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October 14, 2010

Regional faculty senate presidents report goals, plans

Faculty Assembly last week heard reports from three new regional campus faculty presidents on plans for their respective faculty senates.

Mary Ann Caton, Pitt-Titusville Faculty Senate president, had a schedule conflict and was unable to attend the Faculty Assembly meeting.

Pitt-Bradford

Greg Page, president of the UPB faculty, noted that for the second straight year his campus reached its full-time-equivalent enrollment goal of 1,500.

The campus also recently dedicated a new residence hall, adding 100-plus beds.

“So our on-campus living conditions are vastly improved and we have a larger student body living on campus. We’ve also been able recently to renovate our science labs, which had not been renovated since the 1970s,” Page said.

“But one of the problems that comes with this extended growth is that we have taxed classrooms and resources on campus,” he said.

Page noted that the UPB Faculty Senate’s agenda is full.

“Primarily, we’re trying to establish curricular assessment of our global competencies,” such as math and writing, a task that has come from Pitt’s central administration, he said. “It’s still vague as to what actually constitutes ‘competence’ and we are trying to define that. That effort is something the Senate is helping to spearhead,” Page said.

The UPB Faculty Senate also is examining the general education requirements to assess whether curricular standards truly are meeting the needs of the students, he said.

The Senate also is supporting the evaluation and development of standards for UPB’s distance education courses and materials. Distance education heretofore had been offered as a case-by-case project, Page said.

Another Senate task, he said, is to improve collaboration between the faculty and campus administration.

“As a campus, one of the biggest issues is dealing with the under-preparedness of our students,” which the Senate aims to address from multiple standpoints, Page said. That means developing programs of academic-centered orientation as opposed to the traditional student affairs-centered freshman orientation. Such programs would increase student retention, he said.

“We’re also looking at resources available for faculty as far as training or curricular materials that can assist us in helping the students adjust to college life academically,” Page said.

The UPB Faculty Senate also plans to convene the campus’s first committee of faculty, staff and students to look at sustainability issues, with an eye toward partnering with Pittsburgh campus programs.

Pitt-Greensburg

In conjunction with the UPG Faculty Senate revising its bylaws, the group also is discussing with the UPG administration what shared governance means, said Frank Wilson, adding that Pitt-Greensburg must view all issues in the context of being an undergraduate teaching unit.

Wilson noted that all of Pitt’s campuses, as well as higher education generally, face challenges, many of which are due to a lack of financial support. He said the UPG Faculty Senate is looking at the best ways to support undergraduate education during dismal economic times, as well as how to countermand the low morale that results from a lack of resources.

“What is helping our morale is that we are engaging in all kinds of experimental projects on our campus involving things like collaborative teaching in ways we have not done before, such as having cross-divisional courses,” Wilson said. “We’re offering one this semester that is a science and ethics course that’s being team-taught by a philosopher and a biochemistry professor. I’m a sociologist and next semester I’ll be teaching with one of the lit professors a course that’s a mesh of urban sociology and the graphic novel. Collaborative work is very stimulating, and we’re trying to implement appropriate examples of that.”

Of Pitt-Greensburg’s 93 faculty, 50, including Wilson, are outside the tenure stream. About 20 of those are part-time faculty who have been teaching at UPG, in some cases, for 10 or 15 years, he said.

Wilson plans to charge the UPG faculty welfare committee to deal with the issue of educational standards, particularly standards for evaluating faculty performance.

Specifically, Wilson wants to examine whether full-time non-tenure-stream faculty should be evaluated using the same criteria as their tenured and tenure-stream counterparts in the context of the University’s three-pronged mission of teaching, research and service.

“We don’t call it research, we call it professional development, so there is a question of what is the actual meaning of professional development. I don’t have an answer,” he said.

The crux of the question of faculty performance evaluation is that full-time non-tenured faculty who teach four different courses each term feel additional pressure to publish and attend professional conferences.

“But, of course, there’s not enough money to send everybody to conferences,” Wilson said. “I, for one, think of myself as a professional teacher of undergrads, so it’s galling sometimes to see that what you do is not being accepted under professional development, and you pay a price for that.”

He expects there to be differing views among the faculty about whether alternative evaluation criteria could or should be implemented.

Pitt-Johnstown

Brian Houston described his campus as in a state of renovation.

“The Student Union was renovated and now is a modern student union, very appealing to younger people,” Houston told Assembly Oct. 5. “We have another new outside space called University Square; the Engineering and Science Building underwent a renovation that was partly technical upgrades and partly to give it a youthful look. A new health sciences building is underway in the preliminary stages. I think all that’s a result of the new administration four years ago trying to update the campus and make things more modern-looking and I think that’s a good thing.”

But as with anything new comes some tension, he said.

“People resist change. We have a lot of new faculty, and we have a lot of people retiring. The new people don’t know the history of the campus.

“What I’ve defined as my challenge for my first year is morale. I want to do a couple things: How do we pull back disenfranchised people and get them involved, and how do we convince [new faculty] they do have a say and that they have some position in shared governance. That’s what I see my job as,” Houston said.

—Peter Hart

Filed under: Feature,Volume 43 Issue 4

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