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Strategic Faculty Hiring Initiatives

 
 
By Lesley Lovett-Doust, provost and vice president for academic affairs

These are exciting times at Michigan Tech.

We have now released the general advertisement for the three Robbins chairs and seven additional faculty positions that are associated with the theme of sustainability. The advertisement will be appearing in Science, the Chronicle of Higher Education and several other print media, as well as online. Deans, chairs and other faculty colleagues are also invited to send out copies of the advertisement to potential candidates, in particular, colleagues and researchers in the field, as this would reach people who are not presently “looking” but might be encouraged to apply.

To help candidates judge where they might fit in, in terms of departments, schools and centers/institutes, they are referred to a website, www.mtu.edu/sfhi/ . At the website, there is information about ongoing research in sustainability at Michigan Tech, facilities and colleagues, and more-specific details on what to include in the application package.

Many individuals are involved in interdisciplinary research projects at Tech, and indeed many academic units are, in their own right, multidisciplinary; but the idea of hiring in an interdisciplinary area is relatively new to the University. The Strategic Faculty Hiring Initiative (SFHI) committee has crafted a procedure that should ensure we have the opportunity to hire truly excellent faculty from diverse disciplinary and interdisciplinary backgrounds.

All applications will be in PDF format, and they will be posted to a committee website where a preliminary review can take place. The applications will be grouped according to whether they are under consideration for endowed chairs or other faculty positions, or are not being pursued at this time.

A blue-ribbon committee will then adjudicate the endowed chair applications and propose candidates for interview. Candidates who are unsuccessful as endowed chairs but who may wish to be considered for the other faculty positions will be reviewed as such.

For each candidate being considered for the faculty positions, a panel of three research-active colleagues in cognate areas to those of the candidate will be assembled. While some may be existing SFHI committee members, many will be from the faculty at large. They will rate the candidate in terms of scalar measures (1-5) in terms of excellence in each dimension that has been identified as important for the position. Since rank is open for these positions, panel members will be expected to take into account expectations for the career stage of the candidate.

Each candidate will be assessed, largely on scores but also on narrative commentary from the expert panels. At that point, the long list will be reviewed by the SFHI committee, Human Resources and the provost for consideration of diversity, balancing contributions to both breadth and focus in research. Candidates will then, on a rolling basis and starting with the highest-rated individuals, be invited to campus for two-day interviews. Interviews will include a seminar on the candidate’s research and a presentation to the University and the general public, in which the candidates will explore where their work fits within the general theme of sustainability research and education. Feedback on these presentations from the University community will be important. In addition the candidate will meet with the academic unit(s) and centers or institutes with which they have closest affinity, graduate and undergraduate students, staff and potential collaborators.

In their application materials, candidates have been asked to identify their "most likely academic units." The curriculum vitae and areas of publication will also provide a guide as to which academic units should be visited. It is anticipated that most individuals will prefer to be associated with an academic unit, and that academic units will welcome their contributions, but some may prefer to attach solely to an institute.

The new faculty hired through this process may not fit the traditional mold of academic units as we presently have them; they may teach and have appointments in more than one academic unit, with one identified as the designated unit for promotion and tenure decisions.

So in this innovative hiring process, our goal is a University-wide one, to bring in the very best, wherever they might be, and whichever discipline they might regard as their home base. We will add to the capacity of the whole institution to support growth in doctoral education and research productivity, both directly by adding the new faculty members, and indirectly through the fact that their teaching contributions should allow academic-unit colleagues enhanced opportunities and success in research. Our students, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels, benefit greatly from the opportunity to create new knowledge through research, inquiry and scholarship. This initiative, which will reinforce the connection between research and learning by adding to the faculty complement, is an exciting and timely one.