From the Office of the Provost
Episode 16: Prioritizing Faculty Success at Pitt
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Joe McCarthy: Hello and welcome to "From the Office of the Provost," the podcast that highlights exciting activities and initiatives in the provost's office or University-wide that bolster and enhance our collective vision for growth and transformation. I'm your host, Provost Joe McCarthy, and today I'm joined by Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement and Leadership Development John Wallace.
John's office is committed to enhancing faculty experiences and supporting them in their professional growth and success and recognizing their achievements. From early career faculty to senior academic leaders, John's team designs, implements, and evaluates programs that build capacity, increase impact, and support long-term career success.
John joined the Office of the Provost in 2020—perfect timing, John—and serves as the interim chair of the Department of Africana Studies and as the David E. Epperson Chair in the School of Social Work. He previously served as interim director of the Center on Race and Social Problems from 2021 until 2023. Welcome, John.
John Wallace: Joe, thanks for having me. Honored to have the opportunity to spend time with you this morning.
McCarthy: Great. Well, let's get started. John, can you tell us more about the vision for your office and why supporting faculty development is critical in higher education right now?
Wallace: Sure. In A nutshell, our goal and our aspiration is to support our faculty from recruitment to retirement.
So, faculty come to the University, often straight out of graduate school from other institutions, and try to get the lay of the land and what are the resources available for them. So, our aspiration is to make them aware of what Pitt offers, but also then to support them, whether their role is primarily teaching, emphasis on research, if they're interested in a community-engaged scholarship.
And then, of course, as they age—like myself, I'm looking at the clock and I'm like, this retirement thing is a little closer than it was 20 years ago when I came here.
McCarthy: Right there with you, John.
Wallace: Again, the goal is that Pitt will be the premier place for faculty, that they can spend their entire career here and continue to grow, continue to find new things to do, and just be rich and full.
And then there are those, of course, who want to, like myself, want to go into administration, not realizing that you wanted to, but recognizing that opportunity. And so also making folks aware of that as well. So, the leadership development aspect of the work is hugely important as well.
McCarthy: Excellent. I love that. We all know that we have fantastic people here at the University, so I really appreciate your vision and trying to help them thrive in their environment here.
Your team's built a lot of great connections across campus to bring faculty across all disciplines together and to provide them with invaluable resources. Can you share a few key programs that we have to offer to our faculty?
Wallace: Absolutely. So, I mean, let me back up just a little bit. I've been doing some research and writing, and I just have a piece coming out in the Journal of Faculty Development soon on mattering. And this issue of people being known, affirmed, and needed is hugely important. And so, as we're learning about not just universities, but other environments, that folks don't feel like the work matters. They're not connected to the mission.
And so, as we think about the Plan for Pitt and the emphasis on student success, we know that faculty really are at the core of that. And so, if our faculty feel supported, they feel that their work matters, they understand the importance of the work to our broader goal of making our kids here at Pitt successful, I believe that will make a huge difference.
So in response to that, our goal is, first of all, when we started the office, to evaluate the existing programs and things going on. Pitt is a huge place and there are all kinds of programs and activities, but oftentimes we don't speak to each other much. And so, the first thing we did was just evaluating the existing program to get the lay of the land.
And then the second piece is trying to collaborate across schools, departments. You know, we have the health sciences, we have the Office of Research, we have the Center for Teaching and Learning. So again, oftentimes these things are happening independent of each other.
So, it's by stepping back and trying to get the lay of land in the big picture, we able to, I think, to coordinate some of that work and hopefully to streamline it.
And then the next thing, we have these resources. So Academic Impressions, National Center for Faculty Diversity and Development, LinkedIn Learning. So most recently, we've tried to curate these existing resources. People don't know it exists. So the initial task really is just communicating about the amazing resources and the opportunity that the University has. And then as needed, developing new programming.
And so again, leveraging our existing resources, one of the programs we've done, we're pretty well, it's called PittWrites. So just a 14-day writing challenge built on NCFDD's platform, encouraging our faculty to write. This summer we have some things coming up, a two-week writing retreat, so giving our faculty access to the library, some coaching, and encouraging them to spend literally a few hours, six hours, four or five hours every day, for two weeks to just write. Pick something that you want to finish, put your head down, and also building relationships.
So, one of the other goals of our office has just been to get people together. I love meeting face to face, providing a meal and just getting people back out of their houses, right?
So I know that the pandemic sent us home of necessity, but a lot of folks, I think, went home and stayed. And so, we really want to get people back out connecting to their colleagues, connecting to the students.
And again, the power of the life of a faculty member, I think it's unique when you sit in your office or you wander the halls and ideas and I know a lot of projects that I've done over the course of the last 30 years have just been ideas that popped up in talking to my colleagues.
