By SHANNON O. WELLS
Setting ambitious goals is one thing. Figuring out what actions are necessary to bring them to fruition is quite another.
How to approach and bridge that gap was the theme of Chancellor Joan Gabel’s update on a reimagined Plan for Pitt, which she shared at the Jan. 18 Senate Council meeting in Posvar Hall. Gabel seeks to revise the University’s current strategic plan, which will cover the next five years.
“What we are in right now … is an incremental step between the high-level articulation of, ‘This is how we’re going to translate these values into actionable, measurable, impactful initiatives, and action items and the 100 percent on the ground. Here’s how we’ll measure to see whether or not it’s working,’” she explained.
“But before we go from 100,000 feet, which is where we left things in September, to the ground, we’ve got to spend a little time at 30,000 feet, because measures don’t mean anything if you don’t have a very shared sense of what it is you want to measure.
“Otherwise it just feels like yet another spreadsheet, and that’s not the intent … that this plan helps us tell our story,” she said. “It gives us some inspiration for the direction in which the institution is going, and it gives us some tools to see how we’re doing. But if it’s just measures without all the legs of that stool, then (plans) tend to just get dusty in the back of the drawer.”
Gabel, who joined Pitt as chancellor in July, spent much of last summer and fall seeking feedback from a variety of stakeholders “on campus and beyond,” using what she called that “meet-and-greet period” to hear ideas for transforming the strategic plan’s values into action.
This winter, she’s focused on bringing resulting measures and outcomes before shared governance and the Board of Trustees at its Feb. 8 meeting for discussion. Outcomes for the revised strategic plan would apply to the 2024-25 fiscal-year budget.
The Plan for Pitt, the second of its kind for the University, was finalized in 2021, following robust community and shared governance engagement starting in 2019.
Among the community and University values Gabel said impressed her during last year’s strategic planning process included: driving student success through accessible and affordable education; propelling scholarship, creativity and innovation; being a welcoming and engaged community that promotes accountability and trust; and longer-term innovations, or “moon shots” in areas of science and sustainability.
Gabel presented pillars of the updated plan to Senate Council based on last fall’s feedback-seeking meetings. Information gathering included campus and legislative surveys and what she called “I’m the new chancellor, nice to meet you” conversations, all of which she said garnered “universally positive reactions.”
“And the only problem we had, if you would even call it a problem, was people were jumping to the ‘Well, make sure you do this,’ and ‘Don’t forget about that’ (phase), which is a good problem to have,” she said. “We feel like we captured the right vibe at the 100,000-foot level, and so we felt very comfortable moving on to the next phase.”
That involves defining each of the plan’s pillars in terms of real actions the University will take. “There are a whole host of consultations that need to happen before we (solidify) all of this,” Gabel said.
Student success and experience
“We want to make sure that the education that we provide is accessible and affordable. So we have series of initiatives underway there that we would dive in on,” she said, noting retention is a “very key” part of student success.
While the national benchmark is based on first-to second-year retention, Gabel said “we want to think about that a little more broadly here, especially because we also have graduate and professional students, and we want to make sure we’re thinking about their needs too.”
Student support services — including elements like well-being, housing and academic support — has proved a robust topic among students, Gabel said. “What does it mean to ensure student well-being physically and mentally? Housing came up a lot in our conversations: Are we providing the right living spaces for those who live on campus, and how are we the right partner for students who live off campus? And are we providing the right kind of academic support for students?
“We want to make sure that our academic programs are strong, that they prepare students in a way that they want to be prepared for that first job and for the entire life of their career,” she added. “For many of them, that will take them in directions that don’t even exist yet. Are we thinking about what that means?”
Pitt should strongly support and encourage distinguished student awards, as in Fulbright, Gilman, Goldwater and Truman scholarships, “and maybe we’re due for another Rhodes Scholar.”
“It may go without saying, but completion is a fundamental goal, as well as what happens after Pitt. We want them to finish. We’re big on that,” Gabel quipped. “And then we’re thinking about the post-graduation success: job, grad school for our undergrads, licensure for professional students and alumni engagement.”
