University Times

Newly elected President of the University Senate Thomas C. Smitherman begins his one-year term on July 1. A professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Cardiology, Smitherman joined the Pitt faculty in 1990. His clinical, teaching and research interests are in coronary artery disease, myocardial infarction and imaging of the heart.

He has several years of service on the University Senate, as well as on several School of Medicine committees.

He also was a featured speaker at the 2011 Senate spring plenary session, “Teaching Excellence and Tenure.” (See April 28, 2011, University Times.)

Smitherman sat down recently with University Times staff writer Peter Hart to discuss his plans as Senate president, as well as recent events and developments on campus.

UNIVERSITY TIMES: In the recent exchange between the presidential candidates (see March 22 University Times), you mentioned Senate President Michael Pinsky’s CERTS initiative — Community Engagement for Research and Teaching through Service — as something you would like to continue emphasizing. Could you elaborate?

SMITHERMAN: In preparing for this position, virtually everyone I talked to said, “I think it would be better to take some of our more recent initiatives and try to make sure we’ve gotten as much out of them as we can.”

Since CERTS was a faculty initiative, supported vigorously and commendably by the University, we have a fair amount of control over it. We haven’t really brought it to full fruition and we ought to keep at it. I find this program very attractive for any number of reasons.

No. 1, it broadens what faculty members can do and be judged upon beyond the traditional.

No. 2, we talk a lot about the University’s contribution to the community. But this could be another element, almost one-on-one, group-on-group contributions.

So this deserves even more development, refinement, augmentation, enhancement. The key question is: How do we try to develop some overall standard of what we expect of our faculty?

One reason this appeals to me particularly was that I served nine-10 years on the medical school committee for tenured faculty promotions and appointments and another five or six years on the committee for clinical non-tenure track promotions and appointments. So for the better part of 15 years I have heard the complaint from faculty members: “I do so much and I don’t know if anybody knows about it, or if I get any credit for it.”

In my role on the committees I’d say: Tell me about it. And often it is very interesting, very valuable stuff, so I would like to try to use [the CERTS program] as a channel to build bridges with our community at large — not necessarily just Oakland — and then to make it an even more understood and vital part of how certain faculty can utilize it and be judged by it in their performance evaluations. Obviously, it will work better in some fields than others.

At the 2011 Senate spring plenary session, you spoke about the need to have better and more consistent teaching evaluation processes. Can you explain further what you mean by that?

At the plenary session I was talking about our needing to do a better job of evaluating what we do at the micro-level. I believe an in-depth peer review of each course right at its conclusion would be very valuable and would lead to a belief by faculty that evaluation of teaching excellence is very important, particularly in promotion and tenure decisions. I would love to push that a little further. And there’s interest, certainly in the medical school, although everybody always says the same thing: Where are we going to find the time?

Since it is time for annual performance evaluations, I was looking at my performance as a teacher and as a clinician, and I spent quite a long time going through the students’ comments. I realize the value of those comments — the students certainly have important insights — but also their limitations. For example, there are studies that show that student assessments at the time of graduation, as opposed to right after taking the course, change, with a little bit of reflection, a little bit of time.

We faculty need to sit down as a group, soon after the course is over. All right, everybody, hide your ego, hurt feelings are not allowed, and let’s talk about what went really well and what didn’t go well. And let’s try to critique each other and get better.

There are obviously some differences depending on your academic field. But let’s suppose you’re in charge of 200-level courses in psychology, and you have students from all [academic] persuasions taking them.

We need to ask: “How do we think we did beyond what the students tell us? Did we make second-year students who are going on to another level of courses more excited about psychology? Was it just a course they were taking to get it over with or because they had to take it? Did we challenge them? What did we do well? What didn’t we do well?” It would be enormously valuable.

What can you do as Senate president to push this initiative?

What I’ve done so far is provide a concept. And I have at least preliminary evidence of proof of concept. The next thing is to figure out a way, perhaps in a pilot model, to get faculty together. Let’s select these five groups and let’s give them the means, resources and time to get this done — all that takes really is some organization.

I did propose this to [medical school Dean] Art Levine, who loved it.

We would also have to have Provost [Patricia] Beeson’s support.

We need something besides standardized tests and something beyond: Did you get a job? Did you pass the bar? Did you get an internship?

That’s why it keeps coming back to: Hey, we’re the self-appointed experts. Can’t we sit down with our egos under control and our feelings moderated and think it through?

At a Faculty Assembly meeting where the provost talked about the work that went behind the Middle States assessment document, I commented that that effort is at the bigger level, a much more macro-level, and we need to combine that with assessment at the micro-level.

