University Times

At its Oct. 21 meeting, Pitt's Board of Trustees endorsed the goals outlined in a new five-year University plan titled "Toward the 21st Century." Among other initiatives, the document calls for recruiting more out-of-state students, continued emphases on research and excellence in undergraduate education (including improving labs and classrooms), a new emphasis on study abroad, and a more diverse student body, faculty and staff.

But the trustees stopped short of endorsing the plan's 10 detailed strategies for meeting the goals until the board gets a better idea of how much money the strategies will cost to implement.

The trustees amended the wording of their resolution on the plan, voting to "endorse" the plan's goals but merely "accept" the strategies. The strategies form the heart of the 21st Century plan, together with a set of one-page summaries of proposed five-year plans by each Pitt school, regional campus and academic responsibility unit.

Pitt senior administrators and two key trustees — board chairperson Farrell Rubenstein and James Roddey, who chairs the trustees' ad hoc long range planning committee — said they weren't concerned by the board's reluctance to wholeheartedly support the plan until its costs are better known. But one trustee, state Sen. J. William Lincoln, protested: "If we don't have the courage to stand behind the plan that we asked to be developed, and endorse it, how do you expect it to work?" Rubenstein replied that the trustees were only asking that general "price tags" be put on the strategies before the board endorses them.

Lincoln argued that such a financial analysis is a normal part of any planning process and typically follows a commitment to goals and strategies. He said the trustees would be "doing a tremendous disservice to the people who did a lot of hard work putting this plan together if we take the coward's way out and say we 'accept' these strategies." Despite Lincoln's plea, neither he nor any other trustee voiced disapproval of "endorsing" the goals and "accepting" the strategies when a voice vote was taken on the plan.

Provost James V. Maher told the board that the 21st Century plan will help Pitt focus its resources on its academic strengths. "We recognize that we can't do everything," he said.

"We are not talking about closing units," Maher emphasized. "We are not talking about getting rid of degree options for students, at least not in any large numbers. We are talking about asking each unit to identify what it can do well, to see what niche it can occupy so that students from all over the nation and all over the world will want to come to the University of Pittsburgh." The provost continued: "Our intention during the coming year is to determine how many of our aspirations can be met by having units move resources internally. Resources will be moved into units from other parts of the University only after the units have shown that they can make the University of Pittsburgh proud by using those resources" — and that they are willing to commit their own resources to achieve unit goals, Maher said.

Maher and Chancellor J. Dennis O'Connor stressed that the 21st Century plan is open to rewriting. "The document that you see today will probably be different six months from now and a year from now," O'Connor said.

Both at the trustees meeting and at the Oct. 19 University Senate meeting, Provost Maher commented on each of the 21st Century plan strategies. The following are excerpts from the provost's comments to the trustees: Strategy 1: Transmit knowledge in more effective and efficient ways, seeking out new students, exploring different and improved instructional techniques, and recognizing the importance of all knowledge dissemination activities.

"Strategy 1 has to do with teaching," Maher said. "We intend to aggressively recruit the most talented and diverse students possible." But despite a recent headline in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette indicating that local students will have a tougher time getting into Pitt, the University has no plans to "abandon" Pennsylvania residents, he said. "We are taking about a very small shift (from the current 14 percent proportion of out-of-state students to 15 or 16 percent) which will enrich the atmosphere here, enrich the educational experience and bring our students during their formative years into contact with a wide diversity of people geographically, racially and in political and religious viewpoints. That is an essential part of educating students, and we are a little bit low on out-of-state-students." Pitt also intends to improve its "academic infrastructure" (libraries, computers, labs, classrooms) and maintain an appropriate balance between graduate and undergraduate education, Maher said.

Thanks to new technology, Pitt will soon begin developing a "very flexible and powerful" distance learning network that will enable the University to offer professional courses — and, later, undergraduate courses — from any of Pitt's five campuses to any other Pitt campus, Maher said. Such a system will allow the University to help meet the growing demand among Pennsylvania workers for continuing education, he added.

Strategy 2: Facilitate the discovery of knowledge, enhancing funded research opportunities and promoting and assisting investigations in the humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, health sciences, and professions.

"No major graduate and professional university can play a serious role in this country without having a very, very good research arm," Maher said. Maintaining such a research arm requires constant attention to the University's strengths and national funding trends, he said.

Pitt must continue to produce cutting-edge research such as that going on at the University's Center for Biotechnology and Bioengineering, the Materials Research Center, and the newly created Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Maher said.

This last center brings together neuroscientists, computer scientists and computational biological physicists from Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University. The provost said he agreed with a remark that Chancellor O'Connor made at the center's opening: that the two areas of science where dramatic breakthroughs are most likely in the next century are cosmology and the study of the relationship between the mind and the physical brain. Pitt will be well-positioned for research in both areas thanks to the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition and the University's participation in the Magellan telescope project, the chancellor said.

