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Faculty Retention at Public Research Universities

Brian Leiter

This article contains some interesting data about the increasing pace at which state research universities are being raided for faculty:

The University of Wisconsin at Madison is facing the same type of trouble [as Berkeley]. Of its 2,220 faculty members, 116 outside offers were reported in 2005-6. The prior two years also saw over 100 outside offers reported — which is twice as many as were reported five years ago, according to the university.

Excluding preemptive offers in which no negotiations took place with another university, Wisconsin’s success rate in retaining faculty is about 57 percent, compared with a previous six-year average of 75 percent retained. The average salary associated with the outside offer was about 30 percent more than the faculty member’s current Wisconsin salary. For those the campus did not retain, the competing salary was about 40 percent higher.

Outside offer packages also included more comprehensive start-up packages, more research support and greater research leave and domestic partner benefits, Wisconsin officials say.

“What’s at stake here is the future of public higher education,” said John D. Wiley, Madison’s chancellor. “State universities are where much of the research is taking place, and their ability to keep the top researchers is in jeopardy.”

The situation in philosophy is a bit more complex, since one of the most competitive departments, Rutgers, is at a state university, which has fared well in retaining faculty against, for example, Princeton, and frequently raids private universities for lateral talent.  When Michigan, another top department and a much stronger research university overall, has lost faculty recently, the majority have been going to private universities (e.g., Darwall to Yale, Velleman to NYU–but Ludlow went to Toronto, a public university), but the sample is too small to warrant any generalization.  Of the top five departments in philosophy in the U.S., three (Rutgers, Michigan, Pittsburgh) are still at state-supported research universities.  And if one looks at departments which are not as strong today as they were 15 years ago–examples would have to include Princeton, Harvard, Berkeley, Cornell, Chicago, and Northwestern–state universities are hardly over-represented on that list.  Conversely, departments that have made a big push forward during that time (NYU, Rutgers, Columbia, Yale, Texas, North Carolina, UC Riverside) also include a significant number of state research universities.  The dynamics of the market for philosophy faculty may, of course, be singularly affected by the PGR, where state and private universities can demonstrate to university administrations in a fairly timely way the professional impact of appointments.

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15 responses to “Faculty Retention at Public Research Universities”

  1. Galen

    Salaries and prestige aside, are there advantages or disadvantages to working at a public versus a private university?

    Reply
  2. Matt

    Galen, I could be wrong about this (and maybe Leiter, as a law guy, would be able to shed some light), but I believe there's an advantage of tenure in the public system. If I'm not mistaken, the courts have made it so that removing a public university tenure is more difficult than a private university tenure.

    Reply
  3. anonymous grad student

    It might be worth noting that Berkeley just received a $113 million gift from the Hewlett Foundation that is going toward creating 100 endowed chairs. Part of that gift is also going toward supporting graduate students.

    I imagine this might have some effect on philosophy faculty retention.

    http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-gift10sep10,1,4701260.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

    Reply
  4. John Protevi

    Not to be flippant, Galen, but your "salaries and prestige aside" remark strikes me as a bit "other than that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?"

    Reply
  5. o

    Would any left-leaning professors be willing to share their thoughts on the following: To what extent do you think that teaching at a public (vs. private) university — or at least not moving from a public to a private one — has ethical value? And, if you think that there is indeed an ethical issue here, what degree of advantage offered by a private university would persuade you to give up on that value? I'm asking this sincerely, not sarcastically.

    Reply
  6. harry b

    There's another possible explanation for the relative health of Philosophy in public schools — Philosophers are CHEAP. I think we underestimate this — we need salaries, and not much more, and even those are low relative to sciences, professional schools, and the social sciences, because there is no outside market for our talents. It is much cheaper to invest in an excellent Philosophy than an excellent Chemistry department (of course, the latter might pay off, financially, but still, you've got to raise the funds).

    Reply
  7. Steven Nadler

    In response to the comments by Galen and John Protevi above, if I understand them correctly (and my apologies if I don't): Why do you assume that teaching at a public university is a position of less prestige than teaching at a private university?

    Reply
  8. Christopher Morris

    O asks "Would any left-leaning professors be willing to share their thoughts on the following: To what extent do you think that teaching at a public (vs. private) university — or at least not moving from a public to a private one — has ethical value?"

