University Times

Newly elected President of the University Senate Michael Spring begins his one-year term of office on July 1. An associate professor of information science and technology in the School of Information Sciences, he has been a Pitt faculty member since 1986. Prior to joining the faculty, Spring was associate director and director of the University external studies program (1972-86).

Since 2009, Spring has been an associate professor in the Clinical and Translational Science Institute and a global studies-affiliated faculty member since 2008.

His Senate service includes membership on Senate Council (1993-95, 2009-11, 2013-15), Faculty Assembly (1992-95, 2009-15) and the Senate budget policies committee (2010-present). He served on the plant utilization and planning committee (1996-99) and chaired PUP (1997-98).

Spring also served on the Board of Trustees audit committee (2004-08) and its property and facilities committee (1996-97). He served on the University Judicial Review Board (2003-07); chaired the software and networked information working group (1983-84 and 1996-99), served on the executive committee on academic computing (1982-84 and 1996-99), the provost’s area continuing education committee (1977-78) and the Health Center continuing education committee (1976-86).

Spring sat down recently with University Times staff writer Kimberly K. Barlow to discuss recent campus issues and his plans as Senate president.

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UNIVERSITY TIMES: How do you view your role?

SPRING: In the role of the Senate president, the goal is not for him to do what he wants.

When I think of all the people that are involved, I am a relative newbie at the Senate. [Incoming vice president] Irene Frieze is a Senate past president; she’s served on three times the number of committees I have over the years. She’s just an incredibly valuable resource. Linda Frank is returning as secretary. When I take office, I’ll have three active past presidents: Thomas Smitherman, Michael Pinsky and John Baker.

They’re all incredibly talented individuals. With all their talent and knowledge to draw upon, I think my job is to listen to them.

We have 15 standing committees with chairs who know far more about their areas than I’ll ever know. These individuals, I think, will drive the agenda of the Senate.

I don’t have any desire to tilt at windmills. My goal will be to understand that, of all the issues that will be raised, in the venues that we have, we’ll be able to address maybe 10 percent of them effectively. The question is, what 10 percent?

My goal is listening and trying to make wise judgments with all the input that I get as to what we can and can’t accomplish.

What will be your priorities during your term of office?

One is the notion that we as a collective faculty and as an institution have a belief in shared government. At heart, it really means that the faculty of an institution like the University of Pittsburgh are partners with the administration in setting policy as it pertains to what the faculty are responsible for: teaching, education, instruction, research.

We’re not merely employees but we’re colleagues with the administration in shaping the policy that will govern what we do.

There are institutions with less stature than Pitt where faculty pretty much are employees and they don’t have much say. But I think at the really elite institutions the faculty are the ones that are working with the facilitators — the administrators — that set that policy.

Shared governance is important for the most elite institutions.

Given that premise and that shared belief, the question is, why do only 10 percent or 15 percent of the faculty vote in an election? Why do only 5 or 10 percent participate in Senate committees?

It’s not easy enough to communicate what your needs are, not easy enough to participate in that discussion.

Faculty have an obligation to contribute. I respect the fact that a faculty member who’s putting in a 60-hour week teaching and doing research has precious little time to walk across campus and attend a meeting to add their expertise.

At the same time, I believe that it’s a shame to have an institution with the collective intelligence and wisdom of the University of Pittsburgh that can’t make use of that expertise for its own organizational betterment.

What will you do to facilitate greater participation?

If nothing else this year, I hope we will open up better channels for communication and better channels for offering constructive input to aid the institution in its evolution.

The initial focus is on finding better ways to communicate: To allow faculty to tell what they’re concerned about and to provide a venue for appropriate input.

If everybody understands what the issues are, what the questions are, what the options are that are important for the institution to make a decision about, what we want to do is find a mechanism by which the faculty can add their expertise to that dialogue and to allow the chancellor, the deans and the chairs to do what they do to set the policy.

What specifically do you envision?

What we need to do is establish better communication and that means both outgoing communication and incoming communication.

The chancellor’s office has been gracious enough to provide funding to redo the Senate web site. It will be a responsive design that will be tablet, desktop and smartphone compatible. Among the goals are ease of use, provision for controlled access, polling capabilities and better, more detailed archives. Better organization of the site will make things more accessible.

I envision having polling capacities on the site to enable faculty to weigh in and rate issues in order of importance. I’d like to believe we’d be able to ask faculty to let us know about any issues they’re concerned about.

Both the controlled-access faculty portal and the public Senate web site will be active. We already do Senate elections in a closed fashion online; we could provide a place where issues that should have controlled access will have controlled access, in addition to the public site.

I’m hoping eventually to have streaming video of meetings to better allow participation from faculty at the regional campuses. There’s no reason today why distance should interfere.

The cost of archiving meetings for streamed viewing later is minimal. Whether we will get to that, I don’t know. I see no reason why we couldn’t do some archiving of those and some real-time streaming in a controlled situation.

People like to time-shift. And there’s pretty good evidence that people go in and look. It surely opens up another option. I would think that a new faculty member at Pitt wanting to get a sense of what goes on at the Faculty Assembly might tune in.

