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U. of Pittsburgh Press Director to Retire

February 22, 2012, 6:15 pm

By PageView Editor

Cynthia Miller, the director of the University of Pittsburgh Press, has announced her plans to retire in February 2013. Miller has led the press since 1995, coming to Pittsburgh from a stint as editor in chief at the University Press of Kansas.

Reached via e-mail, she writes that “a good friend of mine, who retired a few years ago, told me that you know when you’re ready—to let go, to do other things. And she’s right.” Miller says her own sense of being ready has coincided with what seems to be a good time for UPP to make the transition, “when we’re financially stable with plans for growth funded by a 5-year grant from the Mellon foundation, and have an excellent staff, strong support from the university, and a wonderful faculty committee.”

Asked if she plans to continue in publishing, she says no, “at least not in any serious way.” However she notes that for the press’s 75th anniversary last year, she compiled a reader of excerpts from 75 of its Pittsburgh-related books. “It was so much fun. If another director wants me to do the same for a selection of their books, I’m game!”

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  • http://www.facebook.com/edwin.rutsch Edwin Rutsch

    Richard

    May I suggest further resources to learn more about empathy and compassion.
    The Center for Building a Culture of Empathy
    The Culture of Empathy website is the largest internet portal for resources and
    information about the values of empathy and compassion. It contains articles,
    conferences, definitions, experts, history, interviews,  videos, science and
    much more about empathy and compassion.
    http://CultureOfEmpathy.com

    I posted a link to your article in our
    Empathy and Compassion in Education Magazine
    The Latest News about Empathy and Compassion in Education. Grades K-12 & College.
    http://bit.ly/dSXjfF

  • whitakal

    Let’s leave aside that spending a night as a “homeless” person or sitting in class next to someone with darker skin or a smaller parental bank account are pretty weak ways to develop empathy. This post implicitly raises the question: what is a college education for? Is it primarily to develop knowledge, a way of thinking, vocational skills, character, or some or all of the above? If character, does empathy–as a sort of passion–cut it? And even if we said, in principle, yes, bring on the empathy training, would such training be, in practice, a good allocation of student time and university money–since it would certainly add to the growing administrative apparatus that offers a parallel universe to classroom education. I’d submit that there are more effective (though old-fashioned) ways to awaken salutary passions (or even virtues) than gimmicky exercises that are easily warped to politicized ends.

    Keith Whitaker, http://www.wisecounselresearch.org

  • skmarie17

    Empathy is not a learned skill, academics.  If there is any concession at all that it is, it would take place in the first seven years of life.  Thank you for your consideration.

  • 12009444

    I very much agree with skmarie17 – it’s too late to teach empathy past the first few years.

    The article is not focused on a single issue but I’ll pick one. I am not a law expert but something that always bothered me is the “flexible” interpretation of laws, be it with regard to empathy or some other emotion. If more care was given to writing clearer laws, perhaps there would be less need to debate their interpretation and to cherry-pick judges.

  • michaeld10

    While I am appalled at the growing lack of empathy in our culture, I really don’t think that college is the place to develop this.  I’m reminded of the whining and shouting after the banks crashed and everyone rushed to blame it, as usual, on higher ed.  The pundits were saying that businesspeople were ethically challenged because business ethics were not taught in college.  The reality is that if a person is not already ethical by the time he or she reaches college, no amount of teaching will change that.

    The place for teaching both empathy and ethics (and a host of other things) is in the home–before the child reaches adolescence, and these things should be reinforced in elementary and secondary schools, which in many places are now all but completely dysfunctional, despite the enormous sums of money spent on them.  I doubt that this kind of teaching is done in most homes these days; and the situation is compounded by a growing culture of meanness–in popular music, movies, games, the internet, and the right-wing media.  Cruelty has been the lingua franca of schools for a very long time now; and it’s shocking how readily children take to it.

    I’ve reached the point where I sometimes seriously think that the right to become a parent ought to be governed by a licensing agency.  While driving somewhere today, I saw a neighbor girl (10 or 11 years old) driving the family van–and her mother was in the passenger seat.  Apparently that girl gets what she wants when she wants; and her parents think that’s cool.

  • activelylearningtolearn

    In critical thinking, one uses multiple perspectives to evaluate. In today’s global society, one has to willfully ignore, suppress, mindlessly denounce, or just plain-old yell louder than alternative perspectives in order to maintain a consistent narrative. Empathy is the affective counterpart to critical thinking, so I’m not terribly surprised that at least one study sees it in decline.

    Maybe education can improve empathy by overcoming resistances to critical thinking — and simultaneously overcome resistances to critical thinking by appealing to empathy?

