Sixty-five percent of applicants offered faculty positions at the University accepted their positions during the 2013-14 academic year, a percentage known as the faculty yield rate, said Dean of the Faculty Kevin McLaughlin. This figure represents a decrease from the previous year, which saw an unusually large 97 percent yield rate.
This yield rate normally hovers between 50 and 75 percent, so the 97 percent reported during the 2012-13 academic year was anomalous, McLaughlin said.
Budget constraints also led to a “deliberate attempt to decrease the size of the faculty,” McLaughlin said. “Of requests for searches to fill vacancies, only 50 to 60 percent were approved,” and hiring in some departments is being frozen for the time being, he added.
“Many fields don’t need to be bigger. They just need better people to make them better, and we’re hiring the best people we can,” McLaughlin said. The University is “reallocating positions to fields that are stronger, have more research opportunities and have more student interest,” he said.
There were relatively more hires in the social sciences and humanities this year, McLaughlin said, attributing this to the growth of the Watson Institute, which included the hiring of four faculty members in political science and one in sociology.
Last year, the majority of University hires were in the physical and life sciences.
McLaughlin said this year’s new faculty members were mostly hired at the assistant professor level, because his office is trying to “push down the age of the faculty.” Hiring at the assistant professor level contributes to the high faculty yield rate because new hires don’t already have positions at other institutions, and “Brown is a good place” to work, he said. Departments usually get their first choice of candidates, McLaughlin added.
“There is a higher percent of assistant professors because departments need to think about replacing themselves with people better than us,” said John Savage, professor of computer science, adding that young hires will improve Brown’s faculty and quality of education offered.
According to data from the Dean of the Faculty’s website, there were 40 departures of faculty members in the 2013-2014 academic year and 29 arrivals. Of the 29 new faculty, 17 — or 60 percent — were assistant professors. Nine are from underrepresented minority groups — five are Asian American, two are black and two are Latino.
Faculty retention was also fairly strong last academic year. Thirteen faculty members received offers from other institutions and subsequent counteroffers from Brown. Of those, 10 were successfully retained, while three decided to leave the University, McLaughlin said.
While the Office of the Dean of the Faculty is “holding off” on making big hiring pushes, they are thinking ahead to the goals of President Christina Paxson’s strategic plan, McLaughlin said. “We are taking a few steps back now to jump forward later.” One goal of the plan is to increase the diversity of the faculty. “We have to keep pushing to move toward finding a more diverse pool,” McLaughlin said.
The University currently has in place the Targets of Opportunity Program, which aims to hire diverse candidates whenever possible. The program has reserves of potential vacant positions so that, if a department comes across a strong minority candidate for a position, they can borrow a position from the TOP to hire that candidate. The department will later on have to refrain from hiring for another position, such as when a faculty member retires. “We want to be able to take advantage of hiring even when there is no vacancy in that field,” McLaughlin said.
In science fields, there are still too few women, Savage said. “We have some very distinguished women in computer science, but not enough,” he said, referring to both faculty members and undergraduate concentrators. And though the diversity of the faculty has been improving over the years, it is still a “major problem,” he said.
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