South Carolina's flagship university will hire 42 qualified faculty to join its ranks in the coming year. Then, it plans to bring another 60 on board by 2012.
Record freshman classes had us worried that the university would let students overrun this campus and throw the proportion of teachers to students in a downward spiral.
Luckily, all of the additional tuition that comes with record numbers can pay for more faculty. It could have been just as easy, if not easier, for the university to dole out bonuses to bigwig folks with the extra cash brought in. We've seen they know how to do that all too well.
Yet cooler heads prevailed, and for that, we applaud the university.
Record numbers are great, but we'd be remiss if we didn't express some caution. We have only so many classrooms, professors and residence hall rooms to accommodate students while maintaining a quality educational experience. We're quickly approaching the capacities of our campus, and without aggressive expansion, students won't even have a place to stand.
New faculty members will be a welcome boost to the university, one that is much needed after the drastic cuts we've seen in the past several years.
As we slowly but surely recover from years of penny pinching, we look forward to becoming an ever brighter bulb in the circuit of universities nationwide.