Houston Chronicle, July 2, 2006, Sunday

Houston Chronicle

July 2, 2006, 2:09AM

A study in hiring at A&M
School is using nontraditional methods to add top-notch faculty
By MATTHEW TRESAUGUE
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/4017076.html

COLLEGE STATION - For years, the Becker sisters shared their physics research in string theory, but not an address.
Melanie worked at the University of Maryland while Katrin toiled at the University of Utah. They expected to spend their careers separated by states.
And then Texas A&M University offered the up-and-coming scholars something no other place had: each other. The school wanted the Beckers for an emerging institute specializing in their branch of physics.
"It was a good experience to be apart," said Melanie, 39, the older sister by 14 months. "But together we can make a major impact."
A&M is expecting as much. The hiring of the sisters is just one piece of the university's multiyear, multimillion-dollar effort to attract hundreds of new professors and boost the entire institution in national rankings.
With $40 million from the state Legislature, the aspiring research university has hired 251 faculty members since 2003 and has plans to hire 196 more by 2008. The fresh faces include Nobel laureate and chemist Dudley Herschbach, Pulitzer Prize-nominated sociologist Joe Feagin, internationally known astronomer Nicholas Suntzeff and Simon Sheather, who is considered among the top 200 mathematicians worldwide.
Their salaries so far have topped out at $278,000.
Besides catching stars, A&M has used the hiring campaign to diversify the mostly male and mostly white faculty and reduce the ratio of students to professors.
The university has made use of two growing practices in higher education: creating clusters of scholars in a particular niche and finding jobs for academic couples.
The strategies, plus the wherewithal to provide new professors with up to $1 million to start or relocate their laboratories, give A&M an edge at a time when other public universities are cutting back, campus leaders said.
"A lot of people are excited about what they are seeing," said Edward Fry, head of the physics department, which has plans to add 16 professors and launch an astronomy program. "It's just a big snowball."
Executing a visionA&M President Robert Gates started the hiring frenzy three years ago in response to "Vision 2020," the school's blueprint for vaulting into the ranks of the nation's top 10 public universities by 2020.
U.S. News & World Report, for one, lists A&M at No. 21, four spots behind the University of Texas at Austin.
The five-year program will add 447 professors, increasing the A&M faculty size by about 25 percent.
The push coincides with the largest construction boom in the university's history, with four academic buildings totaling about $275 million expected to open by 2009.
Gates lobbied for the extra dollars for additional professors from state lawmakers after faculty positions and pay decreased in the late 1980s and 1990s.
With a growing enrollment, the ratio of students to professors reached 22-to-1, significantly higher than the university's peers.
The median ratio for the consensus top 10 public universities is 16 students for every professor.
The new hires should reduce A&M's ratio to 18-to-1. Campus leaders plan to ask for more money to complete the hiring campaign, known around campus as faculty reinvestment, during the 2007 legislative session.
"You can't have an erosion of faculty members at a flagship institution of this kind and maintain quality," said David Prior, executive vice president and provost at A&M.
At the same time, UT-Austin is preparing to hire 300 professors in the next decade, and the University of Houston plans to add about 20 professors this year.
To propel themselves in the rankings and replace retirees, several schools have embarked on major hiring campaigns, education experts said. But A&M leaders think their effort is unprecedented.
Competition intense"The academic market is in great flux because financial problems of many institutions, primarily publics, have limited their ability to hire," said Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute. "Everyone wants to hire winners, and the competition for top young scientists and engineers is intense."
Ricardo Romo, president of UT-San Antonio and a veteran recruiter of academic talent, said the pursuit of a top scholar is similar to chasing a professional athlete on the free-agent market.
"It's fierce," he said, because university leaders know that stars can bring in huge research grants, create a buzz and attract other top scholars and students.
When A&M came calling last year, Suntzeff, the astronomer, had been firmly ensconced at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile for 20 years, with no intention of leaving.
He fielded more than his share of inquiries from major universities interested in hiring him, but turned away all but A&M.
'A fun challenge'What lured him to College Station was the chance to build an astronomy program from scratch at one of the nation's largest and wealthiest universities.
