By SHANNON O. WELLS

Senate Council President Kris Kanthak initiated her report to Faculty Assembly at its March 18 meeting in Posvar Hall with an update on the fledgling Ad Hoc Committee on General Education Requirements.

A statement shared with Faculty Assembly members clarified that the committee is tasked with making a set of recommendations that may include:

• Creating a new Senate committee or committees or similar structures.

• Formulating guidelines for including shared governance in the early stages of implementation.

• Designing a system for shared governance oversight moving forward.

• Providing a means of assessing the new system with an eye toward improvement in one year’s time.

Starting in summer 2023, the General Education Reform Task Force in the Office of the Provost began considering ways to design and implement a set of University-wide undergraduate general education requirements. The Senate Educational Policies Committee and its membership have been involved in that process since its inception.

“Effective shared governance is vital to the creation and maintenance of a successful set of curricular requirements for undergraduate students,” the statement says. “The Task Force’s benchmarking of similar requirements at peer institutions has borne out the importance of shared governance to this process.”

Educational Policies committee leaders agree, however, that moving forward, the job of assuring shared governance in the general education requirements is “simply too large for the capacity of the Educational Policies committee” and would “necessitate neglecting the committee’s other important duties, it says.

“At the same time, the Executive Committee feels strongly that shared governance through the University Senate is the best way to achieve this goal.”

The ad hoc committee, Kanthak explained, will be asked create a report suitable for presentation at the first Faculty Assembly meeting of the 2026-27 academic year.

“The full assembly will then consider the details of the recommendation and vote on our recommendation for those steps,” she said, adding that she’s “grateful” to Educational Policies Committee co-chair John Stoner agreeing to serve as the chair “of this important ad hoc.”

Other updates:

Senate Plenary: The event is from noon to 3 p.m. April 20 in the lower lounge of the William Pitt Union. Kanthak said this year’s topic, civic fluency, is an “issue of vital importance, both at Pitt and beyond our campus. I encourage you to attend to consider the important role of civic fluency and how you can be sure you are getting the information you need to make good civic decisions and meet your obligations as a civically minded citizen,” she said.

Senate elections: Faculty Assembly election will run April 6 to 21. The position of secretary is open “as we’re saying goodbye to the excellent Penny Morel, who's retiring to Scotland at the end of the academic year.” Calling that the “bad news,” Kanthak said the “good news” is there are two “excellent candidates for the secretary position” — Melanie Scott, associate professor of surgery and member of the Senate Research Committee, and Shomita Steiner, executive director of scientific operations at the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine and assistant professor in the Department of Surgery.

Elections for Senate committee positions, will run after the Faculty Assembly election, from April 28 to May 12.

Pedestrian safety concerns

Moving on to questions and comments, Tom Songer, assistant professor of epidemiology in the School of Public Health, expressed concern about the continuing bus rapid transit line construction in Oakland and its possible effects on pedestrian safety.

“The whole last year has appeared to be totally inefficient in the process of how the bus line construction has taken place,” he noted. “I'm rather naive on this topic, but the impression looking from the outside is that there's not much planning going on in terms of how to integrate with students, faculty, staff, hospital patients — both inpatient and outpatient — clinic participants,” he said. “It's just extremely frustrating.”

For comparison, Songer said planning is already ongoing for closure of a section of the Parkway East — Interstate 376 between Wilkinsburg and the Squirrel Hill Tunnel— three weeks in July.

“The planning that's gone into that construction process and how to alleviate potential burdens to the population is light years ahead of what the planning is for integration of this bus-line construction through the second largest area of this city,” he noted. “And I just feel from my perspective that the needs of pedestrians are taking second place in this whole environment.”

Kanthak said she speaks “for many of us here and throughout the University” in sharing Songer’s frustrations.

“It’s a complex process, because it tremendously affects us here at Pitt. Particularly because, as we often have heard, one of our great selling points is how we are deeply integrated into the city around us, which is not true of many, even urban campuses,” she said. “When there's poor planning, for lack of a better term, on the city's part, it has huge effects on us. And as far as I can tell, (there’s) very little that we can do.

“Having said that, the Senate has at least two prompts to dealing with this issue,” she added, including through the Campus Utilization, Planning, and Safety committee (CUPS), “who I know is liaising with folks in government, both big and small,” and through the Government Relations committee, through Pittsburgh Mayor Corey O'Connor. “He kind of came in in the middle of this process, but I would like to at least see if there's been some effort to learn for next time from this process, because I agree it's been very, very confusing.”

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

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