UW-Madison’s cluster-hiring initiative shows signs of delivering on its promise

Laurie Beth Clark distinctly remembers the 1999 national academic conference where former University of Wisconsin–Madison Chancellor David Ward first outlined the university’s bold new hiring experiment, the “cluster-hiring initiative.”

“After the meeting, nobody could talk about anything else,” says Clark, an assistant vice chancellor who now steers the initiative. “They were absolutely riveted by the idea of this model.”

The program was truly noteworthy as a means of reloading the university’s “intellectual firepower” during a time of heightened faculty retirement. It came about through an unprecedented partnership with the governor and state Legislature, which ultimately led to three rounds of hiring in 49 distinct “clusters.”

What really set the initiative apart, however, was the creation of a centralized funding pool and the opportunity for faculty across campus to aggressively compete for new positions with innovative and vital “cluster” proposals. The goal: Get people outside of the “academic silos” of departments, collaborate across disciplines, and go after new challenges that demand interdisciplinary solutions.

Seven years later, the initiative is beginning to produce a formidable track record of accomplishments. Those successes are detailed for the first time in a comprehensive online progress report launched in April for the cluster hiring steering committee.

Collectively, the initiative has led to tens of millions of dollars in new federal research initiatives, generated by either individual faculty or interdisciplinary teams. Scores of new courses were developed, graduate training programs were launched, and new academic majors were created.

The initiative is also helping solidify the university’s leadership in key emerging fields, such as nanotechnology, stem cells, energy policy, global environmental challenges, genomics, and the studies of poverty, religion and American culture.

“One of the great strong points of this university is the lack of institutional barriers to this kind of thing,” says Michael Pariza, a food science professor who serves on the cluster steering committee and runs his own cluster in food safety. “In some very top-down universities, it’s very hard to collaborate with people outside your departments, if not impossible. But here, it’s quite open and has been for quite some time.”

African languages and literature professor Teju Olaniyan, a steering committee member hired to be part of the “African Diaspora” cluster, says he is most impressed with the level of enthusiasm the program fostered across campus.

“When I was being hired, I thought (the African Diaspora cluster) was something being dictated by the people in authority, and I was shocked,” Olaniyan says. “When I got here, I found out that it was just a group of people who wrote a very elaborate proposal and decided to submit it. This has been initiated from the ground up, and that’s what made it very, very strong.”

Environmental studies professor Jonathan Foley, who leads a cluster group on global environmental threats, notes that cluster-hiring professors may comprise only about 5 percent of all campus faculty. But they serve a critical role of exploring the “interdisciplinary frontiers” that are changing all the time. “Whatever today is an emerging discipline will in 20 years likely become an established field,” he says.

And its influence goes beyond just the new hires, Foley adds. While his cluster resulted in three new hires, it also attracted close collaborations with a half dozen more faculty who shared similar interests. That three-person hire has now gelled into a 12-person team, he says, and that development was critical to the cluster landing a $3 million National Science Foundation training grant to produce a new generation of graduate students in global environmental issues.

Foley says he also sees evidence of the hiring initiative building trust and “a lot of goodwill” among the campus community. “When departments do this right, they create a lot of other parallel benefits that can pay off for years to come,” he adds.

Here are some select accomplishments from the cluster-hiring report:

• Bioethics: Faculty developed a new undergraduate course, Ethics of Modern Biotechnology, and teach sections of courses incorporating ethical issues in the School of Medicine and Public Health, the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, and the School of Veterinary Medicine.
• Biomedical Engineering: The cluster was so successful that it spurred the development of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, which today manages the graduate degree program as well as a new undergraduate degree program. This cluster has more than 40 faculty affiliates from all over campus.
• Computational Sciences: Cluster faculty were instrumental in landing a $500,000 interdisciplinary grant that has university computer scientists and engineers working to develop face-recognition technologies that could ultimately be used in national security and law enforcement.
• Expressive Culture and Diversity in the Upper Midwest: The cluster developed more than $2 million in competitive grant funds for arts and humanities projects in conjunction with Center for the Study of Upper Midwest Culture, the Max Kade Institute and the Folklore Program.
• Food Pathogens and Toxins: Because of the cluster’s expertise in fighting food-related bioterrorism, the Food Research Institute was selected to be part of the prestigious National Center for Food Protection and Defense.
• Functional Brain Imaging: The cluster and affiliate faculty won a prestigious National Institutes of Health $11 million center grant. The presence of the cluster and related top-notch faculty have made UW–Madison an international magnet for some of the best postdoctoral trainees in functional brain imaging.
• Technology Entrepreneurship: The cluster has been successful in connecting with the Madison business community. More than 80 law firms, former entrepreneurs and other business leaders have been involved in cluster-related activities.
• Middle Eastern Studies: The cluster offers undergraduate students a certificate and a template for customizing individual majors, and also launched a general-interest Introduction to the Middle East course for the first time in this spring.
• Religious Studies: Since the cluster, the undergraduate religious studies major has gone from an independent major to an established curriculum that draws from many departments. In response, the number of students majoring in religious studies has increased faster than expected.