  • wpastille

    Should we teach empathy in college? We should teach it everywhere!

  • drangie

    Yes, empathy, like a love of reading (see the CHE article and comment thread from a few days ago ) *should* be taught at home, but it isn’t.  So, what do we do about it?  Say “it’s too late,” and walk away?  Or do we try in higher education to address in some way this and other shortcomings in the formation of our young people (translate: future leaders)?

  • http://www.facebook.com/char.mentor Char Psi Tutor Mentor

    Exactly! critical thinking needs empathy~ and we do learn it, and after 7 years of age~ I am autistic and have managed through trials and tribulations to develop the skill in some aspects of life. We need to train learners and educators to get vulnerable, take risks and to Open Ones Mind to alternative ways of being~ it nourishes our creative endeavors~ its science!!!!

  • mhigbee

    Empathy corresponds strongly with many desired outcomes in life, so if it can be taught, that’d be good.  One classroom based pedagogy that I am involved with does seem to enhance empathy, without stating that as a “learning outcome” — this pedagogy is called “Reacting to the Past” and is based on elaborately designed, intellectually demanding, role-playing games that last roughly a month.  It can change students, truly.  –Mark Higbee, Eastern Michigan University

  • bondage2

    When we teach literature as narrative, as opposed to theory or cultural studies, we are asking students to imagine the feeling and thought processes of people different from them, whom they have never met and never will meet. That seems to me the definition of empathy. My question is, why does this seem so mysterious to us? Why can’t we simply point out to a student who has come to care about a character that that caring is something that can be transferred to characters who happen to also be real people. Maybe literature classes are the place where empathy can be taught.

  • jranelli

    teaching empathy seems a stretch, it’s there and needs only to be elicited, then permitted and encouraged until it is an element of the institutional ethos (so much easier to say than do against the tide of commodification)…the shared empathy that envelopes an audience during concerts and other performance forms might be a good place to start…with ample opportunity for reflection and exchange, across disciplines, drawn from the themes, issues and representations that have already had demonstrated emotional impact (the range is unlimited when great writers and composers from any and all cultures and eras are played by great actors and musicians) a trust in empthy will emerge (with practice, it may be defined as an alternative critical method, an affective method, if you will, when factored into studies) which trust will enrich all aspects of campus and community life beyond that. 

    an exploratory institute involving teachers, artists and students in a program of performances and studies of subjects that require empathy such as acting, storytelling, collabortive music and dance making, etc. using foundation texts and premeses with a range of social, political and personal themes would perhaps define the achievement of empathy, already familiar to performance artists, for the wider academic community and its concerns.

    the empathy experiment is certainly a commendable try…professor leake’s report will be welcomed.

  • graddirector

    Teaching empathy in school is fine, both of my daughters are in a school that focuses on social awareness as well as academics.  However,  one of my kids is in second grade and the other is in fourth and are just developing a social conscience.  I am skeptical that teaching empathy to the proto-adults in a college classroom will be effective.  By that point, the attempt will just cause eye-rolling , an accusation of  political correctness, and a resulting backlash by those who don’t.

  • lucystone

    Interesting that empathy, as defined by this author, is solely tied to being able to empathize with people a lower socioeconomic class. That’s a kind of empathy that only the more affluent need develop. How about other kinds of human relating– racial difference, ability, gender, etc? seems to me if we’re waiting for colleges to become more SES-diverse, we’re missing opportunities to include *all* students in developing greater empathy across a range of oppressions.

  • krobison

    Of course, some students would roll their eyes at this. BUT, I bet there would be some students who’s life would be changed dramatically by seeing life through a different lens. If there is a will and a way to incorporate teaching empathy, or providing opportunities for service and volunteering at colleges, I am all for it!  Why not? These are all learning experiences.  

  • davi2665

    In a generation of “gimme” and entitlement, empathy can easily fall by the wayside during the early indulgent years.  By the time the student reaches a university setting it is way too late to even consider “teaching” empathy, especially with the trite exercises of cultural correctness already mentioned.  Teaching empathy to someone is which it is lacking is like teaching ethics and good stewardship to a greedy politician- an utter waste of time.

  • cmichael

    Look to another Chautauqua scholar: Karen Armstrong.  She spoke on her Charter for Compassion there: http://fora.tv/2009/08/14/Karen_Armstrong_Charter_for_Compassion  She started the Charter after winning the TED prize: http://charterforcompassion.org/site/  Consider assigning her book Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life to students.

