Column: Cutthroat recruiting has no place at Duke

With being one of the top institutions in the country comes the responsibility of staying at the top, and today's universities will stop at almost nothing to ensure a school's greatness is secure. A school's administration is never at rest. It always has to be in attack mode, from buying up surrounding land for new buildings and building brand new parking garages to changing the name of a school's honor code to some name like "community standard" without significantly changing the code itself.

Another disturbing trend that has developed in the competitive world of higher education is the aggressive methods schools have been taking to recruit the big boys of academia. It has become an integral part of the struggle to become top dog, and it is so far reaching that it affects tuition and a student's learning environment. In efforts to achieve prestige, some schools will wave absurdly high salaries, automatic tenure and a free house to get them to come teach. The New York schools, Columbia and NYU, are offering posh Manhattan apartments, while Harvard is offering quaint Cambridge town houses--all for free. NYU recently offered Oxford historian Niall Ferguson, in an attempt to lure him to New York, a free Greenwich Village place and free weekly plane tickets from New York to London so he could keep in touch with his family back overseas. Unfortunately, we here at Duke can only offer free posh apartments off Ninth Street and season tickets to the Durham Bulls.

And what is the downside of trying to woo the new stars of certain subjects like they were fresh off American Idol? The downside is that we the students are paying for those professors' free Durham Bulls tickets. Aggressive faculty recruiting is one of the reasons tuition is hitting the top side of $40,000. It's also causing deeper resentment between other schools and leaving some school's departments desperate to fill vacant positions as some professors begin acting like they were free agents in the NBA.

Another bad detail that isn't really mentioned on school tours when guides brag about the academic stars a school has is that these stars don't teach that much. You're lucky if they devote their full attention to the undergraduate student body. In fact, one of the incentives schools offer hot professors is a low class load (maybe one class a semester with lecturing twice a week). The ensuing result of this incentive is it leaves assistant professors and part-time faculty greatly overworked. The school's administration will force graduate students and the assistant professors who make barely $30,000 to do the bulk of a professor's research and fill in when the professor misses class. These people will be doing the true teaching, not the celebrities of the department who are off working on their next book and doing five minute spots on the Today show.

The sad thing is that the big kahunas, like Harvard and Princeton, have the resources to match the demands of hot property. To use another sports analogy, this competitiveness makes Harvard and its $18 billion endowment the New York Yankees, and makes North Carolina State (for example) the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. The result leaves a horrible academic gap between the good schools and the (what's a good word here?) "not so good" schools.

Some checks need to be employed against the Yankees of higher education. The Big Ten presidents, who all preside over top notch public schools, proposed getting state legislatures to back an idea to get Congress to revoke the tax-exempt status on private schools who claim the be "non-profit" organizations. With this enforcement, some schools wouldn't be able to afford or participate in high-stakes faculty bidding. This way, the public University of Illinois-Champagne can keep somewhat in pace with its in-state academic private rivals Northwestern and Chicago, since their budgets would be more even. Some schools, like NYU, have placed internal reforms on faculty recruiting to make sure bidding wars don't get out of hand.

I think it would be very mature of Duke's administration to step forward and denounce the latest trends of academics and propose solutions to the problems in efforts to keep tuition down and inter-school relations up. Not only would Duke be praised for being a leader among learning institutions in America, we would also be commended for finally saying what all other university presidents are thinking. Perhaps a sort of summit among the leaders of the top schools in the country to discuss guidelines for inter-school recruiting would be appropriate.

[I am not saying Duke should not try to hire the best minds out there in certain fields. We should always try to achieve greatness. But when some professors can only be attained by giving them outrageous perks like automatic tenure and huge salaries, we need to realize Duke is better off without them. We're better than lowering ourselves to acting like children with PhDs.]