Colleges hire, with caution

The Triangle's public universities continued to hire faculty members this year even as cuts to swelling administrative ranks put many employees out of work.

The faculty hiring is the result of a strategic move by UNC system leaders to shave costs almost exclusively from the administrative side of the ledger and protect academics.

At UNC-Chapel Hill, where 300 jobs were eliminated and about 100 workers were laid off, 228 new faculty members joined the teaching ranks this fall.

That's down about 20 percent from an average hiring year, a function of the budget constraints still facing academic departments, said Bruce Carney, the university's interim provost. Still, departments with money to spend were able to choose from pretty large talent pools, Carney said.

"Everybody else is facing the same kinds of problems, so a number of jobs out there evaporated," he said. "The talent was pretty good. It's definitely a buyer's market, if you have money."

Not only do universities have their pick of candidates, they generally don't have to pay quite as much as they would in boom times, Carney added.

At N.C. State, where 205 staff positions were eliminated this year and nearly 50people lost jobs, 38 new, full-time faculty members were hired.

N.C. Central University hired 12 faculty members this year; all filling jobs vacated by professors who left NCCU for other jobs or retired.

Across the public university system, 900 administrative positions were eliminated and about 600 workers lost jobs.

Though universities are hiring faculty, the economy did make the process messy.

In the annual scrum to secure faculty posts with law schools, aspiring professor Joseph Blocher snared back-to-back September interviews with Duke and UNC-CH.

Good thing. Though Blocher's interviews came as the nation's economy teetered, he got job offers from both law schools.

Looking back now, he knows his fate may have been different had his interviews been even a month or two later. By late fall, universities were canceling interviews and, in some rare cases, rescinding job offers.

"It was a nasty scene," said Blocher, a Durham native and Yale law school graduate now in his first year as an assistant professor at Duke's law school. "The biggest problem for candidates was uncertainty. Nobody knew where the bottom was."

At Duke, where employees have been offered retirement incentives as part of a move to cut $125 million from the annual operating budget, 275new faculty members began work this fall. Some began a year or two ago, before the economy soured. Others are scientists who fund much of their own salaries and laboratory expenses through federal grants. And some, like Blocher at Duke's law school, are junior faculty who generally have lower salaries.

Though Duke is still actively hiring faculty, it isn't conducting as many searches as usual, said Michael Schoenfeld, a university spokesman.

Though universities have plenty of natural turnover, vacancies are fewer now. Some older faculty are putting off retirement until their financial portfolios bounce back, and others are reluctant to take new jobs elsewhere, Schoenfeld said.

"There have been fewer departures than in the past," he said. "People may have an opportunity to move and think: 'But can I sell my house?'"

Bruce Maggs spent a year commuting between Durham and Pittsburgh before deciding to give up his faculty appointment at Carnegie Mellon University and take a job with Duke's computer science department. A tenured professor, Maggs, who declined to disclose his salary, likely didn't come cheap. His new co-workers made that clear when he arrived in Durham.

"Up and down the line, people told me it was a big sacrifice to bring in a full professor right now," said Maggs, 46, whose grandfather was a Duke law professor and whose father is still on the University of Illinois law faculty.

"That didn't make me feel bad, though. It made me feel good that they were making that commitment to me."