The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announced this week that it would hire about 500 new full-time, tenure-track faculty members in the next five to seven years.
The hiring spree follows years of budget shortfalls that limited hiring at the university, including one year in which hiring was frozen campuswide. University officials now want to restore the total number of full-time faculty members to a level closer to what the campus had in 2007, just before the recession hit.
The hires will be made in two ways, said Barbara J. Wilson, executive vice provost for faculty and academic affairs. Some new hires will fill traditional roles in academic departments. Others will be hired in clusters.
The “cluster hires,” Ms. Wilson said, will be sorted into the six areas that have been identified by the university’s “Visioning Future Excellence at Illinois” project, an effort begun by the chancellor to map out the university’s needs for the future. The review focused on two questions: “What are society’s most pressing issues?” and “What distinctive and signature role can Illinois play in addressing those issues in the next 20 to 50 years?”
After receiving input from professors, staff members, students, and community leaders, Ms. Wilson said, the focus areas were narrowed to: energy and the environment, health and wellness, social equality and cultural understanding, information and technology, economic development, and education.
“The cluster hires will be distributed across campus, and some may even be cross-department hires,” Ms. Wilson said. “They will be the best people we can bring to campus to take what we’re currently doing to the next level in those areas.”
The university plans to advertise some of the first available positions by August, when the next hiring cycle begins. It has not yet been determined exactly how many of the new positions will be filled in each year of the hiring plan.
The university has watched its faculty shrink over the last few years, Ms. Wilson said, because of budget restraints and early-retirement incentives the university has offered. The number of professors who are tenured or on the tenure track is now 1,856, she said, down from about 2,100 in the 2007-8 academic year.
“We’ve been careful about how we’ve managed our finances, and we’re poised now to rebuild the faculty and do it in really strategic ways,” she said. “Our goal right now is to get back to around 2,000.”
Money for the new hires will come from a variety of sources, she said. The university has saved about $17-million over the last several years by finding ways to cut spending on areas such as utilities, facilities, human resources, and information technology. The university has also saved money by not filling positions after retirements and other vacancies, she said.
“Students come to the university because of the great faculty that are here,” she said. “A big part for us is ensuring an exceptional education for our undergraduate and graduate students. The idea of doing cluster hires and being systematic about it will allow our campus to make bigger contributions to society.”
