Pitt Profiles: Deans & Schools Series

Dynamic & Diverse: FCAS provides fertile environment for scholarship that ranges from an international philosophy colloquium to leading-edge research at a regional wildlife refuge

By Evan Pattak

The goals of the Faculty and College of Arts and Sciences are embodied in its 31 departments; 11 programs; and academic centers, institutes, and laboratories—units that have no teaching component but which provide research and community-serving resources for the departments.

It is the personnel who play the lead role in fashioning rich undergraduate experiences, advancing the frontiers of knowledge, training the next generation of instructors and leaders, and serving the community.

They do it in varied and colorful ways, as these snapshots of several selected departments and centers reveal.

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The Department of English touches nearly every undergraduate through the composition requirement, through writing courses the department offers for students in other disciplines, and through its popular writing center, which provides tutorial support for students.

That makes for a large department—it boasts 80 full-time faculty and nearly 900 majors—which features principal programs in literature, composition, and writing, as well as curricula in children’s literature and film studies. In a given year, the department’s classes reach about 13,000 students.

“We are absolutely central to the general education mission of FCAS,” said Department of English Chair David Bartholomae. “It’s a job we do extremely well and that we take most seriously. I think our reputation on campus is very high for those reasons. The senior faculty have considerable interest in both the quality of general education and in general education as an arena of research.”

The department’s reputation is high elsewhere as well; both the National Research Council and U.S. News & World Report rate it in the top 5 percent of English departments nationally. A considerable strength of the department is its graduate program. Bartholomae reports that about 98 percent of the department’s Ph.D. graduates find employment, with about 75 percent landing tenure-stream jobs. The graduate program focuses on “critical and cultural studies,” which includes literature but goes beyond it.

“If you’re really interested in the stories that shape people’s thinking right now, you’ll certainly find some of them in print, but you’ll find some of them on television, some of them in the movies,” explained Bartholomae. “Pop culture exerts a very powerful cultural force. You want to be able to bring disciplined research methodology to that as well as to Dickens, Shakespeare, Chaucer.”

The department is an important and respected force in the community, most notably through two venerable and successful programs.

The Western Pennsylvania Writing Project entertains high school teachers on campus for six-week sessions, helping them sharpen their skills through writing exercises and readings. About 70 school districts in the tristate area have participated.

The Young Writers Institute helps aspiring students in grades three through 12 develop their communications skills—and it does so on their turf, operating at six different community sites in 2001 to serve 350 participants.

Working with young writers remains a priority for Bartholomae, who continues to teach an undergraduate composition course. The path that brought him to Pitt in 1975 was circuitous. A promising football player at Ohio Wesleyan University, he blew out a knee as an undergraduate and turned his attention to English. After completing his dissertation on Thomas Hardy at Rutgers University, he was offered jobs here and as a Victorianist at Boston University. When he selected Pitt, he found his life’s vocation.

“I met this class of kids,” Bartholomae said, “and I realized that they were not prepared to do what the University expected them to do, and I wasn’t prepared to help them do it. Writing is most often defined in terms of its lack: They can’t think, they can’t write a sentence, they can’t read. I wanted to be able to say, ‘Here’s what they are doing,’ and develop curricula that would allow them access to the world of reading and writing that the University took for granted. It was the most interesting problem I could imagine working on.”

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The scenic shores of Pymatuning Reservoir might seem an unlikely site for education, yet it’s here that some of the most important work of the Department of Biological Sciences is accomplished.

Near the town of Linesville, about 90 miles north of the Oakland campus, the department has established the Pymatuning Laboratory of Ecology (PLE) in an 11,000-acre tract of water, wetlands, and forest managed as a wildlife refuge and propagation area by the Pennsylvania Game Commission.

Facilities include laboratories, a staging area for field experiments, and residence halls for students and faculty.

Each spring, PLE hosts up to 100 participants, including students engaged in research, those who sign up for a PLE experience through their regular biology classes, and visiting high school students and teachers. Faculty come from not only Pitt, but Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Edinboro University, and Clarion University, as well.

There’s no question that PLE provides an unforgettable undergraduate experience, but what’s most pleasing to James M. Pipas, professor and chair of the biological sciences department, is how it helps the department meet multiple goals.

“It takes our students and puts them in laboratories with the best scientists in the world,” Pipas said. “What’s nice about PLE as a demonstration of how we work is the integration between the education mission and the research mission.”

