After years of stagnation, university plans to hire more professors in coming years
As far as Provost Michael Amiridis is concerned, it's a buyer's market.
Through the recession, few faculty — here and elsewhere — received raises. Others found themselves feeling stagnant, open to a new challenge.
Over the last year, the university has leveraged those realities to bring in 120 new faculty members for the 2012-2013 academic year, and it's doing so, in large part, by approaching professors that have established themselves at other schools.
They represent the "first wave" of a plan to replenish USC's stagnant faculty over the next four years, Amiridis said. The university had been barely replacing the 30 to 50 faculty it lost in a year, he said.
Over the last decade, the university has had about 1,000 tenured or tenure-track faculty; when the plan's completed, it should employ between 1,200 and 1,250.
But doing so comes at a cost, and the university will drop about $5 million each year for a "wave" of hires — a total of $20 million.
On average, each new position will pay between $80,000 and $100,000, depending on how many USC opens, and they'll be paid with tuition money the university has gathered as enrollment has swelled.
That's competitive pay, Amiridis said, and it has to be — USC's going after senior-level professors at other schools.
Most new faculty at a round-table discussion Thursday afternoon said they weren't looking to move; instead, USC approached them.
It needed to, Amiridis said, because the university's faculty had become "bottom heavy." It had plenty of lower-level junior professors, he said, but lacked people in senior positions.
Over the past few years, waves of senior faculty retired as the state threatened changes to its retirement plan; some left for other opportunities. They weren't consistently replaced.
To fill them and draw new people to Columbia — often after years of work elsewhere — takes some convincing, Amiridis said. That means competitive wages and other incentives, including a program that finds — or makes — jobs for top candidates' spouses. This set of hires included between 15 and 20 couples, he said.
The set of new faculty are scattered throughout the university's colleges, Amiridis said, and roughly follow students' distribution among them.
But they weren't hired along those lines, explicitly.
Instead, colleges and departments made pitches for openings and suggestions for new programs that new faculty could establish.
For many, like Thomas Hebert, a professor in the College of Education who's establishing a graduate degree on teaching gifted students, that's given faculty the license to do something new and intellectually stimulating — something many faculty said was a big incentive to uproot and move.
"You can't do the same thing your whole life," said David Cutler, the new director of music entrepreneurship. "You need new challenges."
The new hires will be joined next year by another wave of faculty, Amiridis said, and the university has already begun searching for people to fill those ranks.
In the mean time, this year's wave is still getting used to life in Columbia.
A few joked they were still getting used to the school's infectious football culture as USC geared up for its game against Vanderbilt — and were still looking for garnet regalia.
One, Carole Oskeritzian, a professor in the School of Medicine who studies inflammation and allergies, apologized as she arrived to the meeting a few minutes late; she'd gotten turned around moving between campuses.
But Oskeritzian, who comes to USC from Paris's Pasteur Institute, has also learned of some of the state's realities — and found silver linings within them.
"What a better place than South Carolina to study allergies," she said.