And so, trying to get people back together and getting to know each other again and moving forward our work so our students ultimately can be successful.
McCarthy: Great. Thanks, John. It's interesting that you're publishing some of the work that you're doing in your role. I'll have to check if there's a journal of provosting out there so I can do some of the same thing.
But going back to one of the activities that you mentioned that are offered to our faculty, Pitt, as you said, partnered with Academic Impressions to bring higher ed leadership skills, in particular, to our faculty and staff. Can you tell us more about that partnership and how folks can maximize the University's membership?
Wallace: Absolutely. So, we know that ultimately, I think John Maxwell said, 'everything rises and falls on leadership.' And so really is our faculty's, the leadership, so our deans, associate deans, and I'm discovering in my interim chair role, those people who are on the ground, we have in many ways the greatest direct impact on the faculty. And so, the preparation that we have in those roles is hugely important.
So, Academic Impressions is the largest organization in the leadership development space in higher education. And so, with your support, we've built that relationship. And they work with, I think, about 3,500 universities around the country and offer a variety of online as well as in-person training.
We've engaged them on a couple occasions to work with our senior leaders through the academic leadership team. So that includes the deans, the provost's cabinet, the regional campus presidents and key center directors, the library. So equipping our leaders to directly impact their faculty is hugely important.
And so this investment in Academic Impressions and the wealth of resources that they bring, we think is a hugely important effort as we try to make sure that everyone, again, from recruitment to retention, that our faculty are equipped and prepared to be successful to help drive the success of our undergraduates and our graduate students as well.
We have a new newsletter called Faculty and Leaders Forward, so that will keep folks updated about new and exciting developments in the office.
And our homepage and really the hub for information about our work is facultydevelopment.pitt.edu. So that will be all things faculty development, and we encourage the faculty to go there to look for resources that should be able to be helpful for them.
McCarthy: Thank you, John. Our audience probably is aware that we just recently had an Experiential Learning Showcase highlighting how important that is as a means for our students to learn. And going back to some of the leadership development activity that you were talking about, do you have examples of how we're employing experiential learning for our leaders?
Wallace: Yeah, absolutely. So, we have a couple things going on. One at the provost level, the cabinet is going through a book right now. So, we have a book club and trying to learn and grow our skill set. We're a diverse group of folks from all over the University, in many ways representing each office. And so, the opportunity to hear from and learn from each other, hugely important.
And then our office is also tasked with facilitating the Academic Leadership Retreat every year. And so that's been a wonderful opportunity to bring many of the senior leaders together on the academic side, and to learn from each other.
This year, for example, we focused on our leadership, and we know that as leaders develop, that everyone gets better. And so, the commitment for the leaders themselves to invest in their own leadership is a huge statement. And also, as we get better as leaders, it then by definition will trickle down and make our individual schools and departments and units better as well.
McCarthy: Yeah, I love that opportunity that we all took together, and I particularly appreciated that we invited the faculty fellows that are working with us to engage in that space as well. I think it was a really impactful event for us. So I appreciate you running that.
Wallace: Absolutely.
McCarthy: Looking ahead a little bit, your office, you mentioned the PittWrites activity. You typically run an annual summer retreat for early career faculty to help them build high-impact skills in their research, teaching, and service. What kind of impact have we seen from that in the past? And what's in store for this upcoming summer?
Wallace: Yeah, so historically, we've run a summer program in many ways. I thought about it as I wish somebody would have told me 30 years ago, right? So, it's the kind of best of here's how to do develop your research program, here's how to be a better teacher, and how do you balance service that's instructible and helpful for the University, but also helpful for your personal career.
And so, what we've seen over the course of the last, I think we've done this four or five years, cohorts of young people—call them young people, but our junior faculty—have developed in building research projects and programs out of that. So, folks who weren't working together prior to the event, working together, getting significant federal funding, frankly, to do their work, hiring students, that's been hugely important. So, the knowledge aspiration, the scholarship development piece of the work has happened.
And then the relationships; we know that people are less likely to leave when they have relationships. And so, the issue of faculty retention is a core piece of what we do, and as these resources are made available, again, when people feel needed, noticed, and affirmed, the likelihood that they'll stick around.
So, we invest a lot of effort and energy on the front end of recruiting faculty. But the key then is to keep them, because for most of us, there is that faculty member that we can point to who made a difference in our life because of a word of encouragement, because of an opportunity to do some research.
And so, as we're trying to create programming for our own faculty, you mentioned the faculty fellows, for example. These are mid-career or even younger senior faculty who are perhaps interested in administration.
I know I wasn't aware of administration and the opportunity that provides, and so this fellow program, we're equipping faculty who may move into administration, giving them access to tools and giving them projects that make them aware of the benefits and frankly the joys that can come with administration.
