By SHANNON O. WELLS
For all practical purposes, Paula Davis completed her campus tours — those rituals that help determine where one goes to college — by the third grade. That’s when the prematurely curious and engaged Northview Heights girl took part in a summer scholars program at what is now the SciTech Academy.
“I just really fell in love with the campus,” she recalls of her first visits to Oakland. “I mean, how do you not love Pitt? The architecture is beautiful. The tone of the campuses is absolutely gorgeous.”
When her high school guidance counselor asked where she was applying, Davis, by then a Monroeville resident, simply said “I’m going to Pitt. (The counselor) said, ‘You can’t only apply to one school.’ And I said, ‘Well, yes, I can, cause I’m going to Pitt.’”
And so began Davis’ long-running entwinement with the University of Pittsburgh. After a run including undergraduate studies and her first job — during her junior year — at the former Learning Skill Center, she recently retired as associate vice chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Health Sciences.
Not one, even as a retiree, to rest on her laurels, Davis’ latest accomplishment is “Diversity in Higher Education Remote Learning: A Practical Guide,” which she co-wrote and edited along with Ellen R. Cohn, part-time instructor in the Department of Communication and Rhetoric, and Jerome C. Branche, professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature.
Published by Palgrave MacMillan, the book provides “fundamental principles of remote instruction and classroom management for diversity,” according to a description. “Twenty-three chapters explore the requisite characteristics of higher education administration and infrastructure that support diversity in both online and hybrid learning.”
With a foreword by former Pitt provost Ann Cudd, the book includes contributions from numerous Pitt faculty and staff on topics including Administration, Pedagogy, Populations and Discipline-Rich Perspectives.
The project, launched a couple years ago, grew out of a conversation Davis had with Cohn about what Davis called “struggles during COVID, and trying to figure out what would be optimal conditions for students, given that we were forced to really quickly pivot to remote learning,” she said. “And we thought it would be really interesting to sort of look at different facets of that. And we pulled in Jerome Branch.”
Noting that she’d contributed on previous publications Cohn and Branch had written and published, Davis called the “Diversity in Higher Education Remote Learning” project “a really nice team effort” and an opportunity to “reflect the experiences of the faculty on our campus — that not all the contributors are folks that were paid grants who were working other places. But all with really insightful reflections on working with students of very different identities in remote learning.”
Once the team put their heads together, Davis said it was “pretty clear” there were basic equity considerations that arose in the sudden reliance on remote learning the pandemic presented. For example, students from lower socio-economic circumstances who didn’t have their own computers often borrowed them from libraries.
“And then all of that was shut down, and they didn't have equipment to complete their studies,” Davis said. “So students whose family lives were not necessarily conducive to learning, that spent most of their days on campus, were forced to go home and live inside that dysfunction and continue to learn.
“I think it highlighted that we really have to pay close attention not to just what we're trying to teach our students, (but also) about the conditions under which they are trying to learn,” she added. “And it really highlighted many equity issues. I think what this book does is to highlight the conditions that may be different for students, bearing varying different identities and whose lives are not what one might assume to be the norm for college students.”
The diversity lens
While the COVID pandemic certainly stepped up the urgency on inequities in remote learning, Davis emphasized that “there's always been a need for an equity lens in higher education. The realization and response to the fact that differing students have different needs,” she said. “So I think that equity lens has always been necessary, (but) not necessarily always applied. But it's always been necessary.”
Without that lens applied to higher education, not to mention students’ personal lives, Davis said certain facets of the student population “start to fall through the cracks. And we wonder why students don't complete — or don't complete on time — and many times if we took a really critical lens on those students’ daily lives, then we might have the capacity, as an institution, to intervene and to make their conditions more conducive to learning.”
An English major while at Pitt, Davis’ desire to be a writer was overtaken by her affinity for helping and guiding students, culminating with her role, starting in 2007, as founding assistant vice chancellor for health sciences diversity.
