Pitt Profiles: Deans & Schools Series

At the Heart of the University: Scale, scope of Faculty and College of Arts and Sciences affect all at Pitt

By Evan Pattak

With 31 departments, 11 programs, 805 full-time and ancillary faculty, and the equivalent of nearly 12,000 full-time students, the Faculty and College of Arts and Sciences (FCAS) is dynamic and diverse, larger than many colleges—larger than many college towns, for that matter.

It fairly crackles with energy, but can so many creative people moving in so many directions maintain singleness of purpose?

Indeed they can, say the leaders of FCAS, who are unified and clear in articulating the college’s mission.

“The Faculty and the College of Arts and Sciences comprise a unit that is very truly the central unit of the academic programs of the University,” said Pitt Provost James V. Maher. “The 31 disciplines represented have the responsibility for the core academic activities that underlie the liberal education that we offer to undergraduates in the college, the liberal arts component of the education that we offer to undergraduates in the professional schools, and the research in the core disciplines that is intended to drive the development of those disciplines.”

N. John Cooper

N. John Cooper, dean of FCAS and the point man for its day-to-day operations, sees a similar mission.

“The faculty feel very strongly that the liberal arts provide the best undergraduate education as a basis for life-long learning, further education, and work,” Cooper said.

The success of FCAS in serving as the academic core of the University is palpable. More than 37 percent of the college’s graduating seniors go on to further education.

“It’s a very high percentage relative to other institutions,” Cooper said. “We have a track record for preparing students for the highest echelons of success.”

The mission of FCAS includes four principal goals that are interrelated in a number of ways:

• Providing outstanding undergraduate experiences, with opportunities for interdisciplinary study and research;

• Advancing the frontiers of knowledge, a component that combines research and instruction;

• Training the next generation of leaders and teachers; and

• Serving the community.

Offering excellent education to undergraduates may be the most visible of the goals, if only because these efforts touch all FCAS undergraduates—as well as many students of other colleges within the University.

“All 31 of those departments have to be offering a superb experience to undergraduates,” Maher said, “both their own undergraduates and the undergraduates of the professional schools that look to them for basic education embedded in the bachelor’s level professional education that those students are pursuing.”

FCAS in recent years has worked diligently to enrich the undergraduate experience, with results that are tangible. For example, many FCAS undergraduates have the chance to participate in research with faculty in their areas of major study, an invitation that many universities reserve for graduate students.

“There really are a lot of opportunities for students here to get research experience in the fields of their choice while they’re undergraduates,” Maher said. “At a public university, that’s unusual. That’s a feature of our program we’ve been able to add very effectively.

“There’s no better way to know how stimulating our faculty members are than to work in the laboratory or the library with one of them, or to become a research associate of one of them,” Maher continued. “That’s where the student can engage the faculty member one-on-one, where a discussion of the importance of a project can convey how someone in that field goes about attacking a problem whose solution is important to the development of that field.”

Cooper notes that research opportunities for undergraduates are expanding outside the natural sciences, where the tradition is stronger than it is in the social sciences and the humanities.

“More than 50 percent of graduated seniors in our natural sciences departments have done research for credit as part of their undergraduate experience,” Cooper said. “We would like to extend that culture across the other disciplines. In fact, we’ve generated a number of major gifts in the University’s current capital campaign to support those sorts of experiences. Research gives the sort of balance that is an essential element of a liberal arts education.”

Beginning in Fall Term 2003, the undergraduate academic experience will be further enriched with the introduction of a required “capstone experience,” a project that will allow all seniors to synthesize the lessons of their undergraduate years. (See accompanying story.)

“In the sciences,” Cooper said, “a capstone experience might be a research experience. In the humanities, it might be a paper or a summary senior seminar course that pulls together a lot of materials that students learned in their courses. We’re expecting the departments to come up with suggestions for what they think capstone experiences should be.”

If such bold academic programming contributes to the depth and breadth of undergraduate education, it’s the remarkable continuity of many key FCAS leaders that provides the comfort level for such innovation.

Maher came to the University as an assistant physics professor in 1970 and later chaired the physics department. Cooper, a native of Northern Ireland, received the B.A. and the D.Phil in chemistry degrees from Balliol College, University of Oxford, and followed that with postdoctoral work and a faculty position at Harvard University, where he was the Loeb Associate Professor of Natural Sciences.

He arrived at Pitt in 1986 as professor of chemistry, chaired that department from 1989 to 1994, and was named FCAS dean in 1998.

Check with many department chairs and program directors, and you’ll find similar professional histories.
“Pitt has been really fortunate in recruiting people who you might say are institutional loyalists,” said Alberta M. Sbragia, professor of political science and director of the Center for West European Studies and the European Union Center, who has been at Pitt throughout her career. “They’re very good scholars, but they also are loyal to the institution. That’s not so common in American education.

