UW gets competitive boost from strategic hiring

Amid intense national competition for tenured faculty, the university’s two-year-old strategic hiring program is proving to be an attractive drawing card.

“It’s creating a buzz throughout the national academic community,” says Linda Greene, associate vice chancellor and coordinator of UW–Madison’s Cluster Hiring Initiative. “It’s exciting and it’s different, and faculty are very interested in these types of collaborative opportunities.”

When the fall 2000 semester begins, 38 faculty from this program will be teaching and researching across a wide range of disciplines, Greene says. To date, the university has approved 91 positions in the strategic hiring program. In addition to the 38 hires, 12 candidates are considering job offers.

Some hiring areas received nearly 200 applications for a single position, Greene says. UW–Madison is getting calls from other campuses that want to clone the cluster-hiring approach.

The program appeals to creative and innovative faculty who see possibilities for knowledge creation beyond their department or discipline, Greene says. So far, the new hires have been an equal mix of accomplished senior faculty and rising stars who are just developing names for themselves. The international mix of talent comes from Germany, Italy and South Africa in addition to the United States.

Strategic hiring is an attempt to build faculty teams around emerging fields of knowledge, rather than around the confines of traditional departments. Anywhere from two to five positions are authorized in each hiring group, enabling the university to assemble teams with varied perspectives on the same issue.

Greene says that many new hires craved this kind of collaboration and didn’t have the same opportunities at their previous campuses. But it’s not only beneficial to the outside hires: Hundreds of current faculty have been involved in submitting strategic hire proposals, stimulating collaboration.

“We hope this exciting intellectual environment will help us retain our existing scholars, who are often recruited by other universities,” she says.

Since Chancellor David Ward initiated the program back in 1998, faculty have generated more than 140 formal proposals, Greene says, spanning in subject matter from particle physics to poetry.

Among the successful hiring groups to date are genomics and nanotechnology, each of which will begin the academic year with four new faculty. The genomics group is at work isolating the genes that are responsible for disease. Nanotech scientists are creating materials of the future, for use in computers, medical tools and other areas, by working at the nanometer scale – or one-billionth of a meter.

Each hiring area also brings learning opportunities for students. One noteworthy example is a new course on biotechnology and ethics that was developed at the request of the Wisconsin Legislature. New bioethics professor Robert Streiffer will teach the course this fall.

Strategic hiring is meant to supplement -not replace – traditional hiring, Greene says. But the ultimate goal of hiring 100 to 150 faculty should leave a permanent imprint on UW–Madison’s way of doing things.

“The intent of this initiative is to shake up our thinking,” she says.