This year's summer programming, we want to pivot a little bit. We want to spend two whole days, two days of it focused on research. And so, everything from leveraging our library resources to IRB to proposal writing.
And then also personal professional development. So, how do you set up your personal website? How do you position yourself online, your LinkedIn profile, updating your CVs?
And so, things are moving very quickly, and particularly with the advent of AI. Hugely important set of tools the University’s made available to us through Claude. And so again, learning to use these things in a responsible way, but also leveraging the strength that they give us to be able to do things much more quickly, perhaps, than we've done in the past.
And so again, keeping our faculty on the cutting edge of technology and knowledge so that they can be successful as faculty and be successful in their efforts to work with our students as well.
McCarthy: So, looking ahead to your continued leadership of the Faculty Advancement and Leadership Development team, what are some new irons in the fire you've got going on? What can people look forward to in the near future?
Wallace: Yeah, I'm super excited. We have curated a Canvas site that is now available to everyone on campus. It'll be on our website shortly. It literally curates the content from Academic Impressions, LinkedIn learning, and NCFDD by career stage and by topic.
So, if I'm an early career faculty, it'll give me a list of all the webinars and workshops and trainings for that group. Or if I'm interested in leadership. There's even a tab focused on folks who are nearing retirement, how do you maximize your retirement account and so forth.
And so, the idea to have this one curated space that's available to everyone is, I think is exciting because there's so much content out there. And it's like when you go to the store, there's like—I like BBQ sauce—there's all this BBQ sauce. He's like, I don't know which one to pick, right? So, we have all of this content that's available to people. But often what happens is when people get overwhelmed with choices, they do nothing. And so, the idea is to make the content readily available and again, leveraging the existing resources.
And then the next piece is really talking to faculty and so we've been doing a lot of one-on-one stuff, finding out what are people's needs, right? How do we make sure that our office is responsive to the needs of the faculty as our primary customer. How can we make sure that the resources that we have or things that we're creating are helpful?
The other thing I've run a couple of times now is Crucial Conversations. We know that oftentimes on campuses we have challenges interpersonally, but we're too polite sometimes and it is important to have meaningful and important conversations and being able to do that in a way that's helpful and instructive. But at the same time, we need to get things done.
And so, giving people the tools to be able to have those meaningful conversations and of course, the tools are applicable even beyond the work environment, even conversations with our family members. So asking like, hey, what do we want out of the relationship? What does success look like? What do you need from me, and how can we work together to address our needs and our concerns and our situation?
So we have a lot of stuff cooking, and again, continuing to meet with our colleagues around the campus to make sure that the resources that we have available, the Teaching Center, again, a bunch of resources, TEACH@Pitt, important foundational course in instruction, which I probably should have taken many, many years ago. But especially as our new faculty come, and many are coming from research institutions where teaching, frankly, wasn't a priority.
But as we know, teaching is central to the success of our mission as an institution. So we want all of our faculty to be prepared to be great teachers, strong researchers, and be able to serve not only their departments, their schools, the institution, but their field as the University of Pittsburgh seeks to be the leading institution that we want to be and that we are.
McCarthy: Thanks, John. Speaking of things that I wish I had learned 30 years ago, I think some of the things you've shared are really fantastic, and I know that I personally continue to learn and grow in my role thanks to some of the things that you've uncovered.
And one area in particular that I learned from you quite a bit is how I connect to people on social and other ways. Can you share a couple ways in which people can continue to be connected to your office? Reiterate some of the things that you've already said, but I think there's a couple other avenues that people can connect to your shop.
Wallace: Yeah, so our website, of course, hugely important, facultydevelopment.pitt.edu. Our social media, and you can go to the website and you can find it there.
One thing that I think that we brought to the office is the idea of elevating and celebrating our faculty. We do so many amazing things here at the University of Pittsburgh, but oftentimes people simply are not aware. And so, through the social media, on our website and also my personal social media as I'm aware of things that are happening on campus. Just amplifying that work. We put a lot of work into our projects, our teaching, and so forth. So, I think it's great to be recognized, and social media allows a much broader audience to be aware of the great things that are happening here at the University of Pittsburgh.
It's difficult, frankly, to keep up with it. So, by having the website, using social media, and having a team of people who are devoted to the success of our faculty, it's a gift, and I want to thank you for the opportunity for the work that you allow me to do.
McCarthy: Yeah, thanks, John. I hope you get a bunch of new followers on LinkedIn from this podcast. I know aspiring to be one of the shout outs on the John Wallace personal LinkedIn account is something that our audience will probably clamor for.
But I appreciate you joining me today and sharing the great work that you and your team are doing to support Pitt and our mission.
As always, thank you to you, listeners, for tuning in. I'm Provost Joe McCarthy, and this has been from the Office of the Provost.
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