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July 21, 2011

One on one: Zupcic reflects on 41 years at Pitt

zupcicOne of Pitt’s best-known staff members in recent history is retiring next month after 41 years.

Assistant director of Community Relations Steve Zupcic won a Chancellor’s Award for Excellence for University Staff Employees in 2000 primarily for his role in organizing Pitt’s Day of Caring and other community efforts.

But his fingerprints can be found on everything from Pitt’s employee assistance program, to expanded staff benefits and enhanced retiree benefits, to the Staff Association Council (SAC) and numerous University committees.

In 1986, he served as the SAC representative on the ad hoc committee to study South African investments; trustees eventually agreed to divest Pitt’s holdings in certain corporations doing business in South Africa.

He was an early member (1989-92) of the medical rate review committee, which recommended cost-saving modifications to the University’s health insurance plans.

Zupcic was the founding chair in 1992 of the Lesbian and Gay Academic Association at Pitt, which was established as a support organization for sexual minority staff and faculty.

In the 1990s and again recently, Zupcic served on the University Senate’s anti-discriminatory policies committee. He also has served on the Senate’s community relations committee since 1994.

In addition, in his role as coordinator of the Faculty and Staff in Service to Communities program (formerly the Volunteer Pool), Zupcic has organized food, clothing and book drives too numerous to count.

A Pittsburgh native, Zupcic earned two degrees here, a BA in anthropology in 1971 and an MLS in 1973.

With his boisterous voice and infectious laugh, he is a well-known figure around campus who said he loves the University “warts and all,” and thoroughly has enjoyed his career as a Pitt employee.

Zupcic sat down recently with University Times staff writer Peter Hart to reflect on his long years of service.

UNIVERSITY TIMES: What was your first job at Pitt?

ZUPCIC: I had gone two years to Duquesne, but I transferred because I really wanted to be at a large public university. While I was still a student I applied for a staff position. I started on the staff in the University Library System in 1970. I did basic work like shelving and restacking.

After I got my degree, I entered library school, which is what we called it at the time. While I was in library school, I was promoted to work the reference desk. Working as a reference librarian is something I really enjoyed. I used to love fielding four calls at once and trying to find a line in a Shakespearean sonnet and how many gallons of gasoline were consumed in Seoul, Korea, in 1952 — this eclectic mix of information, I just loved tracking that down.

How did you get into community organizing activities?

Around the time I was leaving library school, Art Tuden, who was a faculty member in anthropology, told me of a position in the history department, which, in conjunction with the University Center for International Studies, was working on an oral history project. They were gathering an oral history of ethnic fraternal associations.

I began directing the program, where we’d train and send interviewers out to the Croatian, Italian, Polish, black and Jewish communities.

That oral history project was on soft money, but before the grant ran out, Art Tuden again came to my rescue. He told me that Lloyd Bell, head of the Office of Urban and Community Services, was looking for somebody.

What we did there was basically old-fashioned community organizing work, where we delivered services that Pitt had to offer. For example, we had a lawyer on staff who offered legal services to nascent community organizations. We helped create the East Allegheny Community Council on the North Side.

Wasn’t there a lot of friction between the University and the community at that time, during the 1970s and early ’80s?

During that period, [my office] had only one person, Jay Roling, who worked with Oakland groups. We primarily worked with organizations beyond the immediate Oakland area. That changed as time went on.

But the relationship of our office to the University early on was like an insider-outsider relationship, which I think to some degree was encouraged by the director, Lloyd Bell.

When the University hired Roger Benjamin [as provost in 1983], Urban and Community Services was threatened for closure or enormous scaling back.

Urban and Community Services started this community letter-writing campaign where we actually encouraged the community to oppose decisions made by the senior administration and encouraged tension between the University and the community for the sake of preserving our office. That shows institutional disarray. It shouldn’t be your primary purpose to criticize your own administration.

There’s been an evolution from a rather primitive, disorganized institution that the University really was in the ’60s and early ’70s.

Also, fiscal management is so much more responsible than it used to be.

For example, while I was still an undergraduate at Duquesne, I was volunteering for the Gene McCarthy for President campaign, one of my jobs was to run over with one of the other volunteers who was a Pitt faculty member to get supplies and he had a Pitt requisition.