"I didn't want to go to an excellent university and be just another astronomer," Suntzeff said. "A&M was different. They have a new department and wanted leadership. It sounded like a fun challenge."
David Lambert, director of the UT McDonald Observatory, described Suntzeff as "a first-class catch."
To understand A&M's coup in landing Suntzeff, one needs to understand his work. Eight years ago, he contributed to a team of researchers that found evidence that some form of dark energy is causing the universe's expansion to unexpectedly accelerate.
BenefactorThe breakthrough brought cosmology — the study of the origin, structure and fate of the universe — to the forefront of astronomy and caught the attention of Texas billionaire George Mitchell.
An A&M alum, Mitchell helped finance the fledgling astronomy program and pledged $1.25 million so that the school could be a partner in the Giant Magellan Telescope.
The $500 million telescope, which is under construction in Chile, will produce images 10 times sharper than the Hubble.
Before accepting the job, Suntzeff submitted a wish list of 15 items, including permanent funding for visiting lecturers and post-doctoral fellowships. Fry, head of the physics department, took the list to Mitchell, who agreed to establish endowments to satisfy the requests.
A&M also will surround Suntzeff with at least three similar-minded scholars in the new program. He said he should have no problem filling the positions with top-notch professors.
"They go where the big telescopes are," he said.
DiversificationFor all the talk about stars, most new hires are younger, promising scholars who will shape A&M's future.
The appointment of a tenure-track faculty member represents a possible 30-year commitment by a university. Professors with tenure have a lifetime appointment, and they cannot be dismissed, transferred or demoted, except under limited circumstances.
By recruiting younger faculty members, who are more likely than senior scholars to be women or minorities, the university can address an immediate aim of the hiring campaign: to diversify the faculty. When the effort began, about 80 percent of A&M professors were white, and about 80 percent were men.
Of the new hires, 61 percent are white, and 65 percent are men. In particular, the university has hired 27 women in the colleges of science and engineering and added two prominent black professors, Forster Ndubisi and Valerie Taylor, to lead the landscape-architecture and computer-science departments, respectively.
Campus leaders said the shift is important at a time when the university is trying to increase its minority enrollment without considering race in admissions. The goal is a student body that reflects the diversity of Texas.
"We're looking for people of quality, but we think we'll have a better intellectual community with more diversity," said Prior, the provost. "We're laying the foundation for decades to come."
The university has enticed talented scholars from Ivy League and other elite institutions with lucrative offers: Full professors at A&M earn an average of $104,100 per year, with some of the new senior recruits receiving more than double that amount. It has promised splashier laboratories. It also has included jobs for spouses.
The year before the hiring campaign began, A&M found jobs for four spouses of other new hires. Since then, the university has hired 95 couples, an average of 32 a year.
These days, with more women in advanced-degree programs, an increasing number of academics are married to other academics. So A&M leaders said it makes sense to hire couples because spouses may have a hard time locating well-paying or meaningful jobs in a small community such as Bryan-College Station.
The practice has troubled some unmarried scholars at other campuses when spouses are hired without a national search. But there has been no controversy at A&M.
"It's nontraditional, but this is the way the world has changed for us," said Doug Slack, a wildlife-sciences professor and speaker of the faculty senate. "There are more couples in academia than before, so we have to be imaginative.
"I'm sure it would be a lot easier if we were in Houston, Dallas or San Antonio, with many opportunities for spouses to find jobs. We're the big boy in College Station."
Worth the investmentThe Beckers wanted to work together under the same roof. But their previous institutions did not make dual offers until Texas A&M tried to reunite the German-born sisters.
"We really didn't want them to match the offer," said Melanie Becker, referring to the sisters' former employers. "We had seen the potential of Texas A&M."
After arriving next month, the sisters will join the university's growing group of scholars in string theory, led by two of their mentors, Christopher Pope and Ergin Sezgin. String theorists argue the universe is composed of infinitesimal, one-dimensional "strings," not of point-like particles.
Eventually, they will work in a new building financed in part by Mitchell. The university also promised the Beckers about $450,000 each to start their laboratories.
"We saw an opportunity," Fry said. "Generally, it's hard to hire two people simultaneously in any one department. This program opens things up dramatically."
matthew.tresaugue@chron.com