Strategy 3: Serve the citizens of the Commonwealth and beyond by seeking solutions to problems of human society and condition by providing career-oriented educational opportunities to students, especially in professional programs, unique to Pennsylvania.

"By public service we do not mean having people go out and do volunteer work that anyone could do. We want to focus our service activities on things in this community which really need the University, things which only the University can do," Maher said. He cited what he called the "remarkable" research being done by units from five Pitt schools on teenage violence.

An important part of Pitt's service mission, Maher said, will be a new program to encourage community service by students, especially service activities that are academically oriented. The program will be coordinated by the newly created Center for Public and Community Service.

Strategy 4: Strengthen the core areas of the University — the arts and sciences, business, engineering, law and medicine — and continue to nurture existing areas of high quality.

Maher stated: "What we're saying here is, we want to nurture quality everywhere we find it in the University. We want to give high priority to quality programs in every one of our schools. But we want to recognize that we can have the maximum impact on the reputation of the University and on the University's contribution to this area by having excellent reputations in arts and sciences, business, engineering, law and medicine. It is our intention to focus on strengths within all of the units but to make sure that we have an adequate number of strong programs focused in these five units." Strategy 5: Enhance the knowledge environment by improving the quality of student life and providing the most appropriate range of academic opportunities and student activities.

Pitt has formed a committee of staff from undergraduate programs and student life "to try to get our academic programs much more integrated with residence life (programs) here on the campus," Maher said. "That is something that has been neglected in the past, something that became recognized in this planning process, something that I have high hopes is going to make a big difference in the satisfaction of our students by the time they graduate. It is going to make their experience at the University a far richer one." The University also will take steps to get undergraduate as well as graduate students more involved in scholarly activities within their departments, Maher said. And Pitt intends to dramatically increase the number of its students who spend a semester or two studying abroad.

"Pittsburgh students have traditionally shied away from using the very good study abroad program that we have," Maher said. "It's an irony: we have one of the strongest international studies components in the world at this University. Its scholarship is first-rate, its academic offerings are first-rate. We're one of a very small number of universities that have five federally designated area studies centers — we have centers in east and west European studies, east Asian studies, Latin American studies and international business. But despite all of that international activity, we are falling short of getting this component of education into the curriculum." To minimize tuition increases and recruit more minority students, Pitt will aim to reduce its budgetary reliance on tuition and fee revenues, Maher added.

Strategy 6: Move toward becoming a better integrated system of five campuses.

Within a few years, interactive video technology will enable Pitt to offer selected courses simultaneously at all five campuses, Maher said. "We also think that, because each campus has its own unique niche in the kind of student it appeals to and the kind of location it's in, we can be very effective in a more global kind of recruiting — and then steer the students toward whichever of our five campuses is most attractive to the individual student." Strategy 7: Promote improved policies and procedures relative to the personnel who transmit, discover, and apply knowledge.

By the end of the fall semester, each Pitt school will have developed its own system for evaluating teaching performance, Maher noted. These systems probably will need to be fine-tuned over the next several years, but when that process is complete Pitt should be able to reward faculty for good teaching just as it now rewards them for research productivity, the provost said.

Strategy 8: Improve the structure and processes of the University, reducing barriers to the achievement of the other goals, and ensuring the continued primacy of the academic mission of the institution.

Pitt's central administration and unit administrations should become "leaner and meaner," said Maher. Cost savings and cooperation among units must increase.

"In practice, probably the most important and expensive feature of this (strategy) is that we need data bases," he said. "The management information systems are currently not adequate. When the central administration wants information from the units, it's quite costly for them to deliver it. We are looking to improve that in the very near future…The diffuse nature of a modern university slows down the implementation of this, but I think we're ready to move pretty aggressively now." Strategy 9: Maintain and further develop the physical infrastructure and campus environments that support academic achievement, remaining sensitive to the interests of surrounding communities.

Pitt's Master Space Plan is driven by the academic priorities described in the 21st Century plan's first seven strategies, Maher pointed out. While the University faces serious problems of deferred construction and deferred maintenance of existing buildings, Pitt has a competitive advantage in that most other universities have even worse problems in those areas, the provost said.

Strategy 10: Construct a new image of the University of Pittsburgh through the concerted application of long-range planning strategies, thereby enhancing institutional reputation and voluntary support.

"We really need to have a successful capital campaign" during the five-year planning period, Maher said. "We are talking about a modern university, we're talking about a very, very good university as a resource for the Pittsburgh area, and that is not going to be cheap." To help improve Pitt's public image in the long run, "we've got to make sure that we treat these students who are here on our campus now in such a way that when they leave here they become rabidly enthusiastic alumni."

— Bruce Steele