“If you went to any department, you would be astonished at the number of faculty who have worked for only one institution—Pitt. We’ve all had other possibilities, but we’ve all stayed. It’s a resource that doesn’t show up in endowment figures or budgets,” Sbragia added.

To ensure fresh ideas, FCAS also keeps a steady stream of new faculty appointments flowing.

“We have a very healthy faculty mix,” Cooper said. “This does seem to be a university that develops a cadre of people who are here for most of their careers. They enjoy the University and contribute to moving it forward. That’s the group from which a lot of the long-term leadership is drawn.

“But we also bring in 30 to 40 new faculty every year. (See article, page 3.) The search for these people is one of the single most important things that I’m involved with,” Cooper continued. “In every generation that you recruit, the quality of those people—the match between them and the departments that they’re joining and the match between what those people are doing and where we want to go—is really where you build the University’s future.”

Foremost in Their Fields

Undergraduate education may be the best understood of its goals, but FCAS also focuses on training leaders and teachers and furthering knowledge. These goals may be best reflected in the graduate program, where students provide key assistance in cutting-edge research even as they share new discoveries in their classroom work with undergraduates.

The commitment of FCAS to graduate studies is strong and pervasive. Of the college’s approximately 1,500 graduate students, about two-thirds receive financial support from the University. They’ve earned it; the average QPA for students entering graduate programs in FCAS is 3.6

In addition, the college has undertaken a concerted and successful effort to recruit faculty who are foremost in their fields; these experts are well positioned to advance knowledge in their disciplines and to transform those insights into vehicles for community betterment.

A critical tool in faculty recruiting has been the 19 named and endowed chairs, to which five will be added through gifts committed from the current capital campaign. Moreover, said Maher, hiring has been targeted to assure excellence and growth within departmental specialties.

“Each of the graduate and research programs needs to be very clear about what aspects of the development of the discipline it can really contribute to because of the specialties of the faculty it has attracted,” Maher said. “Then they should focus on doing that, and doing it so well that the Ph.D. students who graduate from our program become hot commodities for others to hire when those universities look for a source for some of the very best people in that part of the discipline.”

Hiring leading thinkers and practitioners does wonders for the University’s commitment to research and the advancement of knowledge; FCAS faculty have been attracting more than $32 million annually in federal grants and contracts.

The strength of the faculty also enhances the undergraduate experience. As Cooper points out, students not only can interact with leaders in their disciplines but also can benefit from courses structured and taught by scholars of the first rank.

“Our view of the undergraduate program is that the engagement of faculty at the forefront of knowledge generation must translate into a different sort of undergraduate experience than they might get at a college without the same commitment to the generation of knowledge,” Cooper said. “That has to translate into a better undergraduate program.

“It doesn’t mean that every single course is taught by a faculty member with a dual interest in research and teaching. But it does mean that the curriculum in the departments, and the overall curriculum for the college, is being designed by faculty who really know the subject.”

Leadership in the Community

The interrelatedness of its goals also is evident in the approach of FCAS to public service. In sending undergraduates into the field as interns, for example, the college provides important assistance to the community while helping students gain practical experience and contacts to supplement their classroom learning.

Said Maher: “I think it’s crucial, in offering a superb undergraduate experience, that we engage students in reflection on their relation to society and their responsibility for the quality of our society. We want them to get out there and do some volunteer work and learn a little bit more about our society. We want them to think about society and their relation to it in a way that they wouldn’t if they just learned about it in the classroom.

“And we want them to be leaders. You don’t practice leadership in a classroom,” Maher continued. “You practice leadership by doing something on your own in a way that could have an impact. Community service motivates students. It makes their classroom work mean more to them. It’s good for their development in addition to helping our neighbors.”

In many ways, then, the four major goals of FCAS are complementary. Hiring top faculty means more memorable experiences for undergraduates, even as it leads to groundbreaking research and discovery. Providing rewarding experiences for undergraduates through volunteer field work improves the community of which the University is a part. The common denominator of the goals is that they depend, to a greater or lesser extent, on first-rate faculty.

“It’s the faculty who are in the lab producing research,” Cooper said. “It’s the faculty who are producing books. It’s one of my key jobs to provide as many resources as I can to support those sorts of activities.”

Both Cooper and Maher view the extension of the capital campaign as instrumental in the ongoing development of FCAS. More than $42 million already has been raised for endowed scholarships and chairs and new or improved academic facilities. Maher is hoping the figure will go even higher.

“It’s vitally important that we convey to people—those who care enough about us that they would consider making a major gift—that the thing that will make or break our having programs that really succeed is the availability to us of the right people,” Maher said. “We need the faculty who will drive the development of their disciplines or professions, and the way to get those faculty is through endowed chairs.”