    Why is this question addressed only to left-leaning profs? More importantly, why do you think that left causes are served by teaching at public universities rather than private ones? Community colleges perhaps, but the flagship universities in most states are supported by state money (and regressive taxation), lots of private money, fees, and it has long been argued that they benefit the privileged more than the poor.

    Reply
  9. John Protevi

    Steven Nadler, I was just joking. On a serious note, though, I'm pretty much a committed nominalist in these matters. As with "analytic" and "continental" philosophy, I find "public" and "private" universities to be too abstract categories for good discussion. There are too many other variables to consider. Thus I don't assume that there is necessarily any less or any more prestige in teaching at a public university than at a private university, since no one ever teaches at "a" public or private university, but at X or Y university.

    On a side note, I completely agree with Christopher Morris' analysis of the financial structure of flagship public universities. (That's a category that has the requisite concreteness for good discussion, IMO.) In Louisiana, the TOPS program draws funds from the general tax pool, but has standardized test and high school GPA requirements that most likely, AFAIK, make it a net transfer of funds from poor to middle-class.

    Reply
  10. o

    In reply to Christopher Morris' reply: I was addressing the question to left-leaning academics, because I assume that most right-leaning ones couldn't care less about the thriving of a public higher education system. As for your other points: these are all fair points. I'm not American, and I guess that my image of the American public higher education system has been overly idealized…

    Reply
  11. Galen

    Some publics are more prestigious than some privates and some privates are more prestigious than some publics. I wanted to remove questions of prestige and money to see what other factors there are that might lead a person to go from a public to a private OR from a private to a public. In other words, if money and prestige cancel out, what other differences might exist? The answer concerning tenure was the type of thing I was looking for. Class size might be another factor.

    Reply
  12. Tim O'Keefe

    Galen:

    There are many important factors that go into deciding what job to take (if you're one of the lucky few to have multiple TT job offers) or whether to move from job A to job B, like

    -Teaching load
    -Support for research
    -Class size
    -Existence and quality of grad program
    -Student quality
    -Departmental functionality/congeniality
    etc. etc. etc.

    All of these are orthogonal to public vs. private, and they're much more important than anything dependent on whether the school is public or private. So I suspect that very very few job decisions depend on whether the school is private or public (as such).

    Two (small) drawbacks of working in public schools: (1) my anecdotal sense is that large state schools tend to have more annoying regulations, paperwork, and bureaucracy than a typical private school. (2) At a state school, your travel money, annual raise, and the like depend on the state legislature and governor. This can be annoying, especially when the legislature is in special session over the summer trying to work out your school's funding for the next academic year.

    But for many people, a plus of working at a public school is that–despite the sorts of reservations expressed above–public schools do give many people the opportunity for higher ed they wouldn't otherwise have, and public schools tend to have a higher proportion of first-generation college students than private schools.

    Reply
  13. Ed Hackett

    Just for clarification, simply because a regional city name or state name is in the title of the university does not mean they are public institutions. The public category of a university depends on the state in question. In Pennsylvania, the only publicly funded universities are part of the State System of Higher Education, or SSHE. In that case, Penn-State and Uni of Pittsburgh lobby for funding, and compete for a state budget which doesn't support the mission of SSHE if they take away state money. Of course, this is a political question, but I am getting the sense that the original post in question said that Uni of Pittsburgh is publicly funded. It is, but the qualification is that it is not part of the state system of universities that are allegedly funded by Harrisburg.

    Best,

    Ed

    Reply
  14. Steve Hales

    Ed is completely right about public higher ed in PA. Penn State, Pitt, Temple, (and others that I con't remember offhand) are state-related, meaning they get a small part of their operating budget from the state. For instance, Penn State receives 13% of its budget from the state. The SSHE schools, like my own Bloomsburg University, are the PA public universities, and we get about 38% of our budget from the state. Another drawback to working at public universities, at least here in PA, is that there is no flexibility. The salaries are structured by union contract, and a dean can't fight to keep anyone who has an offer from elsewhere. Our teaching loads are 4-4, and there is no possibility of permanent reduction; it is bureaucratically impossible.

    Reply
  15. Ben Caplan

    At some private universities, one gets *no* raise ever, unless one has an outside offer. One might prefer the inflexible raises of the PA system to the nonexistent raises of those private schools.

    Not all public schools are unionized. I was at a unionized public school, and now I'm at a non-unionized public school. I think I actually prefer the union-mandated across-the-board raises at the unionized public school to the meritocratic-but-hard-to-predict raises at the non-unionized public school.

    Reply

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