|
|
Recruiting top faculty is paramount to academic excellence in higher education. With that in mind, Indiana University President Myles Brand recently announced that he has created a fund to provide research start-up money that primarily will be utilized to attract top new junior and senior faculty to the Bloomington campus. The fund will make $500,000 available the first year and will be increased to $1.5 million in subsequent years.
Due largely to greater competition for available forms of financial support, a great number of people involved with higher education believe that in the not-too-distant future, there will be only 25 or so great research universities left in the United States. So stakes are high in the "battle for the brainiest."
"This initiative is not designed to increase the number of faculty, but rather to make us fully competitive for the top candidates," said Jeffrey Alberts, associate dean for research in Research and the University Graduate School (RUGS). RUGS will administer the funds, and Alberts will chair the faculty committee to review funding proposals.
| Top faculty not only attract grant money. They also lure a greater number of top tier graduate students to the university and a larger pool of promising undergraduate applicants. This all adds up to creating and sustaining a dynamic learning community, another major factor in attracting and retaining faculty. |
"Of course, we would expect that such investments will pay off in the form of new outside grants," he continued. "Funding agencies often expect the universities to supply major equipment and facilities--the grants themselves will not pay directly for the facilities."
Alberts said that while the cost for attracting top faculty has increased, the deans' resources have not and that Brand's establishment of the start up fund will pay off. Top faculty not only attract grant money. They also lure a greater number of top tier graduate students to the university and a larger pool of promising undergraduate applicants. This all adds up to creating and sustaining a dynamic learning community, another major factor in attracting and retaining faculty.
Top candidates for new faculty come via several routes, according to Alberts.
"The famous ones are simply well-known on the basis of their accomplishments. The challenge is to lure them from a place where they have been successful, or capture them when they've announced their intention to move," he said.
"At the junior level, regular advertisements in professional journals, magazines, newsletters and letters to departments can unleash hundreds of applications. Then the chore is to sift through the resumes, copies of published accomplishments and letters of recommendation."
Common wisdom has it that sustaining success is more difficult than achieving it, and Alberts would like for established faculty also to benefit from the new fund.
"We start with $500,000 in the first year," he said. "It would be possible to devote the entire sum to one, expensive recruitment, but that's probably not our style. More typically, we would find ways of spreading the benefits.
"I can also envision ways in which some of these investments will benefit other, established faculty at the same time as we launch the research of new faculty. Such instances would offer extra value to the dollar."
Return to Table of Contents