With an eye to decreasing the size of the Arts and Sciences faculty, the University has authorized 24 faculty searches in a roughly even distribution across the three divisions of Trinity College. If the searches progress at their current success rate, Arts and Sciences will see a faculty reduction of two or three members as professors’ attrition—the rate at which they leave the University—takes its toll.
The number of faculty sought is up four from last year’s total, and more of the searches will be open to both senior and junior professors in the hopes of attracting young and talented scholars to Duke.
The decrease in the size of the faculty is a “conscious” move by administrators who want to avoid deficits for Arts and Sciences like the $1.4 million shortfall during the 2003-04 academic year, said George McLendon, dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences. He noted that paying fewer faculty would allow the University to devote more resources to its capital development and maintenance.
“We’re a doing a relatively constrained number of searches this year for two reasons,” McLendon said. “One, to make sure that we don’t end up with a structural budget deficit; the second is to make sure we have the resources to support not only the new faculty that we’re bringing in but the faculty who are already here.”
McLendon acknowledged that Arts and Sciences’ limited resources necessitate choices between physical and human resources. He said Provost Peter Lange’s reduction of the searches from the low 30s in 2002-03 to the low 20s in each of the past two years will result in more funding for other Arts and Sciences expenditures.
“Because of the bottom-line budget, you can spend relatively more money on new faculty positions, or you can spend that same money to make sure that the classrooms are ideal and that the information technology is up to date,” McLendon said. “So the provost has pretty much clarified what he believes the optimal faculty size is.”
Several department chairs said more searches in their disciplines would be preferable, but many departments find themselves with faculty sizes well within the range prescribed by their memoranda of understanding—planning tools created by the provost’s office and each department.
“We’ve shrunk over the last 10 years, but now we’re trying to build back up,” said Ingeborg Walther, chair of the Germanic languages and literature department.
Although no official numbers are available that break down the searches by department, the art and art history, economics, English, Germanic languages and literature, history and philosophy departments each have one search currently in the works. “I don’t think anyone has a large number of searches this year because Arts and Sciences is being fiscally conservative,” said Thomas Nechyba, chair of the Department of Economics.
McLendon said there are “very few” departments with multiple searches, but faculty recruitment will remain a priority for him and the departments he supervises, just as attracting top basketball talent is crucial to men’s head coach Mike Krzyzewski. “I really believe a lot in recruiting, sort of the same on the faculty hiring level as Coach K does on the recruit level—for not completely different reasons, because how well you can do depends on the players you have,” he said.
Toward that end, McLendon said many of the searches have been open-ranked in an effort to recruit young, “high-impact” scholars from other institutions with the lure of tenured positions. “We’re looking at more opportunities where we might find the best young person at Stanford [University],” he said.
McLendon expects that the University’s ability to attract faculty will remain strong in quality, if not in quantity. “We assume that we’ll have a three-quarters success rate [in faculty searches],” he said. “We’ve done pretty well. Duke is a very attractive place to teach and work and live.”
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