For Some, Hard Times Make Hiring Easier

The number of colleges freezing faculty hiring seems to grow each week. Yet some institutions are going against the grain of the poor economy and appointing new professors. This decision has given those campuses an edge, yielding top-quality candidates who might not have been within reach in a more-competitive job market.

In the nation’s few flush states, public universities are capitalizing on relative financial health by luring professors away from budget-strapped areas. And some private liberal-arts colleges that did not rely heavily on investment income still have the resources to hire.

They are getting double and even triple the usual number of applications. And instead of finding one or maybe two top candidates for each job, some colleges have found as many as six prospects they would be pleased to hire.

“This is an opportunity to find the very best people,” says Michael J. Chajes, dean of the University of Delaware’s College of Engineering — which had more than 500 applications each for two of its eight faculty job openings. “Typically, we might be competing with 10 other top schools for these people, but this year we might be competing with only three. If you are one of the last ones hiring, you have your pick of whoever you want.”

In short, this is a year of stark contrasts: The tight economy has made times bleak for most of higher education and turned this market into one of the worst in decades for academic job seekers. But for institutions that have managed to be out on the market, this has been one of the most successful faculty-hiring seasons ever.

‘Absolutely Stunning’

The news that some campuses are hiring this year has been drowned out by concern over how the country’s economic downturn is hurting higher education. Among the prestigious institutions that are suffering and have frozen or cut back faculty hiring are Brown, Harvard, and the Johns Hopkins Universities. They join dozens of public institutions that have seen cutbacks in state budgets and decided not to fill faculty vacancies and have even frozen professors’ salaries or issued furloughs.

But The Chronicle contacted 15 colleges that have found a way to continue hiring and will each bring on between six and 90 new tenured or tenure-track professors this coming fall. That doesn’t mean they are flush with money. Even campuses that are hiring have had to cut back elsewhere. Some have put off building new residence halls or renovating athletics facilities, while others have trimmed travel costs, left staff openings unfilled, and not hired as many visiting professors to cover for faculty members who are on leave.

“Our president has said, ‘This is the time to invest strategically where we can,’” relates Iain Crawford, vice president for academic affairs at the College of Wooster, which is adding 10 tenure-track professors this year to its faculty of 131. “The most critical place for us to invest is in the classroom and in the faculty. We have protected our tenure-track searches.”

The decision has paid off, says Mr. Crawford, as the northeastern Ohio college has snagged candidates who might not have even considered coming for an interview in the past. Mr. Crawford counts among them one of the college’s newest hires, Travis M. Foster, who is earning his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

“He is absolutely stunning,” says Mr. Crawford, adding that Mr. Foster “gave one of the finest teaching demonstrations my colleagues had ever seen.” As a gay man, Mr. Foster also brings a measure of diversity that Wooster has difficulty attracting because of its rural location.

Mr. Foster, whose specialty is 19th-century American literature, had interviews with five colleges at the Modern Language Association meeting last December and telephone interviews with two more institutions. Five subsequently invited him to their campuses for visits. But he pulled out of the other job searches when he got the offer from Wooster last month, in part because it is situated in a low-cost area of the country where he and his partner can raise a family on Mr. Foster’s income. Two of the other institutions that were interested in Mr. Foster are public universities where resources are strained.

Augustana College, a private liberal-arts institution in Illinois, is adding 12 tenure-track professors to its faculty of 164, It, too, has attracted interest from candidates who “wouldn’t have even put us on their radar screens,” says Thomas E. Bengtson, chairman of the college’s department of mathematics and computer science. For an opening in math this year, the department had four finalists, among them an African-American woman with a Ph.D. in applied mathematics and a young scholar with a doctorate in mathematics and a master’s degree in finance. These candidates had rare attributes. Only a tiny proportion of mathematicians are black and female. Relatively few hold an advanced degree in finance, which is a growing area of interest among undergraduates.

Late last month, the department ended up hiring another candidate — its top choice: Brian P. Katz, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. “He just fit” with the department and with students, says Mr. Bengtson. “When he was giving this lecture, he got students involved in what he was doing.”

Augustana’s religion department also did something it doesn’t often get to do: It filled its tenure-track position in Hebrew Bible with someone who had already earned tenure at another institution. Hemchand Gossai has been at Georgia Southern University for three years, but because of financial problems the university has never followed through on its plan to develop a major in religious studies, he says. “Budget constraints have led areas such as religious studies and the liberal arts in general to fall far lower on the list of priorities,” says Mr. Gossai, who determined it was worth giving up tenure to move to Augustana, where the religion department is growing.

The history department at the University of Puget Sound also saw some startlingly qualified candidates among the 270 applicants for its job in modern European history. The sheer number of applications was so impressive that David F. Smith, the department’s chairman, called the university’s academic vice president into his office one day to take a look at them.

The job’s three finalists were a tenure-track professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a tenure-track professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. The department ended up hiring the postdoc, but if none of the three finalists had accepted, says Mr. Smith, “we had another three who were just terrific.”

An Upgrade in Quality

Indeed, the strength of applicant pools this year has allowed academic departments to look beyond the basics to more complex qualifications. “We get to make more nuanced choices among individuals,” says Mr. Crawford, the vice president at Wooster. “We can weigh more finely than in the past how a candidate could contribute not only to their home department but departments across the disciplines.”

Ritva H. Williams, chairwoman of the religion department at Augustana, agrees. “We’re able to ask: What is the special something they are going to bring us?”

But what will happen with these special new hires once the economy and the academic job market improve? Will colleges be able to hang on to them if other institutions come calling? That could be a challenge. But officials say that while they may have had access to more top-notch candidates this year, they still hired people who fit the college well. “We certainly didn’t go out and pluck a star to have for a short period,” says Mr. Crawford. “We always hire with a view toward the long term.”

In this market, some universities are also getting a chance to show off their own special attributes, which may have been overlooked in more-robust job markets. For years, North Dakota State University, in Fargo, has battled an image problem: It is known for its cold weather and isolation in the northern plains. But with its state enjoying an $800-million surplus and the governor proposing a 25-percent increase in the university’s biennial budget, it is appealing to candidates who might never have given it a second look.

One of them is Newell D. Wright, a full professor of marketing in the College of Business at James Madison University, in Virginia. Mr. Wright has worked at James Madison for 22 years and been happy there. But last year, the university began suspending nearly all faculty travel and freezing professors’ pay, he says. “The future was bleak as far as getting a raise and being able to accomplish things,” says Mr. Wright. “Everything is tight.” Virginia is facing a $3.2-billion deficit over the next two years.

North Dakota State, on the other hand, is just finishing construction on its $17-million College of Business, which will house a new Center for Global Initiatives and Leadership. And Mr. Wright, who learned that the university was looking for someone to direct the center, considered the opportunity “too incredible to pass up.”

Joseph A. Chapman, North Dakota State’s president, says the economic downturn plaguing most of the country has combined with his university’s unusual robustness to create a “perfect storm” for the campus. The university will make 39 tenured or tenure-track hires this year. “People are looking at places they wouldn’t have traditionally looked, and that’s coming together for us right now when we’re emerging on the scene,” says Mr. Chapman.

Fargo was not a place Mr. Wright ever thought he’d end up. Still, he says: “I might be cold, but I’ll be happy.”

http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 55, Issue 27, Page A1