If you think hiring a new faculty member is a time-consuming process, try hiring five at once. Kenneth A. Connor did, juggling five searches this year for new faculty members in the engineering department he chairs at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Half his time, he says, was spent answering the e-mail messages and telephone calls from roughly 200 candidates, not to mention handling the subsequent interviews and schmoozing on campus. "We wanted to know we had the right people," says Mr. Connor, whose department encompasses electrical, computer, and systems engineering. "We wanted them to know they had the right place."
Rensselaer has hired 22 new faculty members within the last six months: two in architecture, three in science, seven in engineering, and 10 in the humanities and social sciences. More than half of the positions were created just in the last year. Unusual in size and scope, Rensselaer's expansion provides a unique window into both the rewards and challenges of expanding the faculty.
The institute's hiring blitz, financed by an anonymous donation of $360-million, is part of what's called the Rensselaer Plan -- President Shirley A. Jackson's vision for the institution to become a "top-tier, world-class technological research university." Among its goals: double the number of doctorates produced by Rensselaer, to 250 from 125, within 10 years; increase annual sponsored research financing to $100-million from $40-million within five years; and hire lots of new faculty members. Besides the 22 new hires, Ms. Jackson says the institute will expand its faculty by an additional 100 new positions over the next five to six years.
The 22 already hired join a faculty of roughly 360 tenured and tenure-track professors. Two of the 22 were hired into tenured positions, and the rest are on the tenure track, says G.P. (Bud) Peterson, the institute's provost. Many of the new faculty members are relatively young and in their first faculty jobs, he says. They include one black man, three Hispanic men, two Hispanic women, and five white women.
Over the next three years, the institution also plans to create six research "constellations" -- three in biotechnology and three in information technology. Each will be led by a senior scholar working with two junior faculty members. All of the positions have yet to be filled.
Mr. Peterson says the institute managed to avoid a lot of turf battles as it was dividing up the spoils among departments by making the process as open as possible. Every department submitted a three-year performance plan outlining its goals and what it would cost to reach them. Those plans, he says, were posted on the Web so the faculty could review and comment on them before the administration's final decision. "Everyone knew what everyone else was getting," he says.
Mr. Connor's department of electrical, computer, and systems engineering was one of the big winners. Faced with the opportunity to grow, his department had to make some choices -- not just whom to hire but in what areas and specialties. The department wound up making its five hires in computer engineering, which has eclipsed electrical engineering in popularity on the campus. Two-thirds of the department's 250 majors are in computer engineering, and the rest are in electrical engineering.
Hiring in computer science continues to be highly competitive. "Low-level schools are having their computer-engineering faculty stolen from them" by top-tier institutions, who are also stealing from each other, Mr. Connor says. "There's a real shortage of faculty in this area. All but one of the faculty we hired are actually brand new graduates. Only one did we borrow from somebody else." That professor was lured away from a state school where the computer-engineering program was not highly ranked
Not everyone in his department is "100 percent satisfied with the people we brought in," Mr. Connor acknowledges, but he adds that there was surprisingly little controversy in the process. "The cool thing about hiring that much is everybody's morale is up," he says. Having new people around translates into new ideas: "We have 35 faculty members. You get 5 new people and it changes everything."
Within the school of humanities and social sciences, the arts department hired the most new faculty members -- four, all of them women -- in the fields of video and new media, electronics, performance art, and music.
Neil B. Rolnick, chairman of the department, says nearly 40 people applied for each position. The department looked for professors who were active professionally in the arts, he says, people whose work is shown at museums, or who tour and perform, and could teach students "what it actually means to be an artist in this society."
Mr. Rolnick says the department has two more searches under way: one to replace an assistant professor who left to take a job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's media lab, and one to replace himself as chairman when he steps down at the end of this academic year. Mr. Rolnick, one of 4 tenured professors in the 12-member department, plans to remain a professor of music.
The new department head is likely to be an outside hire. The downside of having so many new, young faces in the department, he says, is that there is no one with enough experience to take over as chairman.
