University Times, “and if there are ways to provide for a different kind of input than we’ve had in the past, I would be open to that.”

Chesler likened the proposed advisory committee to the medical advisory committee, a group of faculty and staff that works with Pitt’s administration on health insurance issues. “Except that this new committee would have more clout, because its deliberations would not be confidential,” Chesler said.

In response to Faculty Assembly members who questioned the need for yet another committee, Chesler and former Senate President Nathan Hershey cited the recent relocation of exercise space in Trees Hall from the 1st floor to the basement — a move that will reduce by several hundred square feet the amount of workout space available to Pitt employees, Hershey estimated.

“This was not done in consultation with us,” Chesler said. “We were not even informed in advance.”

Last year, Chesler’s benefits and welfare committee lobbied Pitt’s administration unsuccessfully to permit employees to share with students the Petersen Center’s new workout facilities. “We’re not giving up on that,” Chesler told Faculty Assembly, “but for now we recognize the inevitability of the continued restriction of faculty and staff access to that facility.”

— Bruce Steele


Leave a Reply