At the University, all academic departments are not created equal.
Ask any politics or economics major about experiences getting into his or her classes of choice and even those he needs to graduate and he'll likely woefully share anecdotes of unpleasant time spent with ISIS at dawn's first light.
Eighty-five students had to be turned away from PLIR 340, a large lecture course on United States Foreign Policy, this past August and September, said Politics Prof. John Owen, who also serves as the department's undergraduate director.
Owen, who teaches the course, said he is concerned that a lack of politics courses may cause students to shy away from majoring in the discipline.
"It's clear the demand for our courses exceeds supply," Owen said. "Our big fear is students thinking of majoring in government or foreign affairs who are first or second year will become discouraged because they can't get in our courses and major in something else."
In 2002, the politics department awarded 386 bachelors degrees with only 34 full-time faculty members, according to statistics from the University's Office of Institutional Assessment and Studies and office of College Dean Edward L. Ayers.
Departments in Demand
According to Politics Dept. Chair Robert Fatton, Jr., politics is one of several College departments suffering most severely from a shortage of faculty.
"We always are one of the departments, along with economics and psychology, that have the worst type of ratio," Fatton said. We have "too many students for too few faculty."
Fatton speculated that an "institutional bias" may favor larger departments, like English and history, allowing them to maintain their large numbers of faculty, while smaller departments like politics and economics have difficulty catching up.
"That kind of advantage tends to reproduce itself over time," he said. "That dates back I think to the 60s, when the administration decided that English was going to be one of the key departments. It has a communicative effect. I think we've suffered from that."
Ameliorating the effects of this perceived bias is not a simple task in light of scarce resources, Fatton said, adding that the dean's office might be less willing to deny faculty requests from College departments more highly ranked than politics.
When discussing faculty hiring requests, officials speak in terms of faculty "lines." A faculty line represents an authorization by the dean's office to fund the salary of a faculty member.
"Eventually you will get more lines than another department. The easiest way obviously is to have more resources," Fatton said. "Given the limited resources the dean has, if he gives to someone he has to take from someone else. Why would you penalize departments that are highly ranked?"
The hiring freeze over the past two years has not made conditions any better, Fatton said.
"In the late 90s, it was very clear that the administration had decided that we needed more lines" to hire new faculty, he said. "That stopped brutally because of the freeze."
Economics, which currently has only 22 faculty members but awarded 419 bachelors degrees in 2002, also suffered tremendously from the freeze, Economics Dept. Chair David Mills said.
"Not hiring for the last two years --- it'll take a decade to work ourselves out of the problem that creates," Mills said, adding that it is unclear how economics arrived at its present faculty shortage.
"The numbers are way out of line," he said. "How it got to be that way I don't know."
Mills speculated, however, that the shortage could be due to the inordinately popular nature of economics as a field of study at the University. The University has twice as many students majoring in economics as the University of California at Berkley.
"The combination of rapid, substantial and unexpected growth and interest in studying economics together with the dearth of resources for Arts and Sciences to hire faculty" has created the problem, he said. "Our faculty is too low and the number of majors we have for the faculty is too large."
Although Mills said he thinks it's "important that the resources be diverted to the department that's serving" the largest body of students, He added that he does not believe the University is intentionally ignoring the economic department's needs.
"It's nothing that the administration of this University sought to do deliberately," he said. "We are not the victims of some plan to marginalize the department."
Differing Departmental Needs
Karen Ryan, associate dean for the arts, humanities and social sciences, said the number of majors in a given department should not be the sole criterion for determining the awarding of resources.
"The number of student majors is something that can change really a lot within even a decade," Ryan said.
In 2000, the economics department awarded only 287 bachelors degrees, while the number jumped to 405 in 2002.
Faculty Senate Chair Robert E. Davis concurred with Ryan's sentiments and said it is misleading, particularly in the sciences, to judge the number of faculty necessary solely by the number of students being served.
"One department might have a research program in an area that requires a lot of faculty -- there might not be as much student contact in that department" as in others, Davis said. "So the net result is that if you just look at student to faculty ratios they're going to vary quite a bit. That's because there are different priorities among different departments."
History Dept. Chair Charles M. McCurdy said while his department is one of the largest in the College in terms of full-time faculty members, many of the department's faculty members serve dual roles for the University.
