Pitt pushes for stimulus funding, state seems resistant

University administrators and alumni are asking government officials to work Pitt into the… University administrators and alumni are asking government officials to work Pitt into the state’s application for stimulus funds, but state leaders seem hesitant to rewrite their request.

Chancellor Mark Nordenberg and Vice Chancellor of Governmental Relations Paul Supowitz both wrote to the U.S. Department of Education last week asking workers there to reject the state’s application for stimulus funds because it didn’t include Pennsylvania’s four state-related schools: Pitt, Penn State, Temple and Lincoln universities.

Gov. Ed Rendell announced almost two weeks ago that he would not include the schools in the state’s application, saying that Pennsylvania doesn’t have complete authority over them.

Nordenberg argued in his July 1 letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, through which Rendell applied for funds, is meant to give universities the resources they need to keep from raising their tuition.

Pitt, which had already frozen hiring and raises for faculty members, announced earlier this summer that it would not increase tuition at its satellite campuses.

But Nordenberg wrote that being excluded from the state’s application for stimulus funds “changes everything.”

Robert Hill, Pitt’s vice chancellor of public affairs, said in an e-mail that it was too early to speculate how much Pitt tuition would increase because the University is waiting for the state legislature to finalize Pitt’s budget.

He said the University has not heard from the U.S. Department of Education about the letter and e-mails Nordenberg and Supowitz sent them.

Representatives from the U.S. Department of Education did not return phone calls seeking comment.

In the meantime, Supowitz and other members of Pitt’s Governmental Relations office have sent an e-mail to 437 members of the University’s Alumni Legislative Network and more than 670 members of the Pitt Advocacy Network, which includes students, faculty and staff.

Supowitz and his colleagues asked these people to write to their state senators and representatives urging them to “do everything they can” to include Pitt in the state’s application for stimulus funds.

Hill said the University has heard from more than 40 people who wanted to reach out to their legislators, but several state officials said they haven’t heard from many Pitt alumni, students or faculty members.

Pinar Ramsey, a receptionist in Senate Minority Leader Robert Mellow’s office, said she didn’t think the senator had “received anything from Pitt in the mail for a while,” and a worker in state Rep. Jaret Gibbons’ Ellwood City office said the representative had received maybe 20 or 25 letters about the subject.

State Sen. Jay Costa, D-Allegheny, received between 10 and 20 e-mails and one or two phone calls from people requesting more funding for Pitt, according to his legislative assistant, Jamie Glasser.

“It’s certainly substantially less than we’ve received for other issues, particularly the arts and public TV,” she said. “It’s not insignificant.”

Glasser said she hadn’t been able to talk to Costa about whether the e-mails and phone calls were influencing his opinion.

But the governor isn’t reconsidering rewriting the state’s stimulus application because it would take months to do so, one of his spokesmen, Barry Ciccocioppo, said.