  • 3rdtyrant

    I’m not averse to this in theory, but ought not empathy to organically sprout from critical thinking?  If one is, indeed, considering anything from multiple points of view (I mean really doing it, not just saying other views exist, thought that’s a great leap forward for some people), will that person not eventually develop empathy for those views, regardless of whether he or she agrees with them?  Teach critical thought, and empathy will result, just as day follows night.

  • 3rdtyrant

    Bulls-eye!  If the trivium and quadrivium (in the largest, most evolved sense) were still taught, this would happen.  Sadly, we are so “bottom-lined,” with English, Humanities, Language, and other departments required to have “deliverables” that are tangible and commercial, people have stopped recognizing that empathy must come into existence on its own, from, as you cogently point out, study of other humans.  It teaches people to sort out their own minds, to sort out the right from the wrong, to distill the ambiguous and to exercise restraint.  The liberal arts were supposed to give every student a set of transferrable skills that he or she could use wherever he or she was to make things better.  We now see administrators who cannot manage intellectually this big picture thinking, because they have replaced the common good with the degree, thus making the means the end and forgetting the end entirely.  Nicely done, bondage2.

  • 3rdtyrant

    And sorry for the misspelling of “transferable.”  I was frothing, and it obscured my orthographic censor.

  • 3rdtyrant

    Genuine academics know this, non-academics, but thanks for the reminder.

  • activelylearningtolearn

    Maybe you (and a few others in this thread) are associating “teaching” with depositing information. Don’t forget that “teaching” also refers to placing students in situations that elicit an intended response. For example, Study Abroad programs “teach” both critical-thinking skills and empathy, regardless of subject matter or course content. Do Study Abroad programs provoke eye-rolling?

  • 3rdtyrant

    Fantastic!  Just the point that is lost on everyone who “willfully ignores, suppresses, mindlessly denounces, or [yells] louder” than the objective voices of good scholars.  I couldn’t agree with you more that the decline in critical thinking correlates directly with the development of empathy.  I’m thrilled to see this idea confirmed in your post.  Thank you.

  • Guest

    Thanks for this note. On empathy, I would respond that it’s the same as lawfulness. Lawfulness is good or bad depending on the law in question: It’s good if it’s a law against murder but bad if it’s sharia forbidding women from taking off their veils. 

    Same goes for empathy. Empathy is good when there is some important insight that might otherwise be missed without it; for instance, it is good that people hear testimonials from Holocaust victims so they know what such a tragedy entailed. But empathy can be very bad if it’s selective and/or manipulated–often because there are two sides to an issue but one side is simply more sentimentally attractive. For instance, I think Dan Choi, the West Point graduate who was honorably discharged by the US Army for publicly revealing his sexuality, was a much more alluring human interest story than the young gay soldier in my unit who was outed as gay and then driven to suicide with no way out because the fervor for gay rights made it legally risky to use the gay and lesbian separation chapter. I still see the young man’s face sometimes as I fall asleep, but we could not bring that issue to the press. Instead, Choi, whose West Point status kept him very safe from rape and abuse, dominated press coverage and people empathized with him, so they contributed to a very dangerous situation for gays and lesbians. 

    Empathy is like “weather,” with good and bad kinds depending on the context. So no, I do not think we should teach it. Instead we should teach subjects that give people content knowledge so they can decide when to empathize.

  • Humanusist

    A profound principle of human learning: One does not argue with their own experience. 

    Talking about others’ plights does not engender the same impact as experiencing others’ plight. This is what Capital University is capitalizing on.

    To those tongue-clickers who intone how college age is too late for developing empathy: Based on what evidence? That is a rather dark and limited view to bring to the field of education, is it not?

  • Socratease2

    So this empathy topic is back again. And once again, many people are going to assume because someone wrote that empathy is on the decline, then voila, empathy must be on the decline! I have a new one for everyone. Based on my reading of CHE blog comments, I have determined that critical thinking is clearly on the decline. I encourage everyone to think of isolated examples from their own personal experience that help prove my thesis and also think of ways to help counteract this epidemic of sloppy thinking.

    “The Empathy Experiment is meant in part to counteract what a University
    of Michigan researcher found is a decline in empathy among college
    students today compared with similar students two to three decades ago.”

    So, using a standardized survey, a single researcher concludes that indeed empathy is on the decline. And that is where the questioning stops??? 
    And therefore we must “counteract” what we don’t even know to be true??

    Teaching empathy is like teaching diversity, another hobby horse of the “let’s teach things at college that really can’t be taught” group.  Let’s stop teaching content skills altogether and just focus on faculty who will teach you “how to be intelligent or compassionate or cosmopolitan or thoughtful or, better yet, oblivious to the conclusions of unsupported theories.