It was done so casually: “Oh, here I’ll just supply the paper.” So reams of paper on a Pitt req were being ripped off for the McCarthy campaign!

For one thing, there’s much better fiscal monitoring now. But secondly, I honestly believe there’s been an evolution of mutual trust between staff and faculty and the institution, as well as an evolution of much better relations between the University and the community.

How did those improved relations come about?

When [former chancellor J.] Dennis O’Connor came and Leon Haley became vice chancellor [of Public Affairs and Student Affairs], the Office of Urban and Community Services [morphed] into the Center for Community and Public Service. There was a definite change for me. I was given more direction and made to feel part of a team that had a purpose in advancing the institution, as opposed to simply running around doing random community organizing that I found interesting. I was brought into the institution and moved from an outsider to an insider.

For example, when I became involved in Day of Caring in the early 1990s, it really took off as part of that new office. Day of Caring evolved from picking some projects from a catalogue that United Way supplied with very little relationship of what this had to do with the University.

After we went out on our own, I was able to forge Day of Caring into projects that involved the community — neighbors of the University — and doing projects that are of mutual benefit. It was really a three-way mutuality: The neighborhood organizations themselves benefit; the University benefits in the sense that it provides some valuable hands-on experience for staff to get to know their neighbors and how these organizations function, and, thirdly, the actual recipients of a service, the actual people who might be living in a house that gets painted, benefit.

Later you moved to the Office of Community and Governmental Relations?

Yes. Services of the center were moved under Community and Governmental Relations.

Under the really competent direction, particularly in the last dozen years, of Renny Clark and John Wilds, I feel very pleased that I was able to help transform the relationship of the University with the community in a way that’s been amazingly beneficial to both parties. Not so much in the sense that people feel better about Pitt than they ever did. Sure, that’s been an outcome. But we have built reasons for them to like us. Part of it is our cooperative efforts in building something like the Oakland Farmers’ Market, and cooperative efforts in getting a weedy, trashy lot fixed up and putting pressure on bad landlords.

You’ve also overseen the Volunteer Pool, now called Faculty and Staff in Service to Communities, for many years. How has that changed?

When I started with it in the early ’90s we had maybe 400 volunteers, and today we have going on 3,000. Part of my legacy was to build that over 20 years.

Also during this time, something I feel really good about is we started a survey of community-service activities of our faculty. We did that in cooperation with the Office of the Provost. Now it’s housed in UCSUR. It’s not static; each year it’s updated and it reflects well on the University’s reputation for its service mission.

You mentioned J. Dennis O’Connor, who was chancellor 1991-95. During his tenure, certain benefits such as library privileges were extended to same-sex domestic partners of employees. How did that happen?

Dennis O’Connor was one of the most misunderstood tragedies of this institution. But O’Connor was something other than competent.

An interesting example was when SAC approved the proposal to offer limited in-house benefits to same-sex domestic partners of employees [in 1992], which came from the SAC benefits committee that I chaired at the time.

This [proposal] went to the Chancellor’s office. O’Connor approved the limited in-house benefits, but he didn’t work the trustees at all. He didn’t alert them that this thing was coming up that they might find a little distasteful.

As a result, two trustees resigned as chairs of a capital campaign that was underway [for the then-proposed College of Business Administration]. And it polarized the campus.

However, what was most interesting about the whole process was not that some limited benefits were offered; it was that it established a mechanism for University recognition for other kinds of families, of domestic partnerships.

What kind of benefits you then hang on that recognition is up to the administration, but the mechanism is there. So the University at least poised itself to be part of the rest of the world in this area.

What was your reaction when the internal committee looking into Pitt’s offering of health insurance to employees’ domestic partners in the early 2000s rejected extending those benefits as fiscally imprudent?

I was not on the committee. I thought that committee finally would be recommending the benefits, and in some ways they did on a delayed basis. But the argument that it would cost the University too much was totally fallacious.

In the broader picture, I really believe that senior administrators have always been in support of basic fairness for diverse minorities within the institution. But at the level they operate, they just have to deal with political pressures from both the trustees and the legislature.

