By SHANNON O. WELLS

Senate Council President Kris Kanthak kicked off her report at council’s Oct. 15 meeting by sharing her impressions of a workshop by Pitt’s Partners for Rural Student Success Impact & Mobility (PRSSIM) project. 

“I spent the better part of today right next door at an event that was educational and exciting and inspiring,” she said at the meeting in Posvar Hall. “So, I wanted to beg your indulgence to take a minute to tell you a bit about it.”

This year’s annual workshop theme, "Using Practice and Policy to Support Rural Students' College Access and Success,” brought together Student Success professionals along with faculty and others representing all Pitt campuses. 

“I've said this before, and I'll say it again. If you can finagle a way to spend time with our Student Success team, you absolutely should,” Kanthak said. “They're in the business of inspiring people to be their best, so they did a number on me today.” 

Explaining that rural student success lies “at the nexus” of her research interests, as well as her desire to “make this a better place” and need to live in “a truly pluralistic and diverse community, it also has me thinking about the University Senate's theme for this year and our Senate Plenary, “Rethinking Accommodation.”

The reality, she contended, is that Pitt “does not feel welcoming and inclusive to lots of people for lots of reasons.” 

“In many ways, the PRISSM project is reflective of the whack-a-mole strategy for solving this inclusion problem.” She said she puts the Provost Academy, First at Pitt, Pluralism360, the Disability Resource and Service Office, “and countless other initiatives and offices across our campus in the same category.”

To be clear, however, she added, “God bless the mole whackers. But we do need to wonder what (Pitt) would look like if we were to construct it now as a place that is welcoming and inclusive of everyone who wants to join us on our intellectual journey.”

Noting that the University is good at “’MacGuyvering’ inclusion and accommodation,” invoking the agile troubleshooter from the 1980s-’90s action TV show, she asked, “what would it look like if we were just inclusive and accommodating?”

Of the many ways to think about this question, Kanthak argued it’s nothing less than “a response to an existential crisis for academia, and we need to be humble when, for example, people tell us they don't feel included. 

“Humility will, to give us just one example, make us wonder why it scares some people when we try and build a just community of all sorts of brilliant, dedicated people from all over the world,” she explained. “We can think about how we can be an elite university without being elitist.”

Committee updates

Moving on to more routine Senate Council business, Kanthak reported that the Senate Expanded Executive Committee held its annual fall meeting on Oct. 12. The committee comprises the Executive Committee, Senate president, vice president, and immediate past president, secretary and director, as well as chairs and co-chairs of the various Senate committees. 

Committees discussed their agendas for the year and noted several overlaps, she noted. 

“As you know, the Senate committees are really the place where the hard work of shared governance happens. After the meeting, the chancellor and provost joined us for lunch, where we continued this discussion of issues related to higher education and shared governance, both near and far, that will comprise our shared work over the next year,” Kanthak said, noting that Senate committees are constructing their agendas, creating subcommittees and getting visitors in line for the academic year. 

“They're also working through the synergies we identified in the Expanded Executive Committee meeting.”

In other updates, Kanthak shared that the Senate Health Sciences Affinity Group Engagement (SAGE) would hold its first official meeting on Oct. 16 and focus on the group’s overall mission, establishing goals, priorities and a general organizational structure, set a short-term agenda and assign roles and tasks.

Also on Oct. 16, Kanthak said she would attend a virtual Zoom meeting with Senate presidents of Pitt’s regional campuses to discuss progress in general education requirements and other issues of shared governance “that traverse all of the Pitt campuses.”

On another topic, Kanthak noted she’s been in conversation with new leaders of the Teaching Center and Adam Lee, vice provost for undergraduate studies about the Office of Measurement and Evaluation of Teaching (OMET) changing back to its original vendor. 

“We've received some feedback that faculty in general think this is a good thing, but we will continue to have conversations about this and invite the leadership to a future meeting of faculty,” she said.

Embracing inclusivity

Responding to a question on an earlier topic of how inclusivity can be measured, Kanthak — noting she could “teach a whole course on that in the Political Science department — said that is “really, really, really hard.”

“I think the easy answer is if somebody doesn't feel included, then that ought to raise a red flag. I think the harder answer is sort of ‘How do you do that at the aggregate?’” she said. “With my political science hat on, the way you measure inclusivity is you ask people, and if they say they don't feel included, then those of us who care about inclusivity ought to care about that. (That) sounds very simplistic, but it's actually not.”

Senate Council Vice President John Stoner, noting he co-chaired the Senate Educational Policies Committee for several years, said inclusivity “has been a sort of slow-burning issue.” 

“One of the questions that's been on the student OMETs, the evaluations of teaching, is whether or not students in a class feel that their instructor has created an inclusive environment,” he said. “We don't love that question, not because we think it's a bad question, but … it doesn't necessarily give you great information about what to do unless there's a shared or somewhat shared definition of inclusivity.”

As an instructor, he said “admittedly, if 90% of my students said they didn't feel included, there's clearly a big problem. If, say, 10% did, you don't necessarily know what that means without a way to follow up. It's definitely something that's an ongoing conversation.”

Fritz Pil, distinguished service professor in the School of Business, noted there’s been “a dramatic increase in accommodations at the University. Part of what I think that signals is that our classrooms are not as inclusive as they should be,” he said. “And I love the fact that it's a topic for the spring (Senate plenary). 

“I think as a general question it's important for us to reflect on how can we design our classrooms in a way that they support all our students, so we don't need to accommodate everyone individually, so that we actually embrace a more inclusive model.”

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

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