  • katisumas

    Do I read you right?  The young gay soldier who was outed as gay and then driven to suicide was a victim of proponents of gay rights and not of homophobic biggots?  Neither was he driven to suicide by the now defunct “Don’t ask don’t tell” law because he was outed so obviously he didn’t break that law since he didn’t out himself? 

    Were you also an opponent of doing away with “don’t ask, don’t tell”? 

    In your previous posts you have shown yourself to be as homophobic as it gets, and also claim to be bisexual.  Could your homophobia stem from being rejected by one of the young gay students you accused of “prathological” behavior in a previous post?  Are you trying to bring back the era (sadly not quite over, particularly among closeted gay senators) when gay men were forced to have anonymous sex in out of the way places?  In that situation of course a bisexual person would have an easier time finding a fleeting sex partner, wouldn’t he?

  • director19

    how about professors that actually teach?

  • 5768

    Empathy: “the [imagined?] ability to understand how someone feels because you can imagine what it is like to be them”

    Imagining is not enough. Oozing with compassion is not enough. What good is a surgeon who imagines what you feel like but who lacks technical skill? His/her knife must be sharp to cut.

  • westfalldavis

    Teaching empathy in college is like teaching phonics in high school. There is a window in time in development of a person when empathy is acquired. The studies I have read put this in middle school. Enforcing character skills such as empathy by means of service projects should be a requirement for graduation at both the high school and college levels, as well as reflection on the impact of their project.

  • westfalldavis

    And what does research say about this? Is it effective to teach character development indirectly through narratives?

  • profperf

    As someone who teaches in the humanities and fine arts, I see teaching “empathy” as one of my primary goals.  No, it’s not something I can measure in any systematic way, but when a student reads a novel, performs a poem, sees a play and says, “My God, I know that person, I understand that person, I could be that person,” we may still be in the realm of sympathy rather than empathy per se, but we are getting that student to stretch beyond the strait-jacket of the self.  It’s a start, anyway.

  • goxewu

    coco_rico is a puzzling case. Well, maybe not so puzzling.

    He’s (apparently, if you connect the dots from his other posts, both as Robert Oscar Lopez and coco_rico) a bisexual male who, presumably, has an actual bisexual sex life. This means he has sex with other men. He’s also mentioned his military commitments causing him to be away from his wife for long stretches; the wife was mentioned, as I recall, in the present tense, so his sex with other men may also be adulterous. But he’s a political conservative and seems to want to align himself, at least in comments on “Brainstorm” threads, with other political conservatives. Those conservatives, however, tend to be of the “Ewww, yuck!” persuasion (“abomination before God” in their theological orientation) concerning homosexuality, and they’re against gay marriage, gays serving in the military, public displays (hand-holding, kissing, arms around each other) of gay affection, gay pride parades, etc.

    Such a conflict! And not one easily resolved in terms of finding a political home. (coco_rico could hardly have drawn succor from last night’s Republican Presidential candidates’ debate in Iowa.) So he twists and turns and contorts himself into all kinds of pretzels of weird reasoning in order to resolve his political problem. In a previous post on another thread, he blamed the trouble getting gay marriage into law has caused on such organizations as GLAAD for not settling for civil unions, their many and obvious legal and economic rights inferiority to actual marriage notwithstanding. Now he blames the suicide of a gay soldier in his own unit on “the fervor for gay rights” instead of anti-gay bigots. (One might presume that if coco_rico had been a black person in the Jim Crow south, he’d have blamed the suicide of another black person, hounded by the Klan, on the agitation caused by the Freedom Riders.)

    coco_rico could join the Log Cabin Republicans, but they support gay marriage (or were at least against a Constitutional Amendment prohibiting it) and are against “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” How about GOProud, gay but a little more right-wing? Alas, they’re against DADT, too, which would probably put them in coco_rico’s “the fervor for gay rights” in the military camp, which, to him, was the cause of that soldier’s suicide. Also, GOProud’s 2010 fundraiser’s featured speaker was Ann Coulter, who defended Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino’s extremely anti-gay campaign remarks. As a last resort, coco_rico might join a pretty tiny contingent of hard-core libertarian Republicans who think that it’s none of the government’s damned business what a person does in private (have homosexual sex, take whatever drugs, watch whatever porn, etc.), but whatever miniscule clout they had went to zero last night when Ron Paul, their favored candidate, said it was within Iran’s rights to develop nuclear weapons.

    The mean side of me enjoys seeing coco_rico twist in the wind, hanged by a rope of his own making. He’s an inadvertent object lesson to gays who think their full civil rights will be gained with any other cohort than liberals. On the other, he seems to be a sincere soul, a solid academic and a very well-liked teacher, who deserves better than to writhe in conflict with every comment he posts. I wish him a way out, I really do.

