FIRST PERSON

Into the Wild

An Illinois liberal-arts college bucks the trend and goes on a hiring binge

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By JEFF ABERNATHY

College administrators have a natural tendency to be conservative. We watch the bottom line. We wear sensible shoes, turn off lights when we leave a room, and speak knowledgeably about the importance of fiber in a balanced diet.

And, most important these days, we've learned to take the advice of our chief financial officers and advisers: Don't take silly chances with the college's money, and don't make promises we can't keep.

For my part, as a dean, I've learned my lessons. I'm not given to wild-hare bets on the stock market, especially not with the economy in shambles as Wall Street goes begging. And so I was as surprised as anyone when I found myself championing a policy that represents the greatest gamble my college has taken in a generation.

We're hiring faculty members.

A lot of them.

Harvard isn't. Some entire state-university systems aren't. But Augustana College is.

The chair of one of our departments that is not hiring this year asked me what planet we deans live on. Even colleagues in departments that are hiring have been dubious, wondering if I've read the news. One dean at another college speculated wryly on just how many more federal bailouts it would take before I begin to pull back on searches.

They're right to be skeptical, of course. A decision to freeze hiring on our campus would be entirely sensible. It would be prudent and politic. I know I would sleep better had I followed the lead of so many colleges with endowments greater than our own.

But, with the support of my president, I didn't.

As an erstwhile English professor, I'm not given to quoting Warren Buffett, but his simple investment rule offers insight into my decision. The path to riches, he says, is to "be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful."

We have, in fact, been both. On the fearful side, we have responded vigorously to an economic collapse rivaled only by the Great Depression. Our governing board has confirmed the smallest tuition increase in a quarter-century, announcing its decision months ahead of our usual schedule. We have delayed a building project and made difficult and substantial cuts to budgets across the campus. Our retention committee has formulated individualized plans for every at-risk student. We are pursuing a dozen new options for recruiting, retention, and cost containment. In academic affairs, we are reducing travel and cutting back wherever we can.

Clearly we're not lacking fear.

But while we can afford to make those sacrifices, we can't afford to make a decision that would weaken the college's greatest asset: its gifted and devoted faculty. So we're being greedy in our commitment to faculty hiring. Rather than freezing or even slowing faculty hiring, we've accelerated it.

With the support of our president and board, I've committed to a dozen tenure-track hires this year in critical areas across the campus.

Having increased the number of full-time faculty members by 26 percent over the past five years as we have added students and built a new senior capstone program, we have the opportunity this year to further strengthen the college, especially through hires in disciplines in which we, as a small institution, typically have difficulty hiring. The potential upside to hiring in this down year was too great to pass up.

In a typical hiring cycle, new Ph.D.'s from the most prestigious research institutions tend to overlook many small colleges. A lack of exposure to liberal-arts colleges conspires with the research-centered culture of graduate school to lead some would-be academics to seek positions in which they would replicate the careers of their dissertation advisers.

This year in particular we have the chance to get the word out on what a great career one can have at a place like ours. Liberal-arts colleges provide a terrific opportunity to balance teaching and scholarship. While research institutions say they will support both halves of the teacher-scholar model, we know that most of them pay closer attention to the scholarship.

At Augustana and other liberal-arts colleges, excellent teaching and learning are essential. But colleagues are also valued — and supported — for being superb scholars and researchers (the important Antarctic fossil discoveries of my colleague Bill Hammer have recently resulted in a mountain on that continent being named for the college) as well as deeply engaged citizens who shape our community (last year my colleague Charlie Mahaffey was named citizen of the year by our city). Further, we value faculty members for their ability to balance their work and home lives.

New faculty members have always been attracted to liberal-arts colleges for the opportunity to model the sort of balanced, reflective lives that we hope our students will lead after they graduate. But this year, we have an opportunity to introduce hundreds of faculty candidates to the particular joys of developing a career at a place where they will know every one of their students, and every one of their faculty colleagues across the campus, by name.

Here they will teach small classes and guide students in one-on-one research experiences that the students seek out. These new hires will help students who come to us as consumers and leave us as citizens. They will help those students to see that a college education is about transformation rather than transaction. At Augustana we take seriously Emerson's idea that colleges, at their best, "set the hearts of their youth on flame."

It's still early in our searches, but we have some evidence that our gamble is paying off: The chairs of several of our departments report that we're seeing much larger and stronger pools of job candidates than we could otherwise expect.

Hiring faculty members in Spanish, for instance, has been a considerable challenge for liberal-arts colleges in general for the past decade. This year we are conducting two searches to replace retiring faculty members, so we were particularly concerned. But we have seen a surge in both the quantity and the quality of applicants this year compared with previous searches. We are seeing strong candidates in both subfields, with a mixture of A.B.D.'s, recent Ph.D.'s, faculty members on term contracts at other colleges, and even a few tenured professors who are hoping to relocate.

We are also seeing success with our searches in the exceptionally difficult market of communication sciences and disorders. Many searches in that field fail nationally every year, considering its chronic shortage of Ph.D.'s. Given the fact that we are an undergraduate-only program in a discipline in which a master's degree is the entry-level degree required to practice, we held our collective breath when we had to run a search to fill a position because of a coming retirement.

We were relieved when we received a healthy number of applications, but we were thrilled when we evaluated those applications and saw the impressive quality of the applicants, the way that most of them fit so well with our needs, and the expressed desire that several applicants stated to work at a liberal-arts college.

In our searches in Japanese, mathematics, and religion, among other fields, the number of applicants is through the roof.

There might have been conditions under which a freeze would have been the best course for Augustana this year, as it was for so many other colleges. But I'll proceed on the courage of my convictions. As challenging as the coming year will surely be, Augustana has budgeted conservatively, built reserves, cut expenses, and profited from lower energy costs.

We'll be fine. For 2011 and beyond, there's no question we'll be much better than fine. Building on the faculty strength that is already here, we're hoping to be excellent for generations. Being greedy now, in this most fearful of markets, might just be the right path to the kind of riches we value most: excellence in student learning and growth.

Still, I'm checking Google Finance by the hour.

Jeff Abernathy is vice president and dean of the college at Augustana College in Illinois. To read his previous column, "Meat Loaf and Me: a Journey to Hell and Back," see http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/03/2008031701c/careers.html.