I’m going to float the balloon. I will take this concept to the [Senate] educational policies committee.

There will be resistance. This is not the kind of thing that university professors have wanted to hear in the past — “What do you mean I can get better? My lectures are fantastic.”

Did the recent spate of bomb threats that appears to have ended upset your academic life? What is your sense of the way the Pitt community handled the stress?

As is everyone else, I am relieved that the threats have ended and I am hopeful that the cessation will hold. The threats did not upset my life individually, with the exception of one evacuation during the April Senate Council meeting. But they certainly affected me indirectly, and I felt particularly empathetic for the students who were turned out of their dorm rooms in the middle of the night. I was moved by the students who said to each other, “If you get displaced, come over to my house.”

I also felt for the agony it must have caused the professors who were trying to rescue their courses.

I felt for the administration, who must have been utterly exhausted. The chancellor even got rousted out of his own house.

The resiliency of the students and the faculty and the staff has been not only remarkable, but heartwarming. It seems to me we’ve all come together as a community even more tightly, even more dedicated and stronger than we were before. I feel absolutely honored to be part of such a community.

I had a parallel experience. I grew up in the deep South in the middle of the civil rights era. When I was a student at Medical College of Alabama in Birmingham during that era, we not only had bomb threats, we had bombs. The 16th Street Baptist Church was blown up; the house of the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth was blown up. You had the Ku Klux Klan pointing rifles at you, you had citizen’s committees belittling you and putting pressure on your businesses. I was never threatened with death; I was threatened with being beaten up, and I was spat on once. That I wear as a badge of honor. Those times were trying. It developed among those of us with a progressive mindset to say, “We’ve got to get through this. There is a better place and we’ve got to get there and we will get there.” Birmingham was then known as the “Pittsburgh of the South” because of the large steel industry, and we adopted as our slogan, to help us get to that better place, the phrase, “The hottest fire makes the strongest steel.”

Do you foresee any longer-term effects of this situation?

I’m sure every university in the country is thinking, “What do we do if this happens here?”

I am sure that we all would long to continue with the open campus that we have enjoyed in the past. But our recent experience and the tragedies in the recent past on other college campuses leads me to believe the interests of improved security will mean that completely open campuses will increasingly become a thing of the past.  Restrictions are already in place in certain sensitive locations and will likely become more widely employed.

For example, I suspect that having card entry to most buildings, limitations on what one can bring into the buildings and other restrictions are likely.

Recently, the provost and the dean of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences announced a moratorium on admissions for three departments. Do you see other departmental changes on the horizon?

The provost said they’re going to give this some more study, they’re going to come talk to the relevant departments. That outcome I think is commendable. I don’t  know about the future. The decisions may well lead to some redesign or tailoring of programs. It’s rather common across the land where programs are losing support.

There is an ongoing issue about use of gender-specific facilities by members of the   community. How do you think that issue should be handled?

Michael Pinsky’s plan to form an ad hoc committee is a very good way to do it. It is a complex, complicated, difficult issue. This is far more complex than when women wanted their rights, for example, far more than when black people wanted to be respected, far more than when gays and lesbians wanted to be respected.

In this case, there are multiple constituencies who have something to say, and we must try to be concerned about all of these constituencies. We must take everyone’s interests to heart.

Michael wants a committee with open but eager minds, to put everything on the table and try to seek genuine solutions to meet as much as possible everybody’s needs.

Obviously, we will never come up with a product that satisfies everybody. This is one of those cases where everyone is going to have to make some degree of compromise. But I think that’s a very healthy way to do it.

I am hopeful, even confident, that with thoughtful work we can reach a solution that will be satisfactory to all, although perfect to none, if we all work creatively, collegially, gracefully.

Michael will stay in charge of the process and I endorse that, and I stand behind him to help whenever I can.

Given declining commonwealth support, there has been discussion about whether Pitt should remain a state-related university or become a private institution. What would you recommend?

One of my biggest concerns is we continue to lose state support. In that context, I certainly would have to think about it: We’re getting so little money from the state, why should we continue to give students a break in tuition? Any reasonable financial analyst is going to say, for all practical purposes we’re not a public university anymore and as much as it pains us, the in-state tuition is going to have to go up. At some point what can you do? But I believe it should be only a last resort.

One of my joys since I came here in 1990 is how this place just keeps getting better and better — exponentially, really. It’s been an honor to be here while this has happened. And for in-state students what they are getting is an incredible bargain. I hope our students and their parents understand that.

I don’t think it’s too much of a reach to say what we’re offering is getting up there with [the Ivy League schools]. It would be a horrible tragedy for the students and for our state to lose that, especially considering the value of a Pitt education.