I actually feel the fallout of O’Connor’s incompetent approval on this earlier issue was more responsible for the later delays. Even if O’Connor would have waited a year to gain more acceptance, it would have been better. Or maybe talk to some trustees and legislators beforehand. He took on this attitude he knew what was best for the institution and they didn’t.

You’ve been a member of SAC for most of your tenure at the University, but left the organization from 1995 to 2003. Why?

In the late ’70s and early ’80s, SAC honestly had the respect of the administration. We worked collaboratively on proposals; I had chaired the benefits committee so I worked collaboratively with HR benefits, and we got a lot accomplished.

We had gotten approval of a proposal for an employee assistance program, which has stayed alive and evolved into Life Solutions. Our staff assistance programs are superb. One, they save the institution money. But secondly, they build another level of trust between an employee and the institution. When that individual faculty or staff member is in a difficult period in their lives, they have some place to turn that’s identified by the institution and supplied by the institution. And it’s confidential. It’s supplied by, not controlled by, the institution.

SAC also was behind the buy-back of sick days at retirement as a way of encouraging employees not to make casual use of their sick time. We thought it up, we proposed it and it was approved. So we had ideas.

We also were behind establishment of parity between staff and faculty benefits; we pushed for short-term disability benefits; we recommended implementation of dental and vision insurance plans and diversification of retirement plans, and we were behind the implementation of a flexible-spending benefits plan, although many of those efforts have been more recent.

But in the mid-’90s, we also had gotten approval for a policy of AIDS prevention education for staff and faculty.

The SAC membership was divided over these efforts, the AIDS prevention and the same-sex benefits stuff, and I believe SAC began to engage in the politics of exclusion, combined with prioritizing the holding of power over the promulgation of ideas.

There were no more ideas coming out of the SAC leadership. It added a top-down style to SAC, which was designed to be a grassroots organization, so I removed myself from the organization for about 10 years.

Were you apprehensive about rejoining SAC in 2003?

A little. But I rejoined SAC and the benefits committee and over time became chair and now we’ve been pushing for a bank of staff-donated sick time and, especially, for more encouragement of flex-time.

I came to believe that part of the issue was that I was proposing ideas that were ahead, slightly ahead, of their time. Domestic partner benefits was an idea slightly ahead of its time. I’ve presented an idea in other forums of having our health premiums be based on a percentage of our salary rather than a flat amount. I was told that officers of the University are opposed to that, but it may just be because it’s ahead of its time.

What changes would you like to see for Pitt staff?

I consider myself damn lucky to be able to retire at 62. But if population dynamics hold true, there’s probably going to be a staff shortage in the next eight-10 years. There’s probably going to be a trend to hold onto older staff. There will be pressure for people to work longer, and not only because you need the money to be able to retire, but simply because there will be fewer people available.

We’re not going to be in a position to offer lots of bigger and bigger salaries to attract and retain people, but I’m sure there also will be more incentives to stay at work longer, HR incentives such as working more at home and lots more flex time. It’s inevitably coming: Lots more flexibility and lots more workplace accommodations.

I was attracted to working for the University rather than, say, a Downtown corporation, partly because of the workplace culture, which I believe will continue to evolve. It’s a very tolerant environment, and a very human environment.

I hope, and this is a hope rather than a prediction, there will be stuff like staff sabbaticals, so that valued staff are given time to develop themselves and then return to the University as better workers.

What are you post-retirement plans?

In the longer term, my plans include relocation to Tucson, Arizona. Tucson is slightly smaller than Pittsburgh, and the University of Arizona is about 30 percent larger than Pitt and it’s a very sort of comfortable, homey town.

My biggest goal is to stay engaged in some form of social advocacy.

One of the things ethically in my position at the University I cannot do is advocate for social issues. I can try to solve problems, I can supply volunteers to address needs, but I’m unable to advocate to the political level. My own sense of ethics prevents that.

In post-retirement, however, I can be unleashed. And the skills I’ve learned here — it’s almost as if they’re preparing me for my next career. The skills I’ve acquired over 40 years of coordinating neighborhood, political and religious organizations toward common, worthwhile social goals I can now apply to social advocacy in Arizona, specifically, advocating for a more compassionate interface with our border neighbors in Mexico.

That’s one of the big rewards of retirement — it’s not to stop working but to stop working for an employer. That’s the true meaning of retirement for me.


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