By SUSAN JONES

The first Faculty Assembly meeting of the 2026-27 school year on Sept. 9 was dominated by discussion about proposed general education requirements and how faculty can have  continuing input into them.

Belkys Torres, associate vice provost for curricular innovation, presented an outline of the draft plan to reform gen ed requirements that she and the provost’s Gen Ed Task Force have been working on since 2023.

The task force held 30 feedback sessions in fall 2025 with 624 people attending. The draft plan is now being reviewed by the more than 60 members of the task force, along with 50+ subject matter experts, schools’ curricular committees, the Senate Educational Policies Committee, the Provost’s Advisory Committee on Undergraduate Programs and Pitt’s academic leadership team.

Torres said there are several reasons that gen ed reform is needed now, including “our institutional mission of focusing on student success.”

Students, she said, are increasingly interested in interdisciplinary studies, earning multiple credentials or transferring across schools and campuses.

“The existing structure has us offering nine different sets of general education requirements according to the school in which a student is admitted in their first year,” she said, which creates a model “that has unintentionally offered barriers to students’ success, especially when it comes to mobility or to offering curricular coherence.

“What we’re trying to do here is to really own up to our promise to our students to offer them unique opportunities to build upon a broad intellectual agility, to engage in ethical reasoning and civic engagement, and to build other skills that complement specialized research training in an institution that takes great pride in our research agenda.”

The new model, which would require a minimum of 40 credits, also would enhance faculty collaboration and innovation, improve accreditation compliance, and require experiential learning, Torres said.

"I think the current models — and the students will tell you and the advisors will affirm —  are currently failing to engage our students,” she said. “They’re seeing the general education requirements as nothing other than a checklist that they’re just dying to get through, so that they can get to the thing that they actually want to do.”

The goal of the new requirements, which Pitt hopes to implement in fall 2027, is to give students the skills to:

1. Put knowledge in action

2. Analyze, synthesize and exercise judgment

3. Communicate effectively

4. Thrive in an AI-powered world

5. Engage across differences

6. Flourish throughout life

The chart below shows how the courses would break down with the numbers indicating which of the above goals they support.

Ad hoc committees proposed

The issue facing Faculty Assembly is how can faculty continue to have a voice as the new gen ed requirements are implemented.

John Stoner, Senate vice president and a history professor, said the task force’s benchmarking against other schools “made crystal clear that the almost universal practice across American universities that were benchmarked has faculty leadership of both curricular change and assessment robustly informed by the subject matter experts.”

Stoner, who chaired the Senate’s ad hoc committee for general education reform, said his group is proposing two new standing committees — one on general education assessment and one on general education curriculum.

“These committees, even though they’re working in the same space, have significantly different mandates from one another and need to have different voices in the room as subject matter experts,” he said. “If I was to serve on the assessment committee as a faculty member, I would absolutely count on our colleagues from, say, the University Center for Teaching and Learning, or colleagues in the School of Education who work on curricular assessment to be able to make informed decisions about these processes.”

Elections for new committee members generally happen in the spring. Stoner said they are bringing the proposal to form these committees now so that as the provost continues to move toward final approval of the gen ed reforms, “to let him know that we have a plan to move forward, but also to give us the time to curate the shape of these bodies,” including which provost liaisons should be included in each group.

He also noted that, “There are units and campuses and departments that do not always feel as if their voices are heard, and/or that their needs are met, or that they can necessarily provide what is being asked of them by the University writ large.” This is especially true of colleagues at the regional campuses, or even the Swanson School of Engineering, which has “particular needs because their students have such a prescribed curriculum, for example, that makes it difficult to add anything to what is already there. …

“So we imagine the curricular committee being slightly larger than it needs to be in faculty terms to make sure there are enough voices who can speak to these various constituencies to remind us gently on occasion that Pittsburgh is not Greensburg, or to remind us that engineering students have a very different experience than Dietrich students.”

Juan Taboas, longtime Faculty Assembly member and faculty in the School of Dental Medicine, questioned whether the jobs of these committees should be housed in the provost’s office.

“The tasks that have been allotted to these committees are administration, and it seems to me that administration should be done by the administration, by the provost’s office and the supporting structures we have in the University, such as the institutional research and analytics to gather data,” he said. “These committees are going to collect and analyze, developing, refining, report findings. These are all administrative tasks, and no doubt … we need these. But I do not feel that the Senate is the place where they should be housed.”

Stoner responded that this question has been raised before. “At the end of the day, these decisions officially get made at levels above all of these advisory bodies, but they can’t make good decisions without good input. … If you take assessment for example, if you only had UCTL (the Teaching Center), let’s say, in the room, and provost office data wonks in the room building the models, doing the assessment, they very well might produce something which is incredibly consistent and smart, but it might not actually be sufficiently informed by on-the-ground realities among the different units.”

