Auburn Is Hiring 500 Tenure-Track Faculty Members. Here’s What That Means.

Auburn U.

Auburn University plans to hire 500 tenure-track faculty members by 2022, Steven Leath, its president, announced on Thursday. Those hires will be part of an effort to attract more Ph.D. candidates and research projects to the university, he said.

While the number of hires will draw attention, the actual number of faculty members employed at Auburn will grow by about 100 once attrition and retirements are factored in, the university said. University officials expect the 1,144-member faculty to reach 1,250 by 2022. Some of the new hires will take open positions; others will fill new positions.

“I feel we need to grow our research and scholarship to be a well-rounded land grant, but I don’t want to take our faculty out of the classroom,” Leath said. “So the solution is more faculty.”

Most of the new hires will be in the STEM fields, including agriculture and veterinary medicine, but there will also be additions in the arts and humanities. The university will focus on subjects that have proved popular, like kinesiology, a relatively new major at Auburn.

Beth Guertal, an agriculture professor, and Bruce Tatarchuk, an engineering professor, lead a group that will decide where to bring in the new professors.

The size of the undergraduate population won’t change, but university officials expect to add more graduate students to support new research projects.

The hiring spree will cost the university well over $100 million, including the costs of faculty salaries and the creation of laboratories, Leath said. Auburn recently finished its largest fund-raising campaign and expects an increase in its state appropriation this year. Alabama’s legislature is still in session, but if the state’s education budget passes, it will include an increase of $42 million for public universities.

While many public universities are facing budget cuts and faculty retrenchment, Auburn is not the first to announce plans to hire hundreds of new professors. Those efforts sometimes cause friction on campuses, as was the case at the University of California at Riverside, where professors said they were unhappy with a plan to hire 300 faculty members. The provost eventually stepped down.

In 2011 the University of Connecticut announced plans to hire 300 faculty members, and last year the University of Florida said it would hire 500.

Leath said he was aware that rapid growth can cause tensions on campuses, but he hoped that by asking professors to lead the group making the decisions, the plan would earn faculty members’ trust.

Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.