“I feel like I’m home, because the University of Pittsburgh is a very, very important place in my journey,” Dwayne Pinkney told the latest Staff Council Coffee and Conversation event on Oct. 6.
The next Staff Council Coffee and Conversation will feature Anthony Delitto, associate provost for digital education, from 10:30-11 a.m. Nov. 6 in the William Pitt Union Assembly Room.
Pinkney, executive senior vice chancellor for administration & finance and CFO, joined Pitt’s staff just over a year ago but also was a graduate student here, earning his master’s degree in public administration from the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.
“Perspective changes from graduate student to being in a professional role,” Pinkney said, “but there are a lot of things that are important, that remain, about the values of this place and what it has meant to me.
“I never wanted to leave,” Pinkney recalled. “I wanted to stay in Pittsburgh,” but jobs beckoned in Washington, D.C., with the Environmental Protection Agency and then the Office of the Comptroller’s resources management division. Soon, however, “my student loans came due,” he said, and federal work didn’t pay enough. So he moved back to North Carolina, where he was raised, and pursued a PhD and a law degree simultaneously, which eventually proved too ambitious — but he finished the former.
Since then his career has taken him from working as a fiscal analyst for the state legislature in North Carolina to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, then moving to increasingly complex roles at larger campuses, from Virginia Tech to Indiana University, from which he joined Pitt.
“I would be less than honest if I said that it was all planning,” he explained. “There’s a mix of planning and intentionality and serendipity. Sometimes it’s about, hey, I’m doing this work, I’m in this place, and you discover something that is related or someone discovers you and a door opens that you might not have fully appreciated before.”
Speaking of his current post, he added: “I did set my sights, fairly early on, on that type of role, and took assignments and engaged in work that would make me competitive for a role like that.”
His tasks for the N.C. legislature — including staffing appropriations subcommittees of the House and Senate — had him working with University of North Carolina officials.
“One thing I was told when I joined the University of North Carolina,” he continued, “and it was partly in jest, by the president — I was told that ‘This is a career-ending opportunity that you have here.’ It was a pretty heavy time. Thiswas shortly after the dot-com experience” — the initial boom for that industry, until the bubble burst — “and here the university was on its way to building a lot of new facilities and renovating facilities, and I was brought over to really be the leading player in that work.
“I grew up a lot in those years,” Pinkney said, “working between the legislature and the university system and the campuses of the University of North Carolina, who had differential capacity to deliver a capital project. Some of the campuses had phenomenal staff with a lot of experience and some of the other campuses had virtually no one to execute on a really ambitious agenda like that. Where there were gaps, the system office was expected to help fill in, and we did that.”
When the Pitt job opened, “my interest was more than piqued,” he said. “I had just a great deal of fond memories of my time here, and the preparation here was absolutely seminal to everything that I’ve been able to do as a professional. So it was a no-brainer for me that this would be a very fitting place to return to.”
Asked by moderator Sam Young of Staff Council for the best piece of advice he has received, Pinkney said: “There’s not one pithy saying that I can recall … but it all moves in this direction: We should be intentional with our time, and the connection between our values and the way that we spend our time should always be top of mind.”
In higher education, he added, “I still believe that it is a tremendous public good — that the work that you do contributes to that public good — and that’s where I found the reward.”
Pursuing his master’s degree in public administration at Pitt “was very intentional. I knew that I wanted to be in public service in some capacity, and so I wanted my educational preparation to reflect that, to prepare me for that. …Being in a capacity that allows you to pay it forward and to give back and to be focused on those things that are broader than just oneself have been the things that have been most meaningful and impactful to me.”
“How concerned do you feel that a general staff member should be about their job security if the NIH funding were to get completely cut,” Young asked.
“I have been saying this: It’s unprecedented. There are elements of the time that we live in that do feel that way,” Pinkney said. “… To our colleagues who are feeling this unease in this moment, I wish I could say that there was a guarantee, and that you’ll always have the work that you do and you love today, forever. … But what I can say is the choices we make put us in the best position to be as resilient as we can be.
“It’s also important,” he continued, “to say that we’re in higher ed and there’s something distinctive about it, still. We’re at the University of Pittsburgh and I can assure you there is something distinctive about this place, its values and its commitment to the members of this community. I don’t think those things are diminished. And so I would say that understanding where we are, understanding the distinctiveness of this place, the importance of people to this place, it’s not something that we can take for granted, or that we can say OK I’m set for life. But … it should mitigate against some of the angst that we might have if we were perhaps in a different setting.
“I have known individuals throughout my career who have run really, really fast and had good effect but they weren’t able to sustain it. So I would just encourage us to think about our lives and our careers as a long game, because it is a long game, and in order to play the long game you have to have reserves. … I say this to members of my team all the time: I love having heroes on my team. But if I had to choose between having the superhero and the super team, every time I’m going with the team, because the team can be resilient when the hero has to move on. The onus is ours to raise our hand, not only to take on things but to say, this load is heavy, I could use help in this way.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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