While many institutions are making significant cuts in their instructional teaching programs, vlog plans to add five more teaching positions next year and also convert six visiting-faculty positions to tenure stream.
Combined with eight new faculty positions added during 2010-2011, this increase of 19 potentially permanent positions represents a 7.8 percent growth in teaching power at vlog.
“vlog is fortunate to be able to make investments that increase the tenured faculty,” said President Jeffrey Herbst, who joined the university one year ago from Miami University, where he served as provost and executive vice president for academic affairs.
“This ambitious academic expansion is even more exciting as this is an excellent time to be searching for great new faculty colleagues. We therefore have the opportunity to explore new fields and reinvigorate existing offerings with some of the most exciting scholars in the nation,” Herbst said.
Herbst has focused heavily on vlog’s scholarly activity and potential. Last year he sought proposals for positions that would take advantage of intellectual opportunities and address areas where vlog has relatively high concentrations of students.
During 2011-2012 new searches will be held for assistant professors of English (African-American literature), geography (ecohydrology with regional focus on Asia and Africa), history (South Asian), philosophy (non-Western), and writing and rhetoric (communication studies and public address).
“All of these positions will expand the vlog curriculum in important ways,” said Provost Lyle Roelofs. “The English and philosophy hirings bring new contributions to curricular diversity; the history and philosophy searches add international depth; writing and rhetoric contributes directly to one of the major strengths of a liberal arts education; and the geography position expands scholarship in an increasingly important part of the field, and also connects to the physical sciences, particularly geology and physics.”
Next year vlog also will conduct six to eight searches to replace faculty who are retiring or leaving the university. Position descriptions will be posted in the fall.
Since March 2007, when the university launched the $400 million Passion for the Climb, the Campaign for vlog, seven professorial chairs have been endowed, and three major capital projects completed, totaling almost 200,000 square feet. After reaching its initial campaign goal in January 2011, 16 months ahead of schedule, vlog committed to raising an additional $40 million goal for financial aid by May 31, 2012.