I think that we owe ourselves the chance to look at whether or not that provides a better mechanism for engaging the faculty in shared governance.

What plans do you have for engaging faculty in the Senate’s plenary sessions?

It’s my intent to try to make the plenary a place where the faculty speak.

As I interpret the bylaws and the intent of the trustees, the council, the assembly and the standing committees are organs that operate throughout the year to carry on the business of the Senate. The Senate is all the faculty. The Senate is responsible for speaking on matters of concern to them: that is, matters of educational policy or other University-wide issues. And the place where they talk about that is at their once- or twice-a-year meeting, the Senate plenary.

If my sense is correct, the Senate plenary should not be a place where the faculty are lectured at, but a place where faculty speak.

I do concur that the last several plenaries have endeavored to address issues of concern to faculty by bringing together expertise to speak about it.

The question is: Is there a way to make it a more open forum for the expression of the opinions of the Senate, where the Senate is all the faculty? Whatever we focus on, that will be the goal.

Unlike the past three Senate presidents who are faculty in health sciences, you’re in information sciences. How does your area of expertise inform your view on the future of higher education?

Many say digital IT will be a coequally important revolution with the invention of the printing press. The reproduction of information has essentially become free; the speed with which it gets communicated, essentially instantaneous.

One hundred years out, education will be different than today. The economics of bits over atoms are so compelling that any bit business that depends on atoms must change. If you make sweaters, you’re still going to be making sweaters — we can’t keep you warm in a series of bits — but higher education is a bit business. We transfer information, create information, we archive and disseminate information.

We’re either going to be Facebook/Google entrepreneurs or we’re going to be buggy-whip manufacturers.

I think that one of the ongoing challenges for the University of Pittsburgh over the next 100 years will be to intelligently, cautiously, graciously begin to modify the institution. I’m not sure what form that will take.

I believe that education is not only an instructional experience but a social experience. So I believe universities will remain places where young people have an opportunity to transition from life at home to life on their own while they happen to learn some things that are very important to learn.

What changes do faculty need to consider?

At the advent of the printing press, some faculty who had previously done all their teaching through one-on-one mentoring began writing down what they knew. I would guess today it would not be inappropriate for faculty to experiment with online lectures, just to know what it’s like and to watch yourself.

Whether it’s simple exposure — the equivalent of what it was like to write a lecture down in the 1500s — now it’s the question of transforming the lecture into a digital presentation. Questions need to be asked.

The current state of software doesn’t make it possible for faculty to have the same information about [online] students as in a live classroom. If I’m in a classroom presenting a lecture to 30 students, I can tell where every one of them is, how they’re doing, what they’re thinking. How much they understand. Whether they got the joke. Whether the lecture needs to be adjusted. That’s not possible if you’ve got 50 students spread over the Internet.

A lot of experimentation has to go on to distill the essence of what we want to accomplish both in the classroom and outside. And how do we transform that in a way consumers like better and that provides a better quality product?

Just like traditional business, the goal is to provide the customer what they want. The second goal in electronic business is to move from push to pull: General Motors wants to sell you the car they designed, whereas Dell wants to sell you the computer you wanted to find. Dell doesn’t sell what they made; they make what you want to buy. The notion of pull rather than push is really quite alluring.

Successful businesses aren’t mass-producing: they’re mass- customizing. The question is what does customization mean in an educational setting like this?

Like doctors or lawyers, we are professionals who have some knowledge about what a person needs, better than they do.

Mass customization in the case of higher education doesn’t necessarily mean giving the student what they want. It means giving the student what they need in the way that they want it.

Some sticky issues have been aired in the Senate in recent months that call into question how well the processes of shared governance are working at Pitt. Is it the Senate’s role to be a watchdog?

I don’t view the Senate as watchdog. I view the Senate — the faculty collectively — as collaborators in decision-making.

If the Senate were to perceive that the delegated responsibilities to the administration were not being carried out, I guess they do go into watchdog mode, as the [U.S.] Senate might go into impeachment mode. Those are really sad occasions.

While a piece of working together could be warning that things don’t seem to be right, I think the most important role for the Senate is collaboration.

We’ve had some graduate programs that have suspended enrollment. And we have a recent [faculty pay] controversy up in the School of Medicine.

Over the last two years we’ve faced enormous budget cuts in terms of the state appropriation. Back 25 years ago when we eliminated the geography department, we were facing some tough times.

Whenever we face tough times, decisions need to be made that are not always agreed to by everybody.

I don’t still have a clear picture of what is going on in arts and sciences in terms of those departments. I understand there will be more data forthcoming.

I would not prejudge that situation, which I think is of great concern, without taking into account the climate in which it occurred — in which deans were forced to make decisions in the face of state funding cuts.

I think there was a lot of pressure on a lot of people and it resulted in some decisions to do things. I’m a little bit reluctant to suggest that what happened there mandates a watchdog kind of thing.

