By SHANNON O. WELLS

Improved access to mental health resources, stronger integration among campus-wide student success efforts and support for students to increase retention rates are among the issues members of the Senate Student Admissions, Aid and Affairs (SAAA) committee would like to see the new vice provost for student affairs prioritize when they come on board later this year.

Nicola Foote, dean of the Frederick Honors College and co-chair of the vice provost search committee, visited the committee’s Feb. 8 meeting to share an update and lead a listening session on what committee members are looking for in the position recently vacated by Kenyon Bonner.

Since forming in December, Foote said, the search committee has held a series of listening sessions designed to help craft a job advertisement for national publications as well as provide feedback for when the committee goes through applications for the position.

The committee is working with an external executive search firm, Isaacson Miller, which has worked with the University before, Foote said. “And their role is to sort of help us build the most diverse, the most well-qualified and expansive pool that we can, and then help us navigate the search process.”

The search committee’s role is to advise interim Provost Joe McCarthy on the strongest candidates. The committee’s current “active stage” of candidate recruitment will continue until mid-March when interviews commence. “So the finalists should be on campus with us in in April,” Foote said, adding that the search is confidential “in terms of who's in the pool … until they get to the finalist stage.”

Clyde Wilson Pickett, vice chancellor for diversity, equity and inclusion, is the other co-chair of the search committee, which also includes two SAAA members — Ryan Young, the Student Government Board president, and Nancy Glynn, co-chair of SAAA and an associate professor of epidemiology.

“You're also aware we've got tremendously big shoes to fill out,” she added, referring to Bonner, who left in January for a similar position at the University of Virginia. “We had a truly superlative vice provost, and we're looking for someone who can meet that challenge.”

Erin Mathia, assistant professor in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, highlighted challenges around more students requiring accommodations, not only for testing “but for the classroom setting, and having more and more personal/mental health issues.” Another challenge is identifying the best ways to support students “who may be struggling — especially from my perspective at the graduate level — that we've seen in the classroom and across our program over the last couple of years.”

Chentis Pettigrew, the School of Medicine’s associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion, concurred. He noted that the candidate needs to be well integrated into student success efforts “to get our students not only enrolled, but through and out and to see their contribution to the total enrollment-management process and be actively involved.

“I think that there is a critical need for us to be aligned in the graduate programs in relationship to the total student affairs effort around the campus,” he said, noting he grew up on Pitt’s lower campus and found it “hard work” to get his upper campus friends to join him. “But I see the institution as very connected, and I would like, from a student affairs perspective, for that to be connected a little bit more.”

Ryan Young said students are going to be measuring the new vice provost’s performance on “actual impact that they feel, specifically around wellness concerns and accessibility to important things like housing.”

Tasha Peacock, assistant director of student programs and community outreach in the Institute of Politics, said she’s “always concerned about retention of current students” and support services. She wants to make sure the new person in this role is “collaborating with other academic departments to make sure our most vulnerable students … are supported once they transition from high school to college.”

Hearing some of the priorities, Amanda Godley, vice provost for graduate studies, clarified that academic support programs are run through the academic team rather the Office of Student Affairs. “And while there is a connection, the (Student) Success Hub, and a lot of the identification and targeted, individualized support for students who are academically struggling is not directly under the purview of the vice provost for Student Affairs.”

Stan O’Loughlin, associate legal counsel for Pitt, emphasized the importance of balancing and communicating First Amendment issues.

He said the Office of University Counsel strives to communicate understanding of what the law is, what the risks are and how to strike that balance, “but when it's students who are engaging in a dialogue, I think that the role — and certainly (Bonner) played an important role — in kind of keeping everybody grounded in the reality of ‘Well, we may not like this kind of speech, we may not like this person saying this, or we may feel that this is against the values of the University,’ but what are the best ways to handle that, and what are the legal guardrails?”

While Bonner was a “very thoughtful partner when it came to all those things,” O’Loughlin said, “it's hard to identify that quality,” but it requires patience and an ability “to not overreact because people in your department or otherwise are pushing you to do one thing or another thing.”

“I think being able to kind of touch base with all those constituents and be balanced … from my perspective, that's where you run into problems if you don't do that,” O’Loughlin added.

Lauren DelSignore, a staff member in the Frederick Honors College, said she would like to see a vice provost who highlights Pittsburgh’s uniqueness and continues “to build bridges with Pittsburgh's international academic community, since a lot of us come for a period of time and then return to the countries that we're from. And we essentially become University of Pittsburgh ambassadors,” she said.

Foote concluded the forum by asking SAAA committee members to submit names of qualified candidates. “You don't have to worry about are they looking to move to Pittsburgh,” she said. “That's what the search firm does, right? … You just have to help us know where to look.”

The SAAA committee’s next meeting is Thursday, March 7.

Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
 

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