At some point in many professors’ careers, they want to move.
They want to upgrade to a more-prestigious university, a bigger salary, and better facilities. Some professors want to go where research collaborations are more plentiful. Others want to get away from toxic politics in their current departments.
But in the wake of the recession, this once tried-and-true method of recasting an academic career now eludes many faculty members. Faculty mobility has been restricted as colleges, particularly public institutions, cut programs and positions in response to budget cuts, while spending more judiciously on new hires. Older faculty are lingering in their positions rather than retiring.
Once, in an economy when jobs for tenure-track and tenured faculty were more plentiful, it was easier for associate professors and even highly paid senior faculty members to jump to a new campus. But now a much smaller segment of the professoriate can move. Among the faculty members who are most mobile these days are top professors looking to escape embattled public universities; professors whose research, experience, and reputation in their field can be used to jump-start a new program elsewhere; and, as always, scientists or other scholars who bring with them plenty of grant money.
“If you are a superstar in a really exciting field that universities want to move into, and especially if you are a scientist with a large amount of research funding, you’re golden,” says Ronald G. Ehrenberg, a professor of industrial and labor relations and economics at Cornell University. “Those institutions that can somehow marshal the resources to do hiring are in a wonderful position to get the people they want.”
Clearly, colleges will ante up for seasoned professors they see as critical to institutional priorities. But experts say that, in general, senior professors are the most likely to feel stuck—even in a good economy. Sometimes family issues keep them in place, as do sagging real-estate markets, but often the nature of the academic job market is the culprit.
“People don’t want to commit the kind of money you’d have to pay a senior professor if you could get someone for half of that,” says Martin J. Finkelstein, a professor of higher education at Seton Hall University. “A young full professor could be on the payroll for another 20 to 25 years.”
For the senior professors and others who are stuck in place, their task becomes finding other ways to remain vital.
“They can recreate their careers by going into totally new areas of research, by taking on major curriculum-revision roles, and by doing professional-organization activities,” says Jan Lawrence, an associate professor of education at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “Sometimes they begin to explore whether they might like administration. We’re in a period where people are doing things like this more and more.”
One 15-year veteran of a regional public university in the Midwest has ended up in that kind of situation. “I really thought that I wouldn’t be here as long as I have—I’ve definitely been applying for jobs—but here I am,” said the associate professor of biology, who didn’t want to be named. “I just try to do what I can to make the best of it. My research keeps me going.”
Staying in Place
Having professors stay in place for longer periods of time can be good and bad for academic departments. The worry of trying to replace key faculty members as they move on dissipates, but so does the possibility of using new hires to steer the department in a different direction. “When you don’t have the funds to hire people in new, emerging areas, that’s really problematic,” Mr. Ehrenberg says.
Yet even when money is available, it can be tough to make a hire. Faculty have been known to shut out candidates who don’t match their vision of a new colleague, particularly if that new colleague may be the only one they get for a few years.
“People don’t have that same generosity of spirit once resources get scarce,” says Michael C. Munger, a political-science professor at Duke University, who recently ended a 10-year stint as department chair. “They think, ‘If they hire in your field, they’re not going to hire in mine.’ So they veto every candidate, and then you end up hiring no one. Things can lock up in no time.”
When their mobility is limited, professors are also left without a critical tool to increase their salaries. Higher education is no different from other industries in that the quickest path to a bigger paycheck is getting an outside offer that triggers a counteroffer from the current employer, or moving on to another job, Mr. Munger says.
And these days that job, if it is available at all, is most likely to be at a private college that can afford to hire from the financially struggling public institutions that are shedding talent. Some private colleges have touted that they are hiring even while other institutions are not. At Cornell University, for instance, officials are raising $100-million to hire top professors in advance of faculty retirements. That effort so far includes the acquisition of seasoned scholars like Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist and physicist. Mr. Lunine came to Cornell this summer after 25 years at the University of Arizona.
The move to Cornell wasn’t a planned one, Mr. Lunine says, but it was an opportunity that he couldn’t resist. With state support for higher education in Arizona continuously waning, “Cornell offers some stability that is difficult to achieve” at Arizona, Mr. Lunine says.
Some public institutions, however, are in better positions than others to hire select professors. Among the people who tend to benefit are faculty members like H. Jay Melosh, who was looking to leave the University of Arizona and who had highly desired credentials that would give a new employer bragging rights. Mr. Melosh, a planetary scientist, was intrigued by the opportunity to build a program from scratch at Purdue University, where he was hired in 2009. The aftermath of the budget crunch at Arizona was just too much, says Mr. Melosh, who had been there for 27 years.
The head of his department announced that space missions, not science, would be the university’s new priority, Mr. Melosh says. And a popular class in which graduate students went on geological field trips was cut. Mr. Melosh, who led the excursions, created the course not long after arriving at Arizona.
Mr. Melosh says Purdue’s president, France A. Córdova, talked to him about leading the college’s effort to become a player in the planetary sciences. Once he got hooked on the idea, he says, “I kept making demands, and Purdue kept satisfying them.” Mr. Melosh asked that two other people be hired to join him, among other things. “After a while I said, ‘This would be silly not to come here.’”