  • Marie M

    I disagree. I certainly have acquired experiences and observations that have taught me to be more empathetic since I was seven. Are you saying you haven’t? Just because something is hard to teach doesn’t mean it’s unteachable. 

    Sincerely,
    A non academic

  • betterschool

    Is there credible scientific evidence that we can teach empathy? If so, it lies outside the bounds of the mainstream learning sciences. I think a goal to provide more meaningful anchors for emphatic responses would be more appropriate.

  • nancydee

    A young man in my class who never said a word, and I suspected didn’t care about anything I was saying, came up to me privately and asked if I had seen the movie “The Human Experience.” I ordered it and watched it twice. I have used it in my classes since then and I can tell you that empathy is alive and well, it just needs an opportunity to be planted and grow. I have to thank my student who reminded me again that we have no idea what’s brewing behind the bored looks, and what is heard and taken to heart. 

  • herter

    I do teach empathy in college: I teach history.  On the first day of class I ask students why they should study history.  They respond with the trite “so we don’t repeat it” line, but I explain to them that we study history so that we might become more empathetic individuals.

    When students study historical documents, they must put themselves in the shoes of those who created the documents.  They must see things through the eyes of others.   I love watching my students read a slave owner’s journal and force themselves into the very uncomfortable position of understanding why someone they find totally reprehensible acted and thought as he did.  They don’t have to condone slavery to understand a slave owner, but they can’t understand slavery without first putting themselves in the shoes of the slave owner (or of the slave for that matter).  That’s a lesson in empathy. 

    It doesn’t take the students long to realize that they cannot really engage with, say, contemporary politics if they cannot see issues from all angles and from various points of view.  In other words, without empathy they cannot understand the world around them.  They must put themselves in the shoes of Michele Bachmann or Barack Obama or Olympia Snow or Ralph Nader in order to understand why they differ (and why that matters).  I hope my students’ lessons in empathy, that is historical reasoning, are helping them to make sense of the riots in London.  If they can’t put themselves in the shoes of the rioters, the police, David Cameron, and so forth, they cannot hope to even begin to understand what is going on there or among those in the US debating whether we should cut government out of our lives almost entirely or if maintaining the social safety net is best for society.  If they can put themselves in the shoes of those who lived in the past–a world completely foreign to my students–I have every confidence that the time spent developing their empathy skills will serve them well as they try to make sense of the world in which they live right now. 

    If you can learn history at the college level, you can learn empathy.  No special class on empathy required.    Perhaps our students and so many others seem less empathetic because they choose to see college as vocational training and as a basis for making lots of money rather than as an opportunity to get a liberal arts and sciences education.  Reading novels, surely, is a way to develop empathy.  I recall my science and math classes in college also provided lessons in empathy.  To understand competing theories requires that you employ empathy.  The liberal arts and sciences by their very nature teach empathy.  With all due respect to the study of athletic training, the students in that major tend to be my worst
    students.  My students in the 4-year dental hygiene program are right behind them.  The biology majors do far better with history and I think that’s because, in part, their study encourages them to see things from multiple points of view.  For whatever reason, athletic training and dental hygiene don’t do that.  I could add a slew of other voc majors to that short list. 

    It’s likely no coincidence that levels of empathy among college students have declined at the same time that enrollment in voc majors has skyrocketed.  You couldn’t have majored in athletic training, for example, 30 years ago.  The business major so popular now was also an anomaly 30 years ago.  Students’ attending college only for the sake of personal financial gain is, I’d venture, directly related to college students’ lack of empathy today as compared to 30 years ago.  I went to college for the sake of personal growth and in hopes of making a difference in the world.  My students now go because they think a college degree will lead to lots and lots of money.  Maybe if more students opted for a true education in the liberal arts and sciences rather than college solely as vocational training or a grounds for future wealth we wouldn’t have to consider offering formal classes in empathy.

  • westfalldavis

    Please look at some of the work by Darcia Narvaez.

  • R117532

    Suppose I were to wonder if we should teach eye color or even IQ in our classrooms. I’m not in touch with the recent literature on this topic but there is a decent chance that empathic responses belong to a class of attributes thought to be determined by genetics and perhaps the early environment. I can understand the question, “Should we provide literary models to which students can attach their empathic responses and broaden their appreciation of emphatic issues?” I watched as a few others suggested that empathy cannot be taught. They were ignored. Do you guys know something I don’t? I’m hoping that an appropriately qualified expert will comment on what we know on this topic. 

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