"It's probably true that history collaborates with more units around the University both in making hires and participating in more programs" than most other departments, McCurdy said. "That's because historians study the whole range of human activity. In terms of [providing instructional] service for the University as a whole, we're pretty central."
McCurdy cited Latin American studies, Asian studies, African-American studies and the Miller Center as all programs in which history faculty have dual appointments.
In the 2001-2002 academic year, the history department ranked fourth in the number of credit hours earned in its courses by University students.
"We teach a staggering number of students," McCurdy said, adding that in aggregate the department likely teaches at least as many students as the economics and politics departments.
Even though the history department had 44 full-time faculty members in fall 2001, it still suffers from deficiencies in certain areas, McCurdy said.
Due to retirements and faculty leaving for other schools, the department currently does not have professors of modern Chinese history or 20th century American history.
"We'll be out there bidding along with the economists" for new faculty, he said.
Ryan said the dean's office tries to be as judicious as possible in authorizing new faculty hires for departments.
Each spring, department officials are given the opportunity to make a pitch to the dean's office as to the importance of the faculty they are requesting to hire, she said. Hiring proposals might include the number of students the new faculty member could teach or the research role he or she would serve in a given department.
"Almost every department in the College has been authorized at least one hire" this year, Ryan said. "We've tried to spread the wealth around."
Finding Faculty
Once a department is authorized to make a hire, though, the process of searching for qualified candidates is no easy task, Fatton said.
"It requires a lot of time, energy, and also money," he said.
Davis said the typical faculty search process in his department, environmental science, begins with the creation of a departmental search committee to create an advertisement for any given position, which will then be advertised in both international and domestic publications targeted at future scholars.
Once all applications have come in, the search committee will try to identify about 20 percent or so that look like they have potential. Then, those applications are made available for all members of the department to review.
Following the review of applications, an even smaller number of candidates will be contacted to submit letters of recommendations.
"That usually gets us to sometime late winter, early spring, and then the committee will try to identify from the first cut a list of a handful to come in for interviews," Davis said.
Three or four candidates then will typically be invited to the University to meet with department members and a College dean. While visiting, candidates generally will deliver a research presentation, followed by sharing dinner with members of the search committee and other departmental faculty in the candidate's area of academic interest.
The process culminates with the search committee meeting again to discuss the candidates and forwarding a motion to their respective department's entire faculty for the consideration of a given candidate.
"At that point, it's in the hands of the dean in terms of the offer package put together," Davis said. "Usually the good people have offers from other institutions. If the process goes smoothly then you'll hopefully be making offers in March or April."
Wining and Dining
Many departments strive to go the extra mile to ensure that candidates visiting the University have the most pleasant experience possible.
The history department usually tries to secure stately rooms for candidates to deliver their research presentations in and to reserve overnight accommodations for candidates in Pavilion Eight's Colonnade Club overlooking the Lawn, McCurdy said.
"We bring them here and show them a real good time," he said. "We try to persuade them that given what it is they're essentially interested in that this is the best place in the world for them to come."
McCurdy added that "nine times out of ten" the history department is able to attract the candidate it is hoping to hire.
"We work very hard at recruiting," he said.
Fatton said the politics department also works extremely hard to create an inviting atmosphere for top candidates asked to interview at the University.
"When you invite someone for an interview, the ultimate object is to have them come," he said. "You want to do something that will indeed make any offer that you make very attractive."
Especially with valuable senior scholars, Fatton said, it is very important to make the University seem like a much better place than their current institution in which to continue their professional life.
"Whenever I deal with senior hires I have a dinner at my house. You try to do something special," he said. "You get in touch with real estate agents so they can look at housing."
According to Fatton, it typically costs somewhere from $1,500 to $2,000 to woo a senior faculty member during a single visit, when airfares, hotel accommodations and meals are all factored into the total.
The dean's office will typically foot the bill for two potential candidates to visit the University for a given position, but negotiations with individual departments can result in the dean's office paying for more if necessary, Ryan said.
Still, even with significant monetary resources, time and energy expended to attract top faculty, it can never be guaranteed that candidates worthy of a department's aspirations will decide to join the University's faculty, Mills said.
"We're aiming high enough that we do get turned down," he said.
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