Post by watsonry on Sept 27, 2004 16:51:10 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2004/09/27/education/27nyu.html
N.Y.U. Begins Hiring Effort to Lift Its Liberal Arts Standing
By KAREN W. ARENSON
Published: September 27, 2004
ew York University is on a hiring campaign that it hopes will put its graduate and undergraduate liberal arts programs on sounder footing and give them the stature of some of its most prominent professional schools.
Over the next five years, it plans to expand its 625-member arts and science faculty by 125 members, and replace another 125 who are expected to leave.
"The ambition here is to live out what it means to be a first-class university," said John E. Sexton, N.Y.U.'s president.
Earlier this year, an accreditation team of scholars from outside N.Y.U. said that the size of N.Y.U.'s arts and science faculty was "marginally adequate," given its student population. It added that unless the university expanded the liberal arts faculty, "it will not be able to achieve the full promise of its intellectual role, nor meet the needs of the recent excellence of the undergraduates."
Mr. Sexton, who began to shape his new hiring plan just as the accreditation panel was visiting the campus, said that deans across the university were supporting the investment in liberal arts because they understood that it would enhance the reputation of the whole university.
The plan goes beyond simple additions to the faculty, however. Another goal is to try to make the liberal arts more of the intellectual core of the university, rather than one more school in a confederation of schools.
Although the university will announce a $2.5 billion capital campaign tomorrow - it has already raised $1 billion of that goal in the preliminary "quiet phase" and plans to raise the rest within four years - that campaign will not give N.Y.U. the spending power Mr. Sexton wants right now for the arts and sciences.
So Mr. Sexton is developing a $200 million war chest to be spent immediately on the new professors - and on offices, laboratories and housing for them. As a first step, he has lined up five trustees as "partners" in the initiative, who are putting up $10 million each - to be matched by $150 million more the trustees have said they will raise.
In the past 20 years, New York University has leapfrogged from an also-ran commuter school into the cadre of elite American research universities. Its challenge now is to stabilize its financial position and, at the same time, try to move up in those highly competitive rankings.
Raising a university's standing is never easy, since other universities are trying to do the same thing. Nabbing top faculty members means paying premium salaries and providing generous lab space, offices and housing in a tight and costly real estate market.
N.Y.U. is not the only university recruiting many professors at once. Other universities also engaged in wholesale hiring include Brown (expanding 20 percent in five to eight years), Temple (hiring 176 new professors this year and next), the University of Southern California (hiring 100 new senior faculty members at its College of Letters, Arts and Sciences) and the City University of New York (adding 300 new faculty members and staff at its six community colleges).
"We think this is a very good time to build the strength of academic programs," said David Adamany, Temple's president. "So we have made resource allocations especially to academic programs."
He said that a clear advantage of hiring so many professors at once is the "bandwagon effect."
"The word gets out that you are recruiting aggressively, that you are building," he said. "Other faculty members who have a reason to move look at your institution."
N.Y.U. is trying to compete with the likes of Harvard, Princeton and Yale, but without their endowments. Harvard, the endowment king, had nearly $23 billion in June. N.Y.U., which has a much larger student body - nearly 40,000 students, about twice that of Harvard - has about $1.3 billion.
The outside accreditation team called N.Y.U.'s resources "thinly stretched" and recommended expanding its financial cushion and becoming less dependent on tuition.
The decision to raise new money and spend it immediately parallels N.Y.U.'s successful strategy in the 1980's and early 1990's. That is how it built its stature so quickly - and one reason its endowment is not larger. Because of conservative investing, the N.Y.U. endowment largely missed the sharp rise in stock prices during the market's prolonged upturn, a period when many other university endowments ballooned.
Advertisement
But when Mr. Sexton was named president three years ago, he concluded that N.Y.U. could not continue to pay for its growth through borrowing and further expansion of its student body - conclusions backed by the accrediting committee.
The number of full-time undergraduates grew 45 percent between 1992 and 2003, and in Mr. Sexton's first year as president, N.Y.U. had a deficit of $70 million on a budget of $1.2 billion. It limited new hiring, faculty raises and other spending, and also raised tuition 6.3 percent. These measures helped pull the university into the black, Mr. Sexton said, paving the way for the new expansion.
The trustees backing the new faculty initiative expressed optimism that N.Y.U. is taking the right path.
"Ultimately, a school is no better than its faculty and its students," said William Berkeley, a 1966 N.Y.U. graduate who founded his own insurance company and is one of the five $10 million "partners." "If you look at how far we've come, we don't have very far to go. But near the top of the mountain, it gets a lot steeper. And that's where we are."
So far, N.Y.U. has selected eight departments for its hiring campaign, including biology, physics, mathematics and English. Mr. Sexton said the success of the university's recent hiring in economics is a model for what it hopes to do in other departments. It plans to concentrate on fields where it can develop a name and build on existing strengths.
"Science is an area where we have to be highly strategic," Mr. Sexton said. "It is very expensive. We have chosen niches because we can't cover the waterfront like Harvard and M.I.T." Among other fields, N.Y.U. plans to focus on comparative plant genomics, astrophysics and soft condensed matter, which relates to substances like plastics and polymers.
J. David Velleman, a University of Michigan philosophy professor who has agreed to move to N.Y.U. next July, said the Sexton plan impressed him, particularly in that rather than adding "bells and whistles, like institutes and special projects," N.Y.U. is building its basic infrastructure.
