By SUSAN JONES
Chancellor Joan Gabel has been spreading her vision for a reimagined Plan for Pitt across campus — including at the Board of Trustees meeting on Sept. 29 and Faculty Assembly on Oct. 4 — and promoting a new rallying cry for the University — “It’s Possible at Pitt.”
Gabel’s proposal is to revise the current plan, which will cover the next five years. The plan, the second of its kind for Pitt, was finalized in 2021, after robust community and shared governance engagement from 2019-21.
A performance management office was established in 2021 to track progress and run special projects. That group currently reports to Hari Sastry, Pitt’s chief financial officer, but Gabel said going forward it will report to Bill Haldeman, who came with her from Minnesota and ran the strategic plan process there. At Pitt, he has the title of vice chancellor and chief strategic officer.
“The current plan was written with no specific deadline, but it’s relatively young in its evolution and the consultative process that led to the current plan is fresh,” Gabel said. “We want to rely on it because it reflects the input of the current Pitt community. But we want to take it to the next step, which was anticipated, which is to lean into the values identified and think about action items and other objectives that would bring those values to life.”
She expects a community-wide message about reimagining the Plan for Pitt to go out soon and hopes that people will reach out in their schools or through a feedback survey with their ideas.
During her first few months on the job, Gabel has been leveraging her encounters with people in meetings, presentations and hallways to ask about the strategic plan.
“I think sometimes when we talk about strategic plans, there’s this sense that it’s a rejection or some kind of indictment of what we’re already doing, and it’s actually the opposite of that,” she said at Faculty Assembly. “If you do it well, it acknowledges and calls out what’s already happening and gives you the structure to … measure it. That’s the majority of the strategic plan.”
But on either end of a bell curve — where the fattest part is “what we are already doing, what we should be doing, and being intentional about ensuring that we continue to do well,” Gabel said — there also are the moonshots where Pitt can take some chances and on the other end are the areas where outcomes are falling short of expectations.
The current Plan for Pitt now is “at the phase where we are supposed to be looking at measures and outcomes,” the chancellor said. “One of the best things that came out of our strategic planning process that I have not seen in other places, was that very overt expression of values, community values, University values. This is not all of them, but these are the ones that came up off the page.”
These include:
-
We will drive student success. “Are they advancing from first year to second year? Are they graduating? Are they well? Are they able to have access to what they need in order to have the kinds of academic, personal and professional experiences to set them up for a life well lived?”
-
We will propel scholarship, creativity and innovation. The obvious thing to measure here, Gabel said, is how much federally funded research is Pitt doing, but, “There are a whole host of other things we can look at around faculty and staff well-being; on startups; interdisciplinarity; the composition of our faculty and staff.”
-
We will be welcoming and engaged. “This is where DEI strategy and outcomes would sit. It’s also an overt acknowledgement of the very high commitment this University has made around community engagement and taking what we do within the community and bringing it outward and having a two-way conversation there, which is not necessarily the case for some of our peers.”
-
We will promote accountability and trust. In addition to making sure the money Pitt is taking in from tuition, the state, research and philanthropy are “creating the return that justifies the investment,” this also means doing better at telling “our story so that people understand the good work that we’re doing, and recognize that in the past, the good work may have spoken for itself, and we need to be more overt,” given the headwinds higher education faces nationally
-
It’s Possible at Pitt. “Those are the moon shots,” Gabel said, like BioForge, the Quantum Science Initiative and Pitt’s sustainability goals. “I suspect that those will change over time and that’s sort of where that agility sits. If someone has a really cool idea, we want to act on it. You can do that sort of thing here.”
Gabel said another important stop on her “roadshow” about reimagining Plan for Pitt is the Council of Deans, “with the hope and expectation that deans would bring this into the governance within their college for discussion. I don’t expect anybody to change a functioning, current, living, breathing strategic plan. Lots of people have them going already. And it’s not like we have this plan coming in because there are bad outcomes and we’re trying to fix them. We’re just trying to move into the next chapter.”
The next phase for the strategic plan is “what we do with the identification of these values,” Gabel told the Board of Trustees.
“We consult with (the Trustees), the Senate Council, community leaders, local, state and federal government stakeholders, the governor’s office, other members of our elected officials in state government and federal government, the deans, Faculty Assembly, student leaders, Staff Council, alums, and continue to refresh and think about those values and the way in which we would act upon them, measure them.”
The timeline calls for presenting a proposed set of measures and outcomes in the February 2024 Board of Trustees meeting for discussion and then adopting the targets and measures for this strategic plan chapter in June 2024, which would be tied to the next fiscal year budget.
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
Have a story idea or news to share? Share it with the University Times.