When Brad R. Simpson visited the University of Connecticut for a job interview in February, he was struck by a vibe that he finds increasingly rare on college campuses.
People, he says, were optimistic. At a time when he encounters many demoralized professors, as campuses across the nation slash budgets and freeze hiring, the University of Connecticut is one of a few that have recently announced plans to significantly expand their faculty ranks. In December, administrators there announced they would create nearly 300 tenure-track positions over the next four years.
“When people are excited about where the institution is going, it’s easy to tell,” says Mr. Simpson, an assistant professor of history and international studies at Princeton University.
He has accepted an offer to join the faculty at Connecticut as an associate professor in the fall of 2013, when the first 90 new hires are scheduled to arrive. “It’s gratifying to join a place with a strategic mission, that’s acting proactively instead of reactively.”
Many universities, though, are finding it hard to shield their core mission of teaching from necessary cuts, says Daniel J. Hurley, director of state relations and policy analysis for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. “Given the fiscal turmoil that has buffeted American public higher education, a lot of other institutions are focused on mitigating further cutbacks,” he says. Institutions with large hiring plans like Connecticut’s are an aberration. And, in fact, it is easier to find examples of places, like the Universities of Kentucky and New Hampshire, that are cutting positions and programs.
Where universities are able to hire and create new programs in the midst of the current budget climate, they are finding money by trimming administrative costs, raising tuition, and forging new ties with industries. Besides Connecticut, Iowa State University and the University of Minnesota system have also recently announced plans to hire large numbers of faculty. In each case, the hiring plans were developed under presidents who were in their first year of office and wanted to make faculty growth an initial priority.
Susan Herbst, president of the University of Connecticut, says she feels that academic institutions are generally heading in the wrong direction during the economic downturn. “Higher education and research are not broken,” Ms. Herbst said. “I do not think they need some fundamental and profound change.”
In her first year as president, Ms. Herbst has focused on finding a way to expand the faculty.
“Our power is always going to be in the faculty,” she says. “They’re the people with the ideas. I feel sometimes in higher education we’re forgetting that.”
Student enrollment at Connecticut has more than doubled since 1995, while the number of faculty has increased by only 16 percent, raising the student-to-faculty ratio from 14-to-1 to 18-to-1. Ms. Herbst wanted to reverse the trend and hired a consulting firm to help identify ways the university could find money for hiring. University officials estimate that the plan to create 300 faculty positions will cost about $50-million.
The consultants, McKinsey & Company, made suggestions including revamping information-technologies services and centralizing purchasing, an area in which the consultants said the university could generate more than $20-million in savings. The consultants also recommended ways to increase revenue, such as by raising Connecticut’s relatively low parking fees and increasing ticket prices for athletics events.
Ms. Herbst also developed a four-year budget plan that would allow for tuition and fee increases in each of the coming years. The exact amount tuition would rise in any year hinges on state appropriations. If state aid for the university grows, the annual tuition increases could be as low as 5.5 percent; if state aid is cut or plateaus, the annual increases could be as high as 6.8 percent. For 2012-13, in-state tuition is set at $8,712, a 5.5-percent increase over this year.
The university’s plan also aligns with the governor’s priorities. Gov. Dan P. Malloy, a Democrat, has advocated an $864-million “Bioscience Connecticut” plan designed to bolster the state’s economy, in part by expanding the University of Connecticut’s health center and working with the university to rebuild the scientific job sector. The state has been bleeding such jobs for the past two decades.
Many of the 300 new faculty hires at Connecticut will be made in research-oriented fields, particularly in biotechnology. To complement the state’s plans, Ms. Herbst also created a new vice-president position to work on economic-development issues. She hired Mary Holz-Clause, who previously held a similar position at Iowa State University, charging her with cultivating relationships among businesses, the state, and the campus.
“The stars aligned with the resources,” Ms. Holz-Clause says. “As we see it, innovation is bringing the right people to the table.”
