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UW hires teachers in selective process

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Also by Brian Pujanauski:

by Brian Pujanauski

Wednesday, October 6, 2004

Many students often do not consider how tough it is to land a job as a professor.

“It’s very selective,” said University of Wisconsin Chemistry Professor Helen Blackwell.

With perennial state budget cuts, UW provost Peter Spear said there have not been any allocations for new professors at UW in a number of years, keeping professor recruitment an exclusive procedure. Due to state budget cuts, “We don’t have any money for new professors,” Spear said.

The typical recruiting season starts in September and October and runs for several months. Field-specific publications, such as “Nature” and “The Chronicle of Higher Education,” advertise new positions in academia. Departments also send letters to professors in a given field at other institutions announcing the opening in hopes of a recommendation for a promising candidate.

Sometimes the department will contact a promising professor they hope would be interested in the job. UW History Professor Nan Enstad was an associate professor at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro when she was invited to apply to the senior position in women’s history at UW.

Schools offer different qualities to prospective professors.

“UW is small enough and compact enough to have a dynamic undergraduate student culture,” Enstad said, calling it one of the reasons she chose to make the move from UNC-Greensboro.

Blackwell said the opportunity for interdisciplinary work was one reason she choose UW.

“It’s a great school because you have the medical school, the engineering school and the agriculture school all in one place,” she said.

After applicants submit their information to the selection committees, a vetting process begins to narrow the field. The committees look at educational background, past published works, research interests and drawing power for grant money when they consider a candidate.

Committees only offer interviews to the best candidates, and the university pays for the candidates’ travel accommodations.

“It’s better not to skimp [on the interview],” Blackwell said. “In the long term it’s a pretty small amount of money involved in the investment of a new professor.”

A candidate’s pedigree is also important in the job application process.

According to Chemical and Engineering News, 60 percent of tenured and tenure-track professors at the top 50 chemistry departments in the country came from just 10 PhD programs. These 10 programs accounted for only eight percent of the PhD graduates in the same time frame.

To broaden the recruiting pool for chemistry faculty, the American Chemical Society created the Academic Employment Initiative to “give colleges and universities exposure to a larger pool of candidates for faculty positions than is possible through current recruitment practices,” according to a release.

Through this program, graduate students and post-doctoral researchers are able to present posters explaining their research and teaching philosophies to faculty recruiters.

The only exception to this is the Cluster Hiring Initiative, which began in 1998.

Spear said this initiative has been funded with both state and private funds for hiring between 125-150 new professors on campus.

“New areas of knowledge and complex societal issues don’t always fall neatly into departmental disciplines and structures,” UW Chancellor John Wiley stated on the Cluster Hiring Initiative website.

Wiley said the Cluster Hiring Initiative is designed to hire professionals to work on these issues.