University Times

It was no great loss — gastronomically or ambiance-wise — when the Pitt Club recently discontinued its weekday lunch service, professors said at this month’s meetings of Faculty Assembly and Senate Council.

Still, faculty said, it would be nice to have an affordable and attractive club on the Oakland campus where Pitt personnel could socialize among themselves, host visiting V.I.P.s and entertain job candidates.

“Am I concerned that the Pitt Club as it exists doesn’t give us lunch anymore?” said Michael R. Pinsky, a critical care medicine professor. “No, because the times I’ve been there, it wasn’t so nice an experience. But I am concerned that we don’t have a faculty club that is of a stature equal to this University’s stature. Because we should.”

Pinsky told his fellow Faculty Assembly members Feb. 3 that at other universities he’s visited (“and not necessarily big ones,” he added), faculty clubs were pleasant places to enjoy good food and fellowship — things he said were lacking at the Pitt Club. The Pitt Club, located in the Gardner Steel Conference Center, still accepts members and continues to host catered activities such as parties. But the club eliminated its lunch service on Dec. 13.

Officials at Sodexho Management Services, the company that Pitt employs to staff food service locations around campus, said the Pitt Club’s lunch crowd had averaged fewer than 30 customers a day, not enough to justify employing the kitchen and wait staff. Those employees, along with the Pitt Club’s manager, are being transferred to other Pitt food service areas, Sodexho officials said.

Jay W. Sukits, a professor in the University’s College of Business Administration, complained that there is no refined eatery on campus where he can host the senior business executives who speak to his classes and meet with CBA students. “It would be very nice to have a place to take someone like that,” Sukits said, “someplace that would be a little bit of an upgrade from Joe Mamas,” the casual-dress Italian restaurant on Forbes Avenue. Business administration professor Josephine E. Olson said it was only when she phoned the Pitt Club to confirm a group reservation for lunch on Jan. 14 that she was informed the lunch service no longer existed, and she would be billed at a higher cost for a catered lunch.

Even though Olson isn’t a Pitt Club member, the club should have given her the “elemental courtesy” of letting her know about a change that had taken effect one month earlier, said University Senate President Nicholas G. Bircher.

Bircher said he has asked the Senate’s benefits and welfare committee to study the feasibility of establishing a campus club with more appeal to faculty and staff.

—Bruce Steele