Inviting Industry
At her former employer, Iowa State, administrators are planning to hire more than 200 faculty over two years. Like Connecticut, the university will add professors mostly in research-oriented fields as a way to strengthen partnerships with various industries, including agricultural biotechnology and biorenewable energy.
The university’s president, Steven Leath, who took the position in January, has been meeting with industry partners, including Monsanto and Pioneer Hi-Bred, a DuPont-owned company, since his arrival.
“I took stock of where we were financially, and how we were going to deal with student growth and grow research areas that are critical to the state,” Mr. Leath says. He hopes to eventually have industry partners that would help sponsor faculty by contributing to endowments or even sharing payment of salaries with the university.
Meanwhile, Mr. Leath is using money collected from cost-cutting measures, such as centralizing printing centers and reducing support staff, to help pay for the hiring, which is expected to begin in the spring of 2013. Iowa State also received $5.5-million from the state for biosciences, and it will put toward the hiring efforts money it has saved from accumulated attrition. When budgets were lean in recent years, department chairs were nervous about filling vacancies and had largely refrained from hiring.
Iowa State’s president is also working to attract top researchers by collaborating with nearby businesses in an area coined the Capital Corridor, which houses Syngenta and DuPont, among other companies.
“It’s about finding how Iowa can differentiate itself,” Mr. Leath says, “and do something that really makes sense for central Iowa.”
Mr. Leath was previously vice president of research and sponsored programs at the University of North Carolina system, one of the universities working with business partners through Research Triangle Park, home to more than 170 companies.
Forging closer ties to industry, as Connecticut and Iowa State are planning through their hiring strategies, is a successful model for growth, Mr. Hurley says, but the approach can also create concerns. Some faculty are hesitant to be involved with commercial endeavors, and corporate partnerships can create tensions within a university over whether they allow businesses to wield too much influence over a university’s direction. Faculty hires that are tied to industry partnerships also by their nature are more likely to be positions that are more centered on research than on teaching, limiting their contribution to shrinking class sizes and growing course availability.
Nevertheless, Mr. Hurley says, seeing hiring plans at these universities is heartening. “It shows a commitment of these institutions in the core teaching and learning missions,” he says.
Budget Stewardship
At the University of Minnesota, ties to industry play a less-prominent role in its plan to bring on 80 to 100 faculty members over the next few years. The university system plans to focus hiring in a number of small clusters, in areas that include science and engineering, liberal arts—including English and theater arts—and food systems and agriculture, says Chris J. Cramer, chair of the Faculty Consultative Committee, which represents the faculty systemwide.
“During hiring freezes there’s attrition, and it’s nonstrategic attrition,” says Mr. Cramer, a chemist. “After those losses, we’re going to hire strategically.”
For example, Mr. Cramer said that some of the university’s strongest areas of research, including food systems and agriculture, have been cut—or at least unable to grow—in recent years because of weak budgets.
Eric W. Kaler, who took over as the university’s president last July, found room in the budget to pay for new faculty after the state spared the university from $25-million in budget cuts it had been planning for, under a worst-case scenario. He also set aside money for current faculty to receive modest salary increases and bonuses.
“We’re happy to be able to hire, that goes without saying,” Mr. Cramer says. “But I think the reason we’re able to do so is because of some careful financial stewardship.”
The budget included a 3.5-percent tuition increase and made cuts in some university operations by tracking each department’s spending, re-evaluating job descriptions, scrutinizing divisions with high administrator-to-faculty ratios, and ultimately cutting staff.
The cuts in some administrative positions, Mr. Cramer acknowledges, have created new challenges. As the number of support staff decreases, he says, more administrative responsibilities go to faculty.
Despite the tradeoffs, Mr. Kaler says, he is optimistic about the direction the budget is allowing the university to move.
“This is the time to make these investments,” Mr. Kaler said. “I don’t think that it’s right for the institution to be huddled up for the worst.”
