By SHANNON O. WELLS
Before Senate Council President Robin Kear provided updates on campus news and faculty honors at the April 11 council meeting in Posvar Hall, she took a moment to share what she called a personally “transformative” experience of watching the April 8 solar eclipse in its path of totality from a lake near Dayton, Ohio.
“It truly exceeds the hype,” she said. “And if you ever have the chance to do it, I encourage you to do it. I had a deep emotional response that I did not anticipate. It was a community experience. It was uplifting and optimistic, and it was the melding of the spiritual and the scientific. And anything uplifting, for me, is well appreciated.”
Moving on to business in her Senate Council report, Kear congratulated Chancellor Joan Gabel on her installation ceremony on April 5, as part of the annual Faculty Honors Convocation at Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland.
“It was a wonderful event all around,” Kear said. “And congratulations to all those faculty who received awards.”
She also congratulated newly installed Provost Joe McCarthy for being officially voted into his role by the Board of Trustees on April 4.
Kear presented the Senate Service Award to John Stoner, a history professor and co-chair of the Senate’s Educational Policies committee. “Congratulations, John, for this,” she said, noting Stoner has a decade-long record of involvement in the University Senate.
Stoner has been a member of Faculty Assembly since 2014 and a member of Educational Policies since 2016, serving as its co-chair for four years. He was a member of the Senate Ad Hoc Committee on Non-Tenure Stream faculty and the Ad Hoc Committee on Evaluation and Assessment of Faculty Teaching. Stoner, Kear noted, has worked “proactively and productively and collegially” on many topics.
“John is a generous and compassionate colleague. I immensely enjoy talking and working through issues with him. He provides focus and articulate analysis in his leadership roles. He is willing to listen and take in new information, and he always works towards making Pitt a better place,” she said. “So thank you for your efforts, John, and congratulations.”
Stoner, who mentioned he was taking some Pitt students to South Africa for the first time since before the pandemic, said he thinks Pitt — as individuals and as an institution — is “at our best (when) we have a shared vision of what Pitt should be as it moves through the world.”
That shared vision, he added, involves students not only prepared to become experts in their professional fields, “but also to become critical citizens of a society in a world that faces new and different existential challenges from the ones that my generation faced.”
Stoner went on to say that he will remain “committed to shared governance in the hopes that we will continue to provide a world-class education, which I think when we're at our best we do.” He expressed hope that “we continue to make it possible for our colleagues to do cutting-edge research that can make the world a better place, and ensuring that our community welcomes and benefits from our presence at both the individual and collective levels.”
Thanking Stoner for his years of service, Chris Bonneau, Senate Council past president and political science professor, said he had the pleasure to work with him “for a long time now, it seems. … His thoughtfulness, particularly in the Educational Policies committee, has really helped move the University forward.
“He's been a strong advocate for shared governance, and even when we've disagreed, I found him to be incredibly thoughtful and open minded and always putting the best interests of students first,” he added. “So, thanks, John, and enjoy your trip.”
Chancellor updates
Chancellor Gabel’s report to Senate Council focused primarily on the Plan for Pitt 2028, which she had presented at the Board of Trustees meeting on April 4. She also talked about Pitt’s budgeting process, noting that last year’s budget was approved on July 25 and 26, slightly more than a week after she started as the University’s 19th chancellor.
“That first week was quite something last year,” she said, adding that the strategic emphasis on accountability and transparency in budgeting in the Plan for Pitt includes making sure the University is “run well” and bringing down its financial overhead. Regarding the latter, Gabel, in response to several inquiries, said she wanted to be “really clear” that “this is not a round of layoffs.”
“If you look at how our staffing looks, we … are not overstaffed. That's not the issue,” she added. “This (concerns) things like redundancy. … It's not (about) a headcount issue. And we'll talk about that in more detail when we start actually doing this work. But I do want to say that explicitly from the start.”
Gabel said there were issues early in her tenure around legislation where the state asked Pitt to endorse bills that “improved or increased the amount of transparency that we provided to the state on our own budgeting process, which we have done. So some of the transparency that was sought has already happened.”
Naloxone initiative
In his final report to Senate Council, Student Government Board President Ryan Young said SGB is continuing work with organizations on an initiative with the Allegheny County Health Department to install cabinets containing naloxone, a medicine that rapidly reverses opioid drug overdoses, on campus.
“We're currently working with a student organization called Students for Sensible Drug Policy to develop a proposal for locations and other things,” he said. “But the Allegheny County Health Department said that they're open to fully funding (Pitt’s) needs as part of an initiative from the health department.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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