Students of Pipas’ migratory patterns likely would be frustrated; before he came to Pitt in 1980, he had never lived anywhere longer than four years. His educational stops included the B.S. in Chemistry degree with honors from the University of Southern Mississippi, a doctorate in molecular biophysics from Florida State University, and postdoctoral work at Baylor College of Medicine and Johns Hopkins University.

When Pipas was a child, his father worked for the company that operated the legendary City of New Orleans railroad—and he moved his family along most of the stops.

“I took second-grade Civil War history in Illinois, the Land of Lincoln. I took third-grade Civil War history in Jackson, Mississippi. And they were different,” recalled Pipas. “Even at that age I thought, ‘Hey, you can write history any way you want.’”

That broad perspective has helped Pipas fashion a curriculum that must appeal to students with differing aspirations. Beyond educating its majors, the department reaches about 2,000 students each year through its introductory courses, and it also attracts majors who have no intention of pursuing careers in biology. This group is bound for business or legal positions but wants to be current on such issues as stem cell research, cloning, and biotechnicals in agriculture, which they expect to loom large in their chosen professions.

“We want to give them an idea of what the scientific method is about and what scientific knowledge means,” Pipas said, “so that when they’re dealing with the issues of the day, they’ll be able to make informed decisions.”

The department holds workshops to help local high school teachers design experiments for their pupils, even supplying them with free materials kits to take back to their classrooms. Yet Pipas sees an even more far-reaching community service component emerging as the region strives to become a center for biotechnology industries.

“There’s an economic battle going on between regions: Who will win biotechnology dollars? That battle will be won in the trenches of basic science, so it’s important for our whole region that this research enterprise succeed,” Pipas said.

“One of the most important services we can offer is to provide the intellectual underpinnings of the biotechnology industry and contribute to its trained workforce,” continued Pipas. “It’s essential that this community be competitive on an international scale in biotechnology. It could be a major economic engine in the future. We have what it takes in two major research universities and many research hospitals here. It can happen here as well as anywhere else. I can’t tell you when this industry will take off, but I can tell you it will.”

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To say that the national reputation of Pitt’s two philosophy departments is stellar would be a serious understatement. In the 1995 rankings of the National Research Council, the Department of Philosophy was rated No. 2, while the Department of History and Philosophy of Science weighed in at No. 5, a dual ranking that may be unprecedented. The departments offer different courses of study, but the two units come together in the Center for Philosophy of Science.

The center provides a fertile climate for research, sponsoring a fellows program that brings international leaders in relevant disciplines to Pitt for one or two terms. Here, they share their thoughts and findings with like-minded colleagues and thrive in an uncommonly productive atmosphere.

The center provides similar opportunities to faculty from tristate area colleges in an unusual and well-patronized regional fellows program.

Furthering the exchange of knowledge also is a goal of the center, one it achieves in a broad variety of ways. It hosts an international colloquium every two years with the University of Konstanz in Germany, as well as similar conferences with the University of Athens and the National Technical University of Athens in Greece.

The center publishes a highly regarded series of books—many of them based on papers and lectures delivered at its international sessions. And it has helped the University assemble and maintain the Archives of Scientific Philosophy in the 20th Century, housed at Hillman Library.

For many, supporting philosophy and the history and philosophy of science would end there, with programs that appeal exclusively to scholars. James G. Lennox, director of the center, doesn’t see it that way.

“Our mission is essentially a combination of research and community service,” said Lennox, who has been at Pitt for his entire professional career and specializes in Greek philosophy of science and contemporary evolutionary biology. “I’ve been emphasizing the role that the center should play in educating the public about the nature of science. It’s one of the things that we’re in a unique position to do.”

For their required philosophy class, Lennox said, students can expect to be engaged and enlightened. He noted specifically the approach of John D. Norton, chair of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, who teaches an introductory course. Said Lennox:

“He’ll walk into the first class, write ‘e=mc2’ on the blackboard, and say, ‘That’s the last equation you’ll see.’ He’s interested in getting students to understand the concepts behind relativity theory and what forced physics to reformulate its foundations.

“That’s pretty typical of what we do,” explained Lennox. “And if you can do that for undergraduates, you can lecture to the community and do exactly the same thing. Reaching out to the public and explaining your research is not that daunting a task. If you’re a good teacher of undergraduates, you probably can do it.”

Indeed, the center is cosponsor, along with the Bayer Foundation, of an annual lecture series at the Carnegie Science Center that does just what Lennox suggests.

“I tell all the speakers, ‘All the people here are fascinated by science but may not know very much about it. After listening to you, they should have a little bit better understanding of science than they did before they walked in.’”