In an ideal world, we move slowly, we move cautiously, we keep account of due process. But I think it’s also important to understand that we do have matters of extraordinary pressure.

Ideally we have procedures. Ideally we’re always growing and opening new venues as opposed to closing old ones. But the fact of the matter is that departments have been opening and closing at Pitt for 225 years and that will continue. Hopefully we won’t make too many bad decisions. I’m sure we’ll make some.

The issue concerning tenured faculty pay in medicine relates to about 100 factors. The medical school is feeling tremendous pressure this year, worse than ever before. That results from really good things like phenomenal growth in the faculty, phenomenal research, and also by sequestration and downsizing and a tougher climate in terms of getting money.

I wouldn’t underestimate the impact of a threatened second 40-percent [state funding] cut, which did not materialize. And I would not underestimate the impact of our rise to research stardom and then the most recent sequestration.

It’s a very scary time.

It’s not unusual at other universities to expect some faculty to support their salaries fully through their research grants. My guess would be that if very explicit contracts about these assumptions would have been written, and very articulate guidelines had been articulated, I don’t think we’d be facing the same issue.

The [Pitt AAUP] presentation to Faculty Assembly did not address the right of the administration to do this. The question was: Does it present an opportunity to reduce salaries below a certain threshold? And would it allow arbitrarily defined differentiation between faculty members? There was not adequate assurance that would not occur.

The traditional view of faculty as those who are tenured and those who are working to attain tenure is not the fabric of the faculty in higher education today. There are part-time faculty, adjunct faculty, clinical faculty, research faculty. And there are professors of practice.

The School of Medicine has a big blend of faculty types.

The challenge to the administration, which I think they’re addressing, and the challenge to the Senate is: What kinds of policies do we establish to protect our goals to be the best educational and research institution we can be in that changing [faculty] mixture?

Given the changing roles, are the policies most optimal for people in those other roles?

How should changes in the composition of University faculty be addressed?

The fabric of the faculty is changing for a variety of reasons. If the faculty conclude that the increase in part-time non-tenure stream instructors is detrimental to achieving the high educational standards we want, then we need to address it in terms of how we achieve those high educational standards.

The Senate’s role in shared governance is to advise the administration that we can’t guarantee you the kind of student graduate you want in arts and sciences with this mixture of faculty. Or we can. Or we can if we do it like this or like that.

It’s my hope that we will take a much more proactive stance in linking our concerns to achieving the goals we have.

It’s clear that the increase of non-tenure stream positions pertains to reducing the institution’s liability in periods of rapid change. That’s the primary motivation. Sadly, I think it’s a sign of the times, but we can’t afford to carry 1,000 people we don’t need.

I’m a traditionalist: I’m happy to be tenured. I think tenure as an institution is a good thing.

How many people have lifelong job security that used to have it  — whether it was in a steel mill or an insurance company or whatever? Higher education is facing some of that same pressure to be more agile.

While I would not like to work for an institution that has no policy of tenure, I believe we could meet our educational research goals with numbers of faculty outside the tenure stream. The question would be: Are we being fair to them? And is that allowing us to meet our institutional goals?

It always has to come back to the institutional goals. We as faculty are responsible for holding the standard of the best instruction, of the highest quality research. That’s our responsibility. Our goal is to share with the administration what they need to do to allow us to accomplish this.

With more non-tenured faculty, could academic freedom be at risk?

I haven’t seen anything here that came close to the issue of academic freedom. If the Senate tenure and academic freedom committee or the assembly as a whole were to discover a situation in which a non-tenure stream faculty member was terminated for reasons that clearly indicated a curtailment of their academic freedom, my belief is that the Senate would speak very sharply and very clearly.

What I believe is a more important issue to address over the coming decade is if we anticipate more people in non-tenured positions, what needs to articulated or put in place as the policy that prevents that? It might be appropriate in this era of increased positions outside the tenure stream to say: What are the guarantees within the contractual relationship of assured academic freedoms?

The proactive thing to do would be to advise the administration what needs to be done to provide that assurance to non-tenure stream faculty.

Back to the issue of reduced funding, how can the University move forward in this environment?

People talk about the fact that money’s going to be an issue. We can look at the future and say there’s going to be less and less money to do what we’re currently doing. Or we could look at the future and say here are 100 opportunities to do new things that will increase new revenue streams that are within our mission, MOOCs as an example.

Another of the things I seem to hear is that in an area like information science, the notion of preparing someone for their life’s work with two years of education when they’re 21-23 is rather short-sighted, given that the needs for re-education or continuing education will increase. We already know that in information technology as a profession, certifications are increasingly important, maybe more important than degrees. Do we think of a radically different way of credentialing people?

It also will be increasingly important in some fields for different kinds of collaborative efforts: industrial research, foundation-supported research, military research.

Educational opportunities and research opportunities are going to change over the coming years. I don’t know what shape they’re going to take, and all the questions will need to be asked.

We can hunker down and say everything’s going to shrink in terms of the funding pie, or we can say: Look at all the opportunity to morph what we do without a loss of integrity and open up new revenue streams.