“I fell in love with student services, and I have been working in that vein for my entire professional career,” she said, noting her early Pitt positions in the Learning Skill Center, an academic advisor in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and work in admissions and financial aid. “When you're working in financial aid, you get to see some pretty stark differences in students’ lives and family conditions. And I, at that point, started working with Bill Nunn, who was in admissions and financial aid at the same time, and we started to build recruitment programs for underrepresented students.”
A program they started, “Teach One, Reach One,” involved contacting local schools and schools around the state to recruit under-represented students. The process reinforced her belief that different students have different needs.
“It could not be one size fits all. And that in and of itself, I think, was the beginning of sort of a lens on diversity, writ pretty broadly,” she said. “I had students I worked with who, it appeared that everything was fine, but everything was not at home. I worked with one student whose mom put him on a bus to Pittsburgh and basically said, ‘You're on your own now, kid.’”
Above and beyond
Ellen Cohn, who started working at Pitt in 1976 and served with Davis on several University-based committees, called Davis a “very impactful” consultant for a series of successful grant applications geared toward disadvantaged students between 2008 and 2017.
“Paula was always a trusted resource for all matters DEI,” Cohn said. “She not only shared her expertise, she faithfully ‘showed up’ each summer to welcome guest faculty members from Howard University and Hampton University. And as is characteristic of Paula, … she attended their lectures and got to know them and our graduate students.”
On conceiving the practical guide to “Diversity in Higher Education Remote Learning,” Cohn called Davis the publication’s chief recruiter of authors.
“She has an amazing wealth of expert and grateful contacts, enough to populate numerous such books,” Cohn noted. “The book could not have been produced without these generous colleagues. I have learned that the default response to a request from Paula is invariably ‘Yes!’ Our authors were thrilled to be asked by her to contribute.”
Noting that Davis is nationally recognized for her expertise in diversity-related issues, Cohn found Davis an excellent writer and editor. “Her work ethic is remarkable. She has high character and integrity. She manages to be both truthful and diplomatic. Paula has superb empathy and understanding of all constituencies of the academy,” she said. “No matter what challenges came our way getting this book to press, Paula was patient, optimistic and unflappable. Plus, she has a great sense of humor and is fun to work with.”
‘We can all play a part’
While Davis has worked with many students whose challenges may have initially gone unaddressed, she emphasized that the Pitt community as a whole — not just equity and inclusion-based programs — is organically adept at elevating students from trying circumstances.
“One of the beauties of the (Office for Equity, Diversity & Inclusion) if you want to think of it that way, but really, life as a human, is that we all have the capacity to contribute or to help someone, no matter what role we happen to be in,” Davis said. “Students will tell you sometime that the person who was instrumental in getting them through college was the administrator in their department, because they always told them where the free food was, right? Or they always made sure that if there was a contraband copy of a book, that they got it.”
Davis recalled a Health Sciences staff employee who worked at the Scaife Hall coffee stand named Dottie. “She brought food to students who looked like they were struggling. If they needed an ear, she carved out time to do that,” she said. “Was that her job? Absolutely not. But what she saw was students who needed help, and she took the time to do that. And so I felt the same way, no matter what my role happened to be.”
“I think we could probably do a better job of acknowledging that there are many, many, unsung heroes on campus,” she said. “They're not faculty, they're not senior administrators. They are people who see students struggling and they help them in any way they can. So it doesn't necessarily matter where we sit in the hierarchy within the institution. We can all play a part in helping a student to be successful.”
That outlook extends to her own experience at Pitt, starting from early childhood. Davis’ subsequent career, therefore, can be viewed as a long-running, shining example of “paying it forward.”
“I can say as a reflection of my own college experience, there were plenty of people who looked out for and took care of me. And so I always felt duty bound to do the same thing for the students who were coming through Pitt behind me,” she said. “I got help when I needed it. Why wouldn’t I do the same for someone else?”
To learn more about and purchase “Diversity in Higher Education Remote Learning,” visit SpringerLink.
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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