A summary of Senate committees and Postdoc Council deliberations relevant to postdocs at Pitt.
Library, Seungil
• Faculty Senate elections happening soon.
• Discussion on funding Open Access (OA) publishing as a social justice issue. Pitt Momentum Funds (https://www.provost.pitt.edu/pitt-momentum-funds) might be helpful.
Benefits & Welfare, Cristina
• Committee did not meet.
Bylaws & Procedures, Sushobhan
• Resolution passed for creating term limits and staggering elections for Senate officers.
• Demographic distribution of faculty in Senate: women and minorities underrepresented in part-time faculty. Discussions arose around how to measure diversity and what target metrics should be.
Budget Policies, Jenny
• Discussion on faculty hiring initiatives.
• Mean and Median Salaries Report
• Annual report on salary increases for continuing faculty canceled due to flat pool this year.
Community Relations, Mariarosaria
• Committee did not meet.
Computing & IT, Doug
• Google Drive had been giving university unlimited storage so far, but as of next July a data cap will be implemented. We are already using 120 TB but our cap will be 100 TB.
• SkySync will be helping with migration to OneDrive from Box.
• Decision need to be made regarding records retention from departed or deceased faculty or postdocs, etc.
Plant Utilization & Planning, Bruce
• Classroom scheduling during COVID-19. Occupancy restrictions result in inability to house 100-200 classes and there are 300-400 classes that are impossible to place due to the size of the class.
Faculty Affairs, Ashley
• ULS Library Update
• Discussion of Health Sciences librarians on 1-year contracts. Issue to be raised with Senate.
• Working with families of deceased faculty members on what happens to their data. The specific answer, for now, is that if a faculty member dies and the University is notified, there is a message that goes into your email account saying the account is no longer active, the message directs you to different accounts if it is a personal or University-related subject. Questions about data sets on Box, OneDrive, etc. what happens to the digital materials also arise. Some new policies about data storage and access are being written, timeline is unclear. Computing committee is working on a statement on the current procedure.
• Going live next week with resources for chairs on the annual review process.
• The Provost Advisory Council on Promotion and Tenure. Pilot year reviewing tenured associate to full professor cases. Committee will meet and review in May.
• New committee formed for reviewing the non-discrimination policy will meet to iron out several issues.
• Faculty concerns raised regarding the G grade policy that students were notified of via email. Concerns included the fact that the communication went out to students first without informing faculty, issues with “passing grade” for taking next course in a series or financial aid decisions, and the fate of those grades when faculty leave Pitt.
• A document drafted by Dietrich School Council was posted on Dietrich School website about assessment of teaching, moving beyond OMETs. No announcement made regarding the guidelines, although they may be mere suggestions. Faculty raised concerns about how to interpret the document. Considerable discussion on ways to measure teaching effectiveness and use it for the future.
Athletics & Recreation, Mariarosaria
• Planning for future meetings.