External chairs grow in number

In the past, bringing in an external chair meant an academic department was in serious trouble.

But the practice of looking outside the University for a department chair seems to be growing--and not always as a means of boosting a department in decline.

In the past five years, Arts and Sciences has searched outward to find chairs for English, public policy studies and biology, and will search for chairs this spring in both religion and history. Over the past two years, Pratt School of Engineering Dean Kristina Johnson has hired three-fourths of her department chairs from outside and an increasing number of the School of Medicine's chairs have been external hires as well--from surgery to cell biology.

Maureen Quilligan, professor and chair of English, was hired in 1999 from the University of Pennsylvania to chair the department following a critical 1999 external review cautioning that the department could decline just as rapidly as it had risen during the years of former chair Stanley Fish.

"Stanley Fish had created something here that looked like it was being lost," she said. "I wanted to come and try it my way."

Quilligan, noting that her situation was very much that of an external hire stepping in to save a troubled department, said that for her personally, being a chair was a highly intellectual endeavor.

Some of the most trumpeted hires in engineering over the past two years have also been externally hired chairs--including April Brown, the new chair of electrical and computer engineering, an expert in nanotechnology from the Georgia Institute of Technology; Roni Avissar, the chair of civil and environmental engineering, an expert in Amazon deforestation from Rutgers University; and Morton Friedman, chair of biomedical engineering, an expert in the mechanics of vascular disease from The Ohio State University.

"The reasons for hiring outside chairs vary, so it is difficult to generalize," Johnson wrote in an e-mail. "Sometimes it is to help add to the senior leadership in a department, sometimes to recruit a top scholar--it depends."

"You have an opportunity to recruit someone at a really senior level, someone who's attracted by the research in the department, someone who wants to build a department in their own direction," said Erickson, who served as interim chair of the department last year before bringing in Brigid Hogan from Vanderbilt University. "If you take an internal candidate, you're not adding anything to the department. That person might be able to recruit a very top-level senior person, but often the senior people are looking for a chair's job."

A spokesperson for Dr. Sandy Williams, dean of the School of Medicine, said the dean would not comment on personnel issues.

Yet, most faculty members believe the issue is about more than personnel, including the intellectual direction of research and organization within a school and an overall strategy of enhancing the faculty.

Dr. Danny Jacobs of Creighton University was recently chosen the new chair of the surgery department over inside candidate Ted Pappas, seen by many inside the department as a talented and able candidate. Last year, Williams tagged Hogan in cell biology, as well as Dr. Haywood Brown of Indiana University as the new obstetrics and gynecology chair. The new chair of the Department of Medicine, the largest unit at the University, will also likely come from outside as well.

William Chafe, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, said from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, the University hired four external chairs--Fred Jameson in literature, Fish in English, Hans Hillerbrand in religion and Kenneth Land in sociology--all of whom had a positive impact on their departments.

"Is it more [now]? Not really," he said. "I think it's consistent with what we can remember being done here in a period of time."

External chairs are hired for a five-year term with the expectation that they will remain in the department afterward, and are given during their recruitment certain "bells and whistles" to attract them, Quilligan noted. Chafe said that those searches are usually more high profile and that committees--chaired by faculty members outside the department--make an ultimate recommendation to the dean and to the provost, who have the final say.

Internal chairs, by contrast, hold the job for just three years, and can be chosen in a number of ways. Often, Chafe said, the departments caucus, vote and convey their preference. That scenario happened recently in the economics department, which declared by acclamation their new chair will be Fuchsberg-Levine Family Associate Professor Thomas Nechyba.

Erickson said that from a faculty perspective, however, external chair hires often signal good times for the future of a department.

"When you decide to hire an outside chair, you have to be committed to growth. No one's going to come in and take a position unless [the dean] really commits the department to major growth," he said. "If you take an internal candidate, you're probably looking at much less growth opportunity."