The Office of the Provost and the Office of Research and Health Sciences are crafting a joint plan for hiring new faculty at USC Columbia using tuition revenue and research funds.
Each office had separately devised plans to hire new faculty during the next several years.
Provost Jerry Odom’s vision calls for 150 new faculty positions, using $2 million in tuition revenues annually for five years. Vice President for Research Harris Pastides’ plan calls for providing funds for up to 100 new faculty, using recovered indirect costs from research grants to subsidize half of each new faculty member’s salary and fringe benefits for three years.
Details of how the unified plan will work are not finalized, but the overall intent is to give USC’s college deans a simplified picture of funding for new faculty hires. The additional faculty will help reduce the student to faculty ratio from 16.4:1, projected for this fall, to 15:1. In 2000, the ratio was 14:1.
“The impact of this faculty hiring initiative cannot be overstated,” Pastides said. “This is the largest investment of research funds in the history of the University. This is like a business—you have to invest in it to reap rewards.”
While the research and tuition revenue funds will enable USC Columbia to recruit up to 250 new faculty, the campus also must replace as many as 350 more faculty who opted for the Teacher and Employee Retention Incentive and will permanently retire in 2005 and 2006. Because those positions already are funded, replacing them won’t require new funds.
“Some of these faculty might decide to teach part time, but others likely will retire completely, so there will be a lot of decisions for department chairs and deans to make in the next couple of years,” Odom said. “There a lot of people leaving who we would rather not see leave, but this retirement exodus offers the potential to transform USC into an even better university with new faculty.”
The new faculty appointments mean an already full campus will become more cramped and likely will curtail the practice of allowing retired faculty to maintain office space, Odom said.
“Space will be a big issue. If we get the research campus up and going, it will help a lot but that will take time,” he said.
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