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The New Face of the Institution

August 4, 2011, 11:26 am

By David Evans

As I write, my institution has a tentative schedule for 14 faculty and dean searches for next year. Only one of those positions is to replace someone who left prematurely. Most of the hires are for new positions, retirement replacements (some of which will redirect positions at least slightly), and decanal posts vacated by internal moves.

Our faculty, including deans, totals about 85 (it depends on precisely how one counts people who do not have 100 percent teaching duties). So bringing in 14 new colleagues constitutes a change of about 16 percent in the faculty as a whole. If we succeed in every one of those searches — which is certainly not assured — next year we will have a substantially changed institution, with between three and four times as many new faculty colleagues as we’ve had in any of the past three years.

That prospect is both exciting and daunting. Earlier in my career, I was chair of a department that, thanks to good institutional times, strong advocacy from the president’s office, and support from the governor and board of regents, went from 18 full-time faculty members to 31 in four years. That growth changed everything: We were able to restructure our majors, offer a significantly richer range of courses, and divide teaching duties in the core curriculum more equitably.

At the same time, though, all of those hires involved arduous and expensive searches. Each fall, we had a fairly large group of new faculty members to orient to our institutional processes and culture, and to help get started teaching in a new place. Most of the hires had some previous teaching experience but were still young and somewhat raw. We had some challenging moments.

Relative to the entire size of our faculty here, next year’s searches aren’t quite as substantial in scale. However, with the forthcoming retirements, we are losing around 200 years of collective faculty experience and institutional memory, and those are valuable commodities that are not directly replaced when hiring new people. Moreover, because of our specific institutional situation — especially our remote rural location, which I’ve discussed before — losing a large number of faculty members who have figured out how to have happy and successful professional lives here poses a particular challenge to the overall well-being of the university.

Nevertheless, we have a great opportunity to bring fresh perspectives and new energy to our faculty. If we can manage the 14 searches successfully, the following year should be truly interesting. Has your institution ever conducted that many searches in one year? What was the fallout? The biggest challenges?

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  • profmary

    I will begin a leadership position as chair of a small department (12 faculty).  The expectation is to grow the department into a school over a few years.  Do you have any tips on getting the resources needed to grow the faculty and work with a few resistant faculty?

  • minnesotan

    Are these fourteen openings for tenure-track positions? I’m writing the cover letter as we speak.

  • david_r_evans

    profmary, congratulations on the new position! As for the resources, you need to be able, first, to make the “numbers” case–your enrollments, course sizes, etc., are not consistent with what is going on across campus, disciplinary standards, etc. Unfortunately, these arguments are generally stronger than issues of quality invoked directly

    As for the few resistant faculty, you have to try rational arguments first. If these don’t work, appeals to self-interest come next. After that it really depends on the person.

    Minnesotan, the large majority of these positions (no fewer than 10) will be tenure-track, yes. There will probably be o.ne clinical type position in business that won’t be, and the two dean searches probably won’t, but the others, yes.

  • yellow1

    Similar growth where I am. The fallout, for us, was the concern of maintaining enrollment numbers that justified the hires in the first place. I know we always concern ourselves with enrollment in many ways, and unprecedented enrollment growth often leads to unprecedented hiring. That growth has fallout in HR services, training, scheduling, in student relations, etc. We were able to have that equitable division of core classes after the fact, and I cannot undersell this as an upside. The “seasoned” faculty had to take on some other roles in exchange for this: FAR more advising than the newbies, lots of their staff development dedicated to prepping and conducting training instead of attending taining, etc. Area budgets had to be completely rethought to account for the growth.

    Biggest challenge is the sea change in culture. Our growth happened over a 2 year period, but it was spread out between multiple campuses as well. Keeping everyone together after large growth (especially if there was little before) is difficult. The new folks are anxious to secure these new positions long term, and the institution as a whole has to redefine what its faculty expectations are when they are by far the largest contigent. And growing.

  • profmary

    Thank you both for your good advice.

  • oh_richard

    ProfMary – these are all true points, but only step one – you won’t get all you need on the first attempt.

    Step two is follow closely the few new hires you get, and from Day 1 document every new/better/improved thing those folks do from research to new classes to new committees to pr spots for the Department in local news or papers… as well as everything anyone else was able to do because they had more free time… as well as every improved course eval result and every improved student satisfaction result.  Tie this to the Dean’s and School’s goals as well where ever possible.

    The idea is to go back to the Dean after your first round of hires, and make an overwhelming case for all the things your Department was able to do by having a few new folks.  This supports that you really –do– need all those new positions you asked for last year but didn’t get.  With the new budget coming up, the Dean should add in the positions that were cut last year…

  • lodovic1953

    If you are looking for a outstanding teacher, community servant and professional in Psy/Special Education. I am ready for a growth opportunity.

  • profmary

    Thank you for this terrific advice.
    I appreciate it.
    It will be important for me to keep a regular log of activities and monitor /record faculty and student results to build a case.

  • dsnowball

    Make brilliant hires.  My department went from a sad little backwater to one of the college’s most respected, based largely on the principle that we never hire B’s.  We work like dogs to construct interesting positions, cultivate a pool of candidates (many who might not otherwise consider us), impress and excite them when they interview, and then hire them.  If we can’t hire someone who makes us think “wow,” we pursue a one-year appointment and do it again in the next year.  It’s an enormous pain in the butt, but it’s paid off more than anything else we’ve done: our deans are impressed with our candidates and pleased with our younger colleagues, which makes it much easier to take the essential stats that David E. mentions below and say “this is going to be good.  Trust us.”

    As for working with recalcitrant faculty, you might also need to consider working around them.  While David’s right – that you need to make reasoned appeals to colleagues – at some point you also need to be able to say, “the train is leaving the station.  I really want you to be with us.  But whether you’re on-board to help direct things and preserve our departmental culture or not, it’s going.”  In that instance, you might need to decide what the recalcitrant folks are still passionate about (service learning? civic engagement? advising?  the non-major courses?) and try to reposition them so that they can make a legitimate contribution where they’re still willing.

  • bugochem

    Don’t get too excited.  They are all probably going to spouses of existing faculty. :(

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