He pointed out that the Provost’s Advisory Committee on Undergraduate Programs and the University Council on Graduate Study, which are under the provost, are also advisory and are not fully public. “I think the light of day is exactly what we want to have on these processes.”

Immediate Past President Robin Kear agreed: “I think that the curriculum belongs to the faculty, and I think that something as large as this for all of our undergraduates belongs to the faculty in a transparent manner. I think that these Senate committees can do that. And I am very wary of giving away this curriculum input into a provost committee that is not as transparent.”

After some more debate, both committees were approved with only a few opposed.

Kanthak’s report

At the beginning of the meeting, Senate President Kristen Kanthak welcomed everyone back to campus for the new school year and noted that she is now a “proud Pitt mom,” whose son is a first-year student.

Kanthak said she had a busy summer, writing “a quarter of a book. … I’m less pleased to report that I didn’t write the other three quarters, but I’m trying to stay positive, and I encourage you to do the same when you compare your pre-summer plans with your post-summer realities.”

In her report, Kanthak responded to criticism by some of shared governance in the process that led to Pitt’s Working Group on Antisemitism, which issued its final report this summer.

“Some folks have lobbed the accusation that the report was somehow a failure of shared governance,” she said. “This is not only false, but demonstrably false. Shared governance operated behind the scenes, but it also operated publicly in this body. That is clear to anyone who was there, or to anyone who bothered to read the freely available minutes to our meetings. … Some assembly members vehemently wanted a Senate ad hoc committee. Others were just as strongly against.”

She pointed out that when the issue was being debated in fall 2024, then-Senate President Robin Kear had the power in the Senate bylaws to create an ad hoc committee on her own, with no input at all from the full assembly and Senate.

“She chose not to do that and rather brought the issue to the full assembly for discussion. The discussion was robust, to say the very least, and President Kear, to her credit, chose not to shut it down. The result of this was that there was a compromise in Faculty Assembly to let this committee process move forward, drawing on the entire Pitt community, rather than setting up our own process just for faculty.

“Some seem to see this as a failure of shared governance. I see it rather as a hallmark of shared governance. Shared governance is at its heart about discussion and compromise. For shared governance to work properly, we all need to go into that discussion of compromise with open hearts and minds, and to understand that none of us — not the chancellor, not the president of the Senate — gets exactly what they want. I understand when our own perspectives do not carry the day, this can be incredibly frustrating. But that does not mean we ought to give up on shared governance or on dialog and compromise.”

She encouraged everyone to read the report and the chancellor’s response, “and think hard about what they can do to help build the community we all want to build. The questions this report addressed were central to the maintenance of an institution that’s dedicated to truth-seeking, freely exchanging ideas, and being a community that is welcoming and kind, I believe we can do all those things. But this is an all hands on deck issue.”

Other updates

• Kanthak said she was a member of the search committee for a new associate vice provost and dean of students, which led to the hiring of Pittsburgh native Mike Giancola from North Carolina State University. “Mike is amazing. We’re really lucky. I can also say it was an absolute honor to get to know and work with several members of the Pitts Student Affairs staff. These are incredibly hardworking and inspiring people.”

• Work is already underway to fill the faculty slots for the search committee to replace Anantha Shekhar, senior vice chancellor for health sciences and dean of the School of Medicine, who announced he will step down in June 2027. The self-nomination process has closed and a list of nominees was to go to faculty today. Then there is a 10-day period for nominations by petition, which must be delivered to Laura Winters in the provost’s office by 4 p.m. Sept. 21. At that point, the ballot will be finalized. Electronic balloting will begin on Sept. 23 via Qualtrics. All votes must be cast by Oct. 5. Because this is a lengthy process, Kanthak said she told the chancellor that she does not object to the search committee holding listening sessions prior to the election of faculty committee members.

• Kanthak also noted the importance of the University Times as it changes editors, from Susan Jones, who is retiring, to Chuck Staresinic. “The future of the University Times is central to how we do shared governance. Like our operation of shared governance here at Pitt, the University Times is something of unicorn. The University Times is vital to the independent dissemination of information that makes shared governance possible.”

• The Senate Plenary, which happens in the spring, already has a working title, “Rethinking Accommodation: Educating Scholars and Citizens for the 21st Century and Beyond.” Kanthak said the plenary will examine what it means to accommodate difference in educational and civic life today, taking into account differences including ability, culture, language, political affiliation, learning style, and more.

• David Salcido reported that the Health Sciences Affinity Group, which is now called SAGE,  sent out a survey to more than 2,000 faculty to see what interest was in participating in the group that will advocate for health sciences faculty. They received 195 complete responses — 109 from the School of Medicine, 28 from SHRS, 17 from Public Health, 16 from Nursing, 13 from Dental Medicine, nine from the Health Sciences Library System and three from Pharmacy. The responses represented 76 departments or divisions. Of those, 52 said they would be willing to be a representative on SAGE.

Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.

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