Finalists named for new round of strategic hiring

Interest remains strong in the university’s three-year-oldstrategic hiring program, judging from the 72 proposals and two dozen finalists selected this month for further review.

UW–Madison officials announced the finalists Dec. 15 for the fourth round of the Strategic Hiring Initiative, also known on campus as cluster hiring. The finalists were selected from 72 proposals submitted this year from nearly every discipline on campus, ranging across art, bacteriology, history, mathematics and Slavic languages.

“The number and the quality of these proposals shows how enthusiastic the campus continues to be over this hiring campaign,” says John Wiley, UW–Madison provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs. “This cross-disciplinary approach is beginning to change the culture of the campus.”

Strategic hiring is an effort to build faculty teams around emerging fields of knowledge, rather than within a single department. They strongly emphasize collaboration across different fields, in order to bring a variety of fresh perspectives to complex issues.

Virginia Hinshaw, dean of the Graduate School and senior research officer, says the initiative has been beneficial to all participants, regardless of whether they are finalists. The teams assembled for cluster hiring proposals often lead to new research areas and outside funding, she says.

Earlier this fall, the proposals were reviewed by a 10-member faculty advisory committee, which sent its recommendations to Wiley, Graduate School Dean Virginia Hinshaw, and Linda Greene, associate vice chancellor and coordinator of the hiring program. The three also considered more than 130 written comments about the proposals before making their decision.

The next step for the finalists is to submit detailed full proposals to the provost’s office by March 1. The winning eight to 10 proposals will be chosen later in the spring semester and announced on May 1. The finalists are competing for 25 available faculty positions this year.

Since the program began in 1998, the university has approved 91 new positions and has filled about 50 of the openings. Other open positions are either still in the search process or have an offer pending.

Greene says there is strong support for continuing the hiring program for at least one more round, but that option depends on whether the second round of the Madison Initiative is approved this year by the Governor and state Legislature.