By SHANNON O. WELLS
As Dave Sanchez, associate director for the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation, sees it, Pitt has a knack for transforming daunting challenges into bold opportunities.
While Pitt is not an agriculture school and has no farm, it does offer classes on food history and sustainability, facilitates field trips to food banks and supports clubs such as Pitt Hydroponics and Engineers for a Sustainable World, he noted.
On the environmental front, a polyethylene cracker plant in Beavery County has raised serious concerns about its potential emissions, prompting Pitt science, engineering and education students to engage with Central Valley High School students in Monaca and community nonprofit groups, Sanchez said.
One of six panel speakers at the Spring 2014 Senate Plenary, “Bringing Disciplines Together to Solve Big Problems,” held March 7 at the William Pitt Union, Sanchez said he’s encouraged by the pattern of the Pitt community responding to problems with novel, innovative and highly interdisciplinary solutions.
“What I try to encourage you to think of is the fact that some of these challenges are galvanizing,” he said, noting that while the cracker plant presents “a big, bad problem, a grand challenge in our environment, it’s being used to galvanize interdisciplinary education.”
At the plenary, which also could be viewed as a Zoom webinar, Sanchez shared his observations along with fellow Pitt faculty members Melissa Bilec, co-director of the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation; Nicola Foote, dean of the Frederick Honors College; Shelome Gooden, assistant vice chancellor for research in the humanities; Lisa Parker, philosopher and director of the Center for Bioethics & Health; and Abdesalam Soudi, a teaching associate professor of linguistics and leader of the Humanities@Work project.
In opening remarks for the annual event, Senate Council President Robin Kear focused on the more daunting obstacles facing higher education today, “including questions of value. And in our larger society, we’re also facing many complex challenges,” she said. “I believe that both of these arenas require the expertise of the many, working together to bring specific and diverse domain perspectives.”
She cited challenges including:
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Climate change
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Caring for an aging U.S. population
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Advancing political compromise
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Enhancing constructive communication
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Eliminating poverty and homelessness
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Eradicating disease
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Ending inequality and racism
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Recognizing and teaching how to recognize misinformation
“There are so many, and they are buried in their own interdependence,” she observed. “And it can be very overwhelming.”
The purpose of the plenary, however, is to “think about this big problem systematically and with optimism and to research for solutions or partial solutions or improvements or understanding and to teach others how to do the same,” she said. “That’s why I’m here. I believe that interdisciplinary work can bring comprehensive approaches and greater clarity of shared purpose to show our value as higher education.”
In the area of student wellness, Sanchez said 87 percent of students surveyed in the past year and a half were academically overwhelmed with stress, he said, with 32 per considering suicide.
“How do you study and how you learn if you go into an existential crisis, if you try and figure out meaning and purpose, when all your social network is collapsing, and you feel absolutely lonely?” Sanchez asked. “The fact of the matter is different champions from across disciplines are looking at trying to engage this … to support students in a way that they can meet and surpass that challenge,” including the recently created Health Policy and Human Flourishing courses.
In her welcoming remarks, Chancellor Joan Gabel, fresh from a three-day American Council on Education summit, cited Gallup Poll data indicating that public trust in higher education is at an “all-time low” of 36 percent, which she called a “very unsettling statistic,” along with worsening completion rates and uncertainty about the implications of generative artificial intelligence and tools like ChatGPT.
Gabel said if the University is willing to “embrace some uncertainty (and) own the fact that we’re not getting everything right” while feeling “pride in our capacity for creativity and partnership” and thinking about “how we support everyone and facilitate … there’s real cause for optimism. So, I’m very much looking forward to this discussion.”
Reimagining surgical waste
Melissa Bilec, who has led a three-year initiative in the Mascaro Center focused on sustainability in health care, said at the heart of Pitt’s ambitious sustainability goals and research — many of which align with those of the United Nations as well as other universities — is transdisciplinary research and “working with a host of disciplines and communities to co-develop sustainability solutions.”
Noting that the U.S. health-care sector is responsible for between 8 and 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, “you can see how it’s really important to bring many disciplines together to start to solve the support challenges,” she said, mentioning medical-device design, along with complex medical-waste issues, policies and regulations.
“We were some of the first researchers to work in this space, (exploring) the environmental impacts of surgical procedures using lifecycle environmental assessment” for hysterectomies.
Bilec’s team worked with UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital on recommendations that ranged from educational opportunities, scheduling of operating rooms, and redesign of medical supply kits.
Borrowing a phrase from the reimagined strategic Plan for Pitt, Bilec said it’s now “possible at Pitt” to create environmental and climate justice solutions, to create regenerative solutions respecting planetary boundaries, to create thriving futures in the face of regional change, to create resilient ecological systems (and) spaces for environmental discourse, “and it’s possible at Pitt to think about education and engagement.”
Collaborative humanities
Noting that research collaboration is “becoming more and more common,” Shelome Gooden emphasized that this comes with “heightened complexity and specialization within disciplines” and an increase in “organizational and scholarly incentives towards team research. So we hear about these two sides.”
Perhaps equally important, she added, “is that collaboration has permitted the development of human capital, (and) knowledge transfer and skills development among researchers also contributes to social capital, facilitating network building and professional connections amongst researchers and students.”
Applying this across disciplines leads researchers to ask what research collaboration in the social sciences looks like
“And these are the sorts of questions we think about,” she said. “Why do we do this? We want to understand the individual disciplinary level, how people do their work so that we can better facilitate what that might look like when people start to do intradisciplinary as well as interdisciplinary work.”
At the national level, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports efforts to advance humanistic knowledge by supporting teams of scholars working on a joint endeavor. “So they are supporting the processing the way in which humanists work, but they’re also supporting the product,” Gooden said. “And so we’re hoping to see some more work and development in that area.”
Inspiring information
Delivering the plenary’s closing remarks, soon-to-be new Pitt Provost Joe McCarthy praised the panel speakers and the areas they highlighted. He concurred with “what we heard time and time again” of the need to “incentivize, reward and recognize things like Humanities @ Work,” highlighted by Soudi, “and the work going on in sustainability.”
McCarthy recognized how, as Nicola Foote noted, the Honors College is “now starting to permeate the entire University, not just the Pittsburgh campus,” adding that the “natural tendency that that will infuse across the entire institution for interdisciplinary work is really exciting.”
Referring to a “refresh” of the campus master plan, McCarthy said the plenary inspired him to continue pushing for more interdisciplinary spaces for research as well as education and teaching, something that should be “front and center and another part of recognizing the gauntlet has been thrown down.”
He also addressed the challenge, in approaching the reimagined Plan for Pitt, of how to include a way to reduce the “disincentives for things like interdisciplinarity, but then actually incentivize instead some of that same activity,” he said.
“Two things became clear to me in this talk,” he concluded. “One is, of course, that I have a lot of work to do. But number two, that Pitt is really without question uniquely positioned to continue to help our region of the world to inform and solve the big problems that continue to shape our collective future.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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