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For most of us, picking up a how-to picture book on Volkswagen repair would not be an epiphany. Most of us, though, aren’t John T. Yates Jr., R.K. Mellon Professor of Chemistry and director of Pitt’s Surface Science Center.

When Yates came upon that thin little volume, it inspired him to produce Experimental Innovations in Surface Science—A Guide to Practical Laboratory Methods and Instruments. Don’t let the clunky title fool you. This is the definitive book on laboratory research methods and tools, featuring about 350 short chapters, 904 pages, and more than 1,000 illustrations.

“There’s nothing like it in this field,” Yates said. “I’m very proud of it because I drew each of the 1,000 pictures myself.”

Surface science—which studies the chemistry and physics that occurs on the surfaces of solids—is a relatively new and exciting field, and the Surface Science Center works on the leading edge. The discipline provides a basis for the production of polymers and synthetic materials, drugs, paints, semiconductors, even catalytic converters for automobiles.

“It’s one of the most powerful, exciting, all-encompassing fields of physical science that’s ever been developed,” Yates said. “It works out that about one-fifth of our gross national product—$1 trillion a year—is connected to surfaces in some technological way.”

Yates and the center are extending the boundaries of the field, both intellectually and geographically. The center has received a significant research grant from PPG Industries, Inc., for the study of solar-powered, self-cleaning architectural glass. For that and other projects, Yates will deploy a cadre of young researchers he has recruited from European and Asian nations.

Since he arrived at Pitt in 1982 after serving as chief of the Surfaces, Processes, and Catalysis Section of the National Bureau of Standards, Yates has trained about 30 doctoral students and nearly 80 postdoctoral researchers in stints at the center. Many have remained in America, where they continue to contribute their expertise.

Yates regards teaching as his first calling, even though his Mellon Professorship provides him with a reduced load.

“This is one of the most wonderful gifts you can get from the University,” Yates said, “a situation where you get to teach—I love to teach—but you don’t have to teach quite as much as other faculty.

“The major reason for the activity at a university is the training of people to go on to the next level of work in our society,” Yates continued, “so while we talk about the research, the products, the technologies—all these are very important and things that economists can measure—the bottom line is training people to do things for themselves and for the world.”

In fact, he envisions his next book, a collaboration with Pitt colleague J. Karl Johnson, professor of chemical and petroleum engineering, as a textbook for his class in physical chemistry for engineering students. The work will explore the relationships among four fundamental areas—thermodynamics, quantum chemistry, statistical mechanics, and the kinetic theory of gases—disciplines that bring molecular insight to engineering students.

“It’s important to show the interconnectivity of core disciplinary areas in the field so students can see how things relate to each other in some detail,” Yates said.

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If your goal is to promote the study of European integration, you know you’re on the right track when the European Union (EU) designates you an official research center and repository of documents. That’s the honor bestowed on Pitt through its European Union Center.

Actually, the University boasts two companion centers: the European Union Center, which assists in the study of European integration, and the Center for West European Studies, which focuses on broader studies of Europe.

Through the work of the centers, Pitt is prominent internationally as a resource for EU research. A primary tool offered by the University is a Web site created and maintained by Phillip W. Wilkin, social sciences bibliographer for the University Library System.

“It’s considered the best Web site for research on the European Union,” said Alberta M. Sbragia, director of both centers and professor of political science.

Apart from assisting researchers, the Center for West European Studies offers a certificate program—the equivalent of a minor—for undergraduates; Sbragia hopes to introduce a similar option through the European Union Center.

Jointly, the centers offer a lecture series with prominent speakers; the president of Italy’s senate was a recent presenter. Sbragia ensures that students benefit from such appearances by offering extra credit in her classes to those who attend.

“When they actually see or hear an ambassador, a scholar, a practitioner who is involved with policy-making in the European Union, they get something that they can’t get from my lecturing in the classroom,” Sbragia said.

The centers’ community involvement includes coordination of an annual Model EU exercise, in which undergraduates participate in a simulated EU summit; a film series; an “immersion” program in French language and culture for local high school teachers; and an annual faculty development seminar for colleges and universities throughout the region.

Sbragia, who has been at Pitt since 1974, has authored a book on federalism, and she served as editor for Euro-Politics—Politics and Policymaking in the “New” European Community for the Brookings Institution. Recently, she was tapped by the U.S. State Department to brief a high-ranking official there about the political landscape in Italy—community service at an elevated level, to be sure.