"The university should give faculty an umbilical cord they'd be unwilling to cut." Samuel Dudley, Assistant Professor of Cardiology

"We are in danger of losing our most precious resource: our scholarly capital."
Sharon Strocchia, Associate Professor of History

Keeping company
On spousal hiring

Lost and found
On the views of recently departed and recently arrived faculty

Why Faculty Come to Emory
By Daniel Teodorescu, Director of the Office of Research

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Hayagreeva “Huggy” Rao, Candler Professor of Business, regretfully declined an interview for this article on faculty recruitment and retention. The reason: he was too busy packing. Just as Rao was preparing to leave for Northwestern University last spring, negotiations with new hires in other departments grew more complex as word spread of the forthcoming changes in employee benefits.

In leaving Emory for a higher-ranked program in his field, Rao traveled a road a number of other highly regarded faculty have taken out of Atlanta in recent years. For National Book Award-winning novelist Xuefei “Ha” Jin, the road led closer to family in Boston in 2000. For molecular biologist Douglas Wallace, Emory’s only member of the National Academy of Science, it went to the University of California at Irvine last spring.

Faculty across schools accept the reality of the academic marketplace. “People move around in academia,” says Tom Insel, director of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience. “It’s just the nature of the beast.” Although recruitment and retention challenges are not unique to Emory, to some faculty, the volume of traffic
out of Atlanta raises serious questions. While losing faculty can be a “healthy sign of competitive marketability,” says Sharon Strocchia, associate professor of history, “Emory seems to be having more difficulty retaining key senior faculty than other institutions of its caliber, size, and endowment.”

But hard data to support such assertions are difficult to find, says Claire Sterk, professor of behavioral science and health education and co-chair of the Commission on Research. She does add that “data in the public domain do not support the idea that Emory is having more difficulty than comparable universities.” According to the Office of Institutional Research, the rate of tenured and tenure-track faculty leaving Emory rose from 2.2 percent in 1992 to 3.1 percent in 1998, then dropped back to 2.9 percent in 2000.

Dreams, raids, and soft money

In Strocchia’s view, many faculty leave Emory College because “they’ve lost faith in the Emory dream.” The expectations she and others had upon arriving in the mid-1980s, in the wake of the unprecedented $105 million endowment gift from the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation in 1979, have gone unfilled, she says.

“The dream of creating a great institution, with a great research faculty and the material resources that would enable us to build stellar graduate programs, has not come to fruition. And I think that causes a tremendous morale problem for key researchers.” Some faculty in the college and the schools of business and theology fear that the recent benefits reductions will make recruiting senior faculty, who are closer to retirement and may have college-age children, more difficult. “Frankly, I can’t imagine trying to recruit somebody now in their late forties or early fifties, when people start having major track records with draw and immediate name recognition,” says Strocchia. Peter Hay, former interim dean of the law school, predicts the benefits reductions will also complicate the recruitment of young scholars, at least in the law school. “Typically, these candidates have spent a few years in a clerkship or with a firm and take a sizeable salary cut to come to academia, so benefits may be important,” he says.

Ironically, just as benefits reductions may cloud recruitment efforts, the rising reputation of some Emory programs also threaten retention, as other schools come courting Emory faculty. The Candler School of Theology, one of the top-rated programs in the country, has suffered several raids by Yale in recent years. And just last year, sociology successfully fended off attempts to lure three promising junior faculty away.

What must an institution do to attract and keep top talent? The preliminary findings of a Research at Emory commission survey of department and division chairs shows that critical factors for recruitment for hard money appointments are “salary, the presence of a critical mass of colleagues with similar interests, start-up resources, and travel money,” says Sterk. But most positions in clinical departments at Emory exist completely on soft money. While soft-money hires must win significant portions of their own salary funds through external grants, the other factors that attract them are similar, with the addition of research space, resources, and the presence of post-docs and graduate assistants. “The hard-versus soft-money nature of the appointment does impact recruitment and retention,” she adds.

Indeed, Emory competes for researchers with many state schools and some private ones, like Columbia University, that underwrite half of the salary of their medical faculty. And in the late 1990s, says Insel, recruiting in medicine became much more expensive as bidding wars erupted with Berkeley and Yale. The start-up package alone for a new associate professor’s laboratory averages around $300,000, according to Insel.

Unlike some institutions, though, Emory enjoys the advantage of belonging to a state agency eager to increase Georgia’s strength in biotechnology, the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA). “The GRA helped us bring eminent scholars like immunologist Rafi Ahmed, imaging expert Xiaoping Hu, and neuroscientist Michael Kuhar, among others, by providing funds for equipment and other resources for research,” says Insel. He argues, however, that a persistent lack of laboratory space, despite the recent construction of the new Science 2000 complex and the Whitehead Biomedical Research facility, may complicate future efforts.

Making sound decisions about where to invest limited resources will be critical to Emory’s development in the next few years, says Strocchia. “Are we really going to invest in the graduate school? Are we willing to give faculty release time for research? Are we willing to put our money where our mouth is in order to achieve excellence?”

Collegiality and the two-body problem

While matching outside offers is often critical, the pull that keeps some academic stars in Emory’s orbit may be more ephemeral. In over a decade as professor and chair of psychiatry and behavioral science, Charles Nemeroff has declined attractive offers from several top-ranked medical schools and government agencies. “My fellow chairs are as good a group as I can imagine as peers—funny, supportive in hard times, and incredibly bright and challenging,” he says.

In addition to a deep collegiality in the School of Theology, Don Saliers, William R. Cannon Professor of Theology and Worship, credits three other factors that helped him to resist offers from Yale: the high quality of Emory faculty who take teaching seriously, the university’s sense of ethical responsibility for the larger society, and the growing power of the performing arts with the new Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts.

Joint appointments can also play a pivotal role in recruitment and retention. By working together, the religion department and the comparative literature program were able to recruit prominent religion and literature scholar Jill Robbins. And the college and the School of Public Health worked together to keep rising star Kathryn Yount, jointly appointed in sociology and public health.

But beyond any of these academic issues, faculty across schools recognize that personal matters—the happiness of partners and children—inevitably affect recruitment and retention. Less clear is Emory’s role in trying to resolve those personal issues to the university’s advantage.

“I’m on the horn with law firms in town,” says Hay, “as soon as I hear that the spouse needs a job.”In the college, however, help with spousal employment often happens at the departmental level. And efforts vary among departments and candidates. Like the law school, medicine and business also systematically try to make joint offers to academic couples or connect the non-academic spouse of a candidate to opportunities in Atlanta.

“It’s often the case now,” says Insel, “that you have a two-scientist marriage. We call it the two-body problem, and it’s only going to get more difficult. Some schools, like the University of Michigan, have special funds to offset part of the cost of spousal appointments. It’s probably time to consider that here.”

Finding ways to accommodate spouses may be one way to offset losses in benefits for potential recruits. “The basic question, though,” says Spanish and Portuguese department chair Hazel Gold, “is how we can compensate differently to attract top people. The deans need the budget to do this, but we also need greater flexibility and creativity in designing offers, from spousal hires to providing funds for journals candidates would bring or programs vital to candidates’ scholarship.” A.B.B.