Scholarship, creativity and innovation
Simply put, Pitt should pursue more research, specifically from a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and collaborative mindset, Gabel said. “We heard this loud and clear when we talked to faculty and deans: There is a wish to be interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, and (they) would like to have facilitation — intentional and purposeful facilitation — so that can happen.”
Pitt should actively promote innovation; tech-transfer commercialization opportunities; the possibility of alternative funding for research, such as corporate engagement; and be “very intentional about the arts, humanities, social sciences and professions.”
“The amount of federally funded research we do is obviously a very important and objective measure,” Gabel said, “but there’s a lot that happens on campus in a variety of disciplines who may not be able to exhibit their progress in that way. And we want our faculty to also be able to pursue distinction. … We are doing amazing work, and we want our faculty to have the support they need.”
Welcoming and engaging culture
Gabel said Pitt’s culture should be “welcoming, qualitatively,” noting that the University does “a lot of surveys. We try not to survey-fatigue everyone, but this is an important measure that we want to make sure we’re acknowledging, naming, seeing. We want to be an employer of choice.
“A lot of people work here, and what are we doing to ensure that they can progress in the way they want and feel inspired and (in a way) that’s fair and equitable?” she said, acknowledging that working with a unionized faculty “requires a different mindset around some of our engagement.”
“We need to staff up, develop expertise and think about what it means to come into this community and work here.”
Gabel praised Pitt’s Community Engagement Centers, noting that “the philosophy behind them remains excellent,” she said. “This is also where we’re thinking about the global engagement that we do. I see a lot of headroom there.”
Accountability and trust
Gabel said during last fall’s budget preparations, she and Bill Haldeman — Pitt’s new vice chancellor and chief strategy officer and a key point person for the Plan for Pitt update — discussed feedback from elected officials regarding Pitt’s state-funding appropriation “and the fact that they don’t get to see where it goes, and how that gave them concerns.”
That prompted the need to talk about the University’s fiscal transparency, not only in how Pitt makes financial decisions, “but that we’re always trying to improve operationally — that this should be one of our areas of continuous improvement,” she said. “We have several things that we have going in this space already. We’ve talked about them in here, and I thought that would be sort of it. But a lot has happened since then that you might put under an umbrella of accountability and trust.”
Pitt’s Institutional Master Plan also falls under this category in areas such as digital infrastructure, public safety and cyber safety. Gabel sees room for other aspects, including “storytelling.”
“And by this, I mean some of the obvious things, like rankings, philanthropy, even athletics I would put in this space. … There’s so much good happening here, and it doesn’t mean we don’t have our challenges (or) we don’t make mistakes, (but) we want to make sure people know about it,” she said. “How do we do more and better in our proactive storytelling about … good work as a part of our affiliation with this University?
“I think that’s a very exciting space, and we need to name it so that we work really hard on it.”
Another element of accountability and trust, Gabel said, involves the free exchange of ideas and ongoing discourse, as exemplified by the Year of Discourse and Dialogue. “How do we keep that going, given everything that’s happening (in the world) right now?”
It’s Possible at Pitt
This category includes what Gabel commonly refers to as “moon shots” — long-term, higher-aspirational goals.
“We want to make sure that if we are thinking strategically, we’re also thinking about strategic risk-taking, things we think we can do uniquely well: play to our strengths, play to our location, play to what we hope to be able to accomplish,” she said. “We don’t know exactly how we will create the process around that — it needs some process, that’s what we have good shared governance for — but we want to make sure that it’s in there as something for us to work on.”
Responding to a question about involving the larger Pitt community in the planning process, Gabel said further surveys and engagement opportunities will be forthcoming, or possibly a town hall meeting.
“So far, it’s been pretty well-received in the asynchronous way in which we’ve been providing the information, but we’re open to diving deeper if it starts to feel like it’s not,” she explained. “And we’ll do that at each step that you saw on the timeline.”
Aspects of the plan Gabel shared with Senate Council will be presented to the Feb. 8 Board of Trustees meeting and opened for additional feedback.
If changes beyond minor tweaks and adjustments are required, “then we may go back to the drawing board, which is fine because the deadline is self-imposed. So if we need more time, that’s fine.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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