Chancellor approves plan to add 32 faculty

Twelve faculty hiring proposals spanning the biological, physical and social sciences and humanities have been approved by Chancellor David Ward in the first round of the Sesquicentennial Hires program.

See also: List of accepted hiring proposals Comp lete summary of submitted hiring proposals

Provost John Wiley says the proposals were chosen from 147 applications that were all worthy of consideration. The proposals will add 32 new faculty members, and 16 to 25 of them should be at work by the fall semester, Wiley says.

The Sesquicentennial Hires program is part of Ward’s budget initiative, which the chancellor says gives concrete meaning to the concept of “public- private partnership.” Under Ward’s proposal, the state would provide enough funding to bring UW–Madison to the median of its peer group in terms of state support. In turn, the campus would take responsibility for raising non-state funds to maintain and strengthen the margin of excellence in its budget – money from federal/private grants and contracts and annual giving that will keep the university among the best in the world for years to come.

Currently, the Madison campus is below the median of its peers by about $1,900 per undergraduate student in state support, which seriously threatens the university’s ability to raise additional private funds and maintain its competitiveness to attract the best faculty, staff, students and research grants, Ward says. The shortfall totals roughly $57 million, which the chancellor is asking the state to provide over the next four years. Some of the additional money would be used to restore faculty positions lost to budget cuts and reallocations during the past few years, and would be matched by private funds from the University of Wisconsin Foundation and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

Wiley says the university is using gift funds now to add the new Sesquicentennial Hires faculty to show university commitment to strengthening and preparing the campus for the challenges of the future. The Sesquicentennial Hires will be in addition to the estimated 400 faculty the university will need to hire in the next four years due to normal turnover.

Overall, Wiley says, virtually all of the 147 proposals were excellent in that they identified interesting and potentially important opportunities for the campus.

“They also revealed some intriguing themes that have arisen spontaneously in many different parts of the campus,” Wiley adds. “For example, more than a dozen proposals concerned expansions in computational areas that would take advantage of and expand the use of high-speed computation and communication, novel computer architectures or computer graphics.”

Wiley says the university intends to convene strategy sessions organized around several of these common-theme areas.

“Obviously, we cannot hire all of the 40 or 50 faculty proposed by a dozen different groups in one theme area,” he says. “What we can do, though, is ask the proposers to think about the most critical missing elements, areas of commonality, and strategic positioning of the campus, and return with proposals that are more tightly focused on those few positions that would provide the highest payoff for Wisconsin.”