"A lot of administrators don't go in for that because it is not as sexy," he said. "But it is the right way to do it."
N.Y.U. Begins Hiring Effort to Lift Its Liberal Arts Standing
By KAREN W. ARENSON
Published: September 27, 2004
ew York University is on a hiring campaign that it hopes will put its graduate and undergraduate liberal arts programs on sounder footing and give them the stature of some of its most prominent professional schools.
Over the next five years, it plans to expand its 625-member arts and science faculty by 125 members, and replace another 125 who are expected to leave.
"The ambition here is to live out what it means to be a first-class university," said John E. Sexton, N.Y.U.'s president.
Earlier this year, an accreditation team of scholars from outside N.Y.U. said that the size of N.Y.U.'s arts and science faculty was "marginally adequate," given its student population. It added that unless the university expanded the liberal arts faculty, "it will not be able to achieve the full promise of its intellectual role, nor meet the needs of the recent excellence of the undergraduates."
Mr. Sexton, who began to shape his new hiring plan just as the accreditation panel was visiting the campus, said that deans across the university were supporting the investment in liberal arts because they understood that it would enhance the reputation of the whole university.
The plan goes beyond simple additions to the faculty, however. Another goal is to try to make the liberal arts more of the intellectual core of the university, rather than one more school in a confederation of schools.
Although the university will announce a $2.5 billion capital campaign tomorrow - it has already raised $1 billion of that goal in the preliminary "quiet phase" and plans to raise the rest within four years - that campaign will not give N.Y.U. the spending power Mr. Sexton wants right now for the arts and sciences.
So Mr. Sexton is developing a $200 million war chest to be spent immediately on the new professors - and on offices, laboratories and housing for them. As a first step, he has lined up five trustees as "partners" in the initiative, who are putting up $10 million each - to be matched by $150 million more the trustees have said they will raise.
In the past 20 years, New York University has leapfrogged from an also-ran commuter school into the cadre of elite American research universities. Its challenge now is to stabilize its financial position and, at the same time, try to move up in those highly competitive rankings.
Raising a university's standing is never easy, since other universities are trying to do the same thing. Nabbing top faculty members means paying premium salaries and providing generous lab space, offices and housing in a tight and costly real estate market.
N.Y.U. is not the only university recruiting many professors at once. Other universities also engaged in wholesale hiring include Brown (expanding 20 percent in five to eight years), Temple (hiring 176 new professors this year and next), the University of Southern California (hiring 100 new senior faculty members at its College of Letters, Arts and Sciences) and the City University of New York (adding 300 new faculty members and staff at its six community colleges).
"We think this is a very good time to build the strength of academic programs," said David Adamany, Temple's president. "So we have made resource allocations especially to academic programs."
He said that a clear advantage of hiring so many professors at once is the "bandwagon effect."
"The word gets out that you are recruiting aggressively, that you are building," he said. "Other faculty members who have a reason to move look at your institution."
N.Y.U. is trying to compete with the likes of Harvard, Princeton and Yale, but without their endowments. Harvard, the endowment king, had nearly $23 billion in June. N.Y.U., which has a much larger student body - nearly 40,000 students, about twice that of Harvard - has about $1.3 billion.
The outside accreditation team called N.Y.U.'s resources "thinly stretched" and recommended expanding its financial cushion and becoming less dependent on tuition.
The decision to raise new money and spend it immediately parallels N.Y.U.'s successful strategy in the 1980's and early 1990's. That is how it built its stature so quickly - and one reason its endowment is not larger. Because of conservative investing, the N.Y.U. endowment largely missed the sharp rise in stock prices during the market's prolonged upturn, a period when many other university endowments ballooned.
Advertisement
But when Mr. Sexton was named president three years ago, he concluded that N.Y.U. could not continue to pay for its growth through borrowing and further expansion of its student body - conclusions backed by the accrediting committee.
The number of full-time undergraduates grew 45 percent between 1992 and 2003, and in Mr. Sexton's first year as president, N.Y.U. had a deficit of $70 million on a budget of $1.2 billion. It limited new hiring, faculty raises and other spending, and also raised tuition 6.3 percent. These measures helped pull the university into the black, Mr. Sexton said, paving the way for the new expansion.
The trustees backing the new faculty initiative expressed optimism that N.Y.U. is taking the right path.
"Ultimately, a school is no better than its faculty and its students," said William Berkeley, a 1966 N.Y.U. graduate who founded his own insurance company and is one of the five $10 million "partners." "If you look at how far we've come, we don't have very far to go. But near the top of the mountain, it gets a lot steeper. And that's where we are."
So far, N.Y.U. has selected eight departments for its hiring campaign, including biology, physics, mathematics and English. Mr. Sexton said the success of the university's recent hiring in economics is a model for what it hopes to do in other departments. It plans to concentrate on fields where it can develop a name and build on existing strengths.
"Science is an area where we have to be highly strategic," Mr. Sexton said. "It is very expensive. We have chosen niches because we can't cover the waterfront like Harvard and M.I.T." Among other fields, N.Y.U. plans to focus on comparative plant genomics, astrophysics and soft condensed matter, which relates to substances like plastics and polymers.
J. David Velleman, a University of Michigan philosophy professor who has agreed to move to N.Y.U. next July, said the Sexton plan impressed him, particularly in that rather than adding "bells and whistles, like institutes and special projects," N.Y.U. is building its basic infrastructure.
"A lot of administrators don't go in for that because it is not as sexy," he said. "But it is the right way to do it."
