Getting their piece of the pie

Jan. 9, 2008, will go down as a pivotal date in the history of faculty recruiting at Duke.

Five weeks ago today, the Duke Endowment announced a gift of $40 million toward the creation of 30 new undergraduate-oriented professorships during the next five years.

The donation has altered the recruitment landscape at the University, encouraging departments to develop innovative program proposals or reorient growth plans toward undergraduate education in the hopes of landing one of the new professorships.

"How do I get a piece of this?"

Carla Antonaccio's second-floor Allen Building office sits only a few hundred feet down the hall from the suites of Provost Peter Lange and President Richard Brodhead.

Despite her geographical proximity to power, the chair of classical studies said her department will still have to develop a highly customized proposal if it hopes to land a Duke Endowment professorship.

"Any chair will look at what a donor, a program, an initiative is trying to do. We'll try to tailor our proposal to their interests," Antonaccio said. "You have to be politically savvy, you have to say 'How do I get a piece of this?'"

She added that since the Department of Classical Studies "does not have people banging down the doors for our major," the department leadership might craft a proposal to draw in more majors or bridge fields of study.

"It's a way of creating a much more interesting Duke," McLendon said. "It can be really fun to take an econ course from [Professor of Economics] Tim Bollerslev, who is the best-known person in his field in the world, but it can be equally fun to take a course with a person who is only six years older than you are."

Math yearns for postdocs

The first of the 12 new full professorships was announced last week, when the Homeland Foundation matched the Duke Endowment's $1.25 million donation to endow the Reynolds Price Professorship in creative writing.

Chair of Mathematics Mark Stern, however, said he was skeptical about the ability of endowed professorships to attract top scientists without making associated funds available to recruits.

"Duke's endowed professorships aren't currently very strong recruiting tools, because most of them don't come with funds for bringing in postdocs, who lead to a more exciting science environment," Stern said. "In the sciences, prestige comes from the work you do and not the name of your chair."

In contrast, McLendon and Chair of Philosophy Tad Schmaltz said the prestige of named professorships are an effective draw for many scholars.

McLendon, a former chair of chemistry at Princeton who described himself as a "reasonably successful scientist," also said top scholars usually come with their own grant money and aside from transition funds typically do not need University support to hire postdoctoral students.

"For me it wouldn't have mattered if they gave me a little bit of money to hire a postdoc, because I had millions of dollars worth of research grants," McLendon noted. "We're unlikely to [fund postdocs] in perpetuity, because that's just saying, 'