By MARTY LEVINE
Anthony Delitto began his college career as a physical therapy student and never expected to be a dean or in his current post in the provost’s office — but still knows how to give a PT practitioner’s advice to those of us who sit all day.
COMING UP
The next Staff Council Coffee and Conversation will be with Kevin Washo, senior vice chancellor for external relations, from 10 to 10:30 a.m. Dec. 1, at the O’Hara Student Center Dining Room.
Delitto, associate provost for digital education, is now leading the Center for Excellence in Digital Education (Pitt EDGE), Pitt’s online/hybrid education component. He spoke to Staff Council’s Sam Young as part of the organization’s monthly public interview, Coffee and Conversation, on Nov. 6.
“I was not a typical student,” Delitto said of his upbringing in upstate New York. “I graduated from high school and really didn’t have much of a direction. I ended up with a job on the railroad,” where his father also worked, “and I actually hurt my back during the job. I saw a chiropractor, who helped quite a bit.”
Delitto started looking at chiropractic schools, but at the time could not find one associated with a college. That’s when he saw that physical therapy might be an option. “I thought it looked kind of similar and it just so happened there were state schools in New York and I was able to affordably go to school. The more I got into it, the more I really had a love for the profession of physical therapy.”
He was quite happy as a practicing therapist, associated with the academic medical center at Washington University in St. Louis, where his skills as an instructor attracted attention, “and I gradually moved over into teaching. Then I realized I really liked the academic life.”
A master’s and PhD followed, and when it came time to start his career as an academician, Pitt with its medical center and opportunity to continue in research seemed ideal (not to mention that it was his wife’s preference to move to the northeast). Delitto joined the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences in 1999, became the chair of the physical therapy department and eventually dean.
“Are you excited that we now have a chiropractic program” in this school, Young asked him.
“That fits in with the culture,” here at Pitt, Delitto said. “I used to tell people that the professions in SHRS comprise over 50 percent of the healthcare workforce, and chiropractic fits in very well. It’s one of the most sought-after therapies, and our approach to it was one of keeping it very evidence-based.”
Asked whether he had the aid of mentors, Delitto said: “When I was at the University of Buffalo, which is where I got my entry-level degree, the chair of the physical therapy department took a chance with me. You have to remember: I was a 22-year-old freshman, everybody around me was 18 years old, and I think he saw me as somebody that was a bit older, a bit — I use the term loosely — mature, but I had leadership roles in the class.
“He took a job in St. Louis at Washington University and asked if I wanted to go with him after I graduated. I of course said yes, and then for the first five years I was in St. Louis he served as a wonderful mentor.” One effect was to expand Delitto’s notion of university work to include research, service and clinical care, he said.
He enjoyed his time as department chair here, and when “the dean’s job opened up,” he said, “I remember telling the senior vice chancellor of health sciences, when they asked me to be the interim dean, that I was the perfect interim dean because I didn’t want the job. Of course, he very cleverly said to me, ‘Why don’t you just withhold that judgment for a while.’ After a while I became very intrigued by it, and started to build a team and eventually put my hat in the ring to get the job.”
His current position developed more gradually, he explained. Almost a decade ago, his school was experiencing major space limitations, getting 20 times as many applicants for physical therapy, for instance, as there were spots, even after undertaking building renovations. By 2018, he recalled, he and his colleagues “started seeing this notion of hybrid education come up,” in fields where the idea had been “unthinkable” before. “You could bring people in for immersions — use the immersions for the skill development part — and then teach the rest fully online.
“More importantly,” he added, “I didn’t have to convince the faculty to do it — most were excited about it. And so we explored that option and did reasonably well with it in how our enrollments went up. We were doing this at a time where Pitt wasn’t really out doing this.”
At first the school used an outside company to manage the program, but by the time Chancellor Joan Gabel was inaugurated they had taken management in-house. “She asked if I would consider doing it for the whole University. … At that point in my career, I thought that was a challenge I really wanted to take on.”
Pitt EDGE, as the University-wide effort is called, runs on the strength of its “educational programs that are produced by the faculty,” he said. “If we have great programs that’s going to be what drives the reputation. There isn’t a dean I’ve talked to in all the time I’ve been in this position, and even when I was thinking about it, that wants to have an online program where there’s huge numbers of admissions and we have a 50 percent attrition rate. That’s not necessarily a bad financial model, because if you have large numbers of admissions and you lose 50 percent you still have 50 percent of the people there.”
However, he said, “that isn’t a model that we would embrace at all. We would strive in any online program to have our attrition rates about the same as our residential rates, which are very good. … By removing the barriers of having to pick up and move to Pittsburgh, and offering education out there to people and maintaining the quality level, I think that sets us apart from a lot of our competitors.
“The adult learner is our target audience,” he explained. “There are some undergraduate programs we’re considering but the primary driving force right now is in the graduate programs. .. I don’t want to disregard those people that are Pitt undergraduates and then come into graduate programs.” But, he said, “where we’re going to see an increase in our enrollment is going to be in the adult learner, the person who’s working and they want to improve themselves … so that they can better themselves at work or even better themselves in a different position.”
At the end, Young asked Delitto a question submitted by the audience: What advice do you have for individuals to keep moving through the day if they have desk jobs and they are mostly sitting?”
“I treat people with back trouble, and I always tell a person, ‘What I’m going to do with you right now is first aid, because you’re in pain and I need you to get out of pain,” Delitto said. “We’re going to do all these things to get you to a point where you can sit. But that’s only part of what treatment ought to be. We need to prevent the next episode, because we know from statistics that people who have a problem are going to have another problem down the road.’”
One of the best ways of doing that, he said, is that “you have to do something aerobically and that’s hard to do. Don’t listen to people telling you, ‘You should swim; swimming is the best thing for your back.’ You should do what you’ll do. If somebody asked me to go swimming I’m not going to do it. Do something that you know you will do.
“Walking is good. When you have to use the bathroom, however many times a day, go up a couple of flights of steps and find a bathroom somewhere else and make yourself do that all the time. At least you’ll get those steps and your heart rate will go up a little bit doing that. … Then there’s some back health exercises I try to give people, and probably about half the people do them and half of them don’t. But they’re simple and I try to keep it really, really simple for people. No more than 20 minutes and you can get them done. I tell people: try to do them every day and I hope they get them done three times a week.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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