The Tisch family’s $35 million donation to enhance University faculty came at the right time for the Big Red.
Recruitment and retention of talented faculty has become an increasingly serious and immediate issue at Cornell. The school’s professors aren’t getting any younger, and the cost of hiring new faculty isn’t getting any lower.
Comforting perhaps is that this problem is nothing new. In March 2007, then-Provost Biddy Martin spent most of her first Academic State of the University address focusing on the impending retirement of University faculty and the need to up the ante in faculty recruitment. Martin projected then that fully one-third of the University’s faculty would retire by 2022, making current efforts to hire new and talented professors an absolute necessity.
More than one year later, not much has changed. As was the case in 2007, Cornell is still in need of more and more diverse faculty hires. Martin stressed the importance of a diverse faculty in her 2007 address, but the process of recruiting the kind of teachers this school needs will take longer than just a few years.
As Cornell struggles to recruit the best faculty out there, $35 million certainly helps. In a fast-deteriorating economy, it will become more and more difficult for the University to offer competitive salaries to free agent professors without the active participation of alumni like Andrew and Ann Tisch.
Cornell’s status as a land grant institution makes it especially tough for the University to maintain overall excellence in faculty hires without the help of alumni. President Skorton’s University-wide e-mail on Friday tried to dispel concerns about Cornell’s financial security in the midst of a national economic crisis, but the sad reality is that the next round of state budget cuts will likely be severe. As Skorton himself wrote, Cornell’s contract colleges cannot absorb these cuts alone. That means the University as a whole needs more money to offset the impending economic fallout.
Cornell is in a tough spot, and the University cannot expect an annual gift of $35 million or more from each of its alumni. Better financial aid programs, lower rates of tuition increase and more talented faculty are all things this University needs, but Cornell must be sure that establishing these programs today does not borrow against the bank accounts of the students of tomorrow. With prudence, planning and a little bit of alumni munificence, we should be on the right track.