Mr. Melosh says the ease he had in landing a job at Purdue was linked, in part, to his being a member of the National Academy of Sciences, which is among the highest honors for scientists. “They were clearly out hunting Academy members. I was well aware of that,” Mr. Melosh says. “They were particularly eager to close the deal.”
Difficult Times
Similarly, the University of Texas at Austin lured away Jeremi Suri, who worked at the University of Wisconsin at Madison for a decade. Officials in Texas saw him as a key player in their plan to make Austin’s international-history program a signature one for the university.
Outside overtures were common for the scholar of international history, who is highly regarded in his field (he’s written five books) and known for his ability to connect with students in the classroom. Last spring, Mr. Suri fielded a call from Texas, and he listened seriously to what they were offering. He knew he had to make a move after watching thousands occupy the Wisconsin Capitol in protest of legislation that would strip collective-bargaining rights from state employees, including faculty members, followed by the flagship’s political battle with lawmakers over higher-education budget cuts and its proposal to separate itself from the system. Last month, Mr. Suri started a new job at Austin.
“Things became really difficult here,” Mr. Suri said in an interview while he was packing to leave Wisconsin. “I could continue to do what I was doing and be happy and have no complaints. But I didn’t see much continued growth potential in that environment.”
Mr. Suri says he was won over by the commitment the Texas flagship has made to interdisciplinary work. Mr. Suri holds an endowed chair at Austin for global leadership, which allows him to work in the history department, the school of public affairs, and a center for international security and law. There is also a critical mass of international historians at Texas, which Wisconsin didn’t have, Mr. Suri says. Another Texas perk: His annual salary nearly doubles the $113,000 he was paid at Wisconsin.
Mr. Suri says Wisconsin officials made him a “very generous” counteroffer, but he didn’t accept. Doing so would have bred resentment among colleagues who hadn’t had raises in two or three years, Mr. Suri says.
Leaving behind the university at which he began his academic career was a difficult but necessary move, Mr. Suri says.
“I didn’t want to coast,” Mr. Suri says. “I think my best work is in front of me, and I want to be in an environment that allows me to do it.”
With faculty mobility hampered, cluster hires of star scholars have become scarcer than they once were. But institutions will still pull off talent raids at universities that have budget woes and limited means to fight back. Three internationally known scientists left behind the University of California at San Diego this year to go to Rice University, where they will anchor a new research center for the study of cancer. José Onuchic and Herbert Levine, both physicists, and Peter Wolynes, a chemist, will transfer their labs to the new center at Rice, along with millions of dollars in grants.
The superstar scientists have said that the budget cuts plaguing the University of California system played a role in their leaving, but that they were also enticed by the chance to delve into a new research area. The incentives Rice used to recruit the scientists (who are also National Academy members) included a $10-million research grant, custom-built labs, and access to foundations whose research is key to their work. Mr. Levine told The San Diego Union-Tribune that “we will be able to do significantly more at Rice than at UCSD over the next five to 10 years.”
Sometimes junior faculty members have an edge when it comes to getting a new academic appointment, experts say. Assistant professors who have made substantial progress on their research agenda and are good teachers can have mobility that their more-senior peers don’t, says Ms. Lawrence, of Michigan. Institutions are eager to hire such “seasoned assistant professors” because they’ve already shown they’re on the right track for achieving tenure, she says.
Track Records Count
No matter the rank or the discipline, a proven track record can make the difference as to whether or not a professor gets the chance to reinvent his or her career somewhere else.
Mary A. Armstrong, an associate professor at Lafayette College, got that chance. After nearly a decade at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, Ms. Armstrong had “done a lot of what I wanted to do there,” she says. As an associate professor, Ms. Armstrong had founded the department of women’s and gender studies. “The department was in a good shape,” she says. “I thought it was a reasonably good time to look around.”
Ms. Armstrong always wanted to work at a liberal-arts college, and so she applied to a handful of them, including Lafayette, which was expanding its faculty ranks even as the economy was faltering. Among the institution’s goals is to strengthen its women’s-studies program. “I was looking for a place that took interdisciplinary work extremely seriously,” Ms. Armstrong says. She started at Lafayette in 2009, with tenure, as an associate professor of women’s and gender studies and chair of the program.
“I’m really happy to be here,” Ms. Armstrong says.
Experts say that soon there will be a shift in the academic job market that should make faculty positions more plentiful, including for those on the hunt for a new academic workplace. Within the next five to 10 years, jobs should start opening up, says Robert Hendrickson, a professor of higher education at Pennsylvania State University. As the graying of the faculty continues, those retirements that have been delayed for economic or other reasons are expected to take place. And, Mr. Hendrickson says, institutions will be forced to realize that they can no longer serve growing numbers of students with a minimal number of professors—although future hires at many institutions are likely to include an increasing number of contingent faculty.
In some fields, there have already been signs of improvement. The American Sociological Association last month said the number of assistant-professor and open-rank faculty positions advertised in its job bank rose by 32 percent in 2010. And in the 2010-11 academic year, the American Political Science Association reported that 1,212 jobs, up from 1,081 the previous year, were advertised in the discipline, spanning the range of professorial ranks as well as temporary and nonacademic positions.
“Colleges are looking very carefully at all their programs,” says Mr. Finkelstein, of Seton Hall, “and they’re redistributing their resources so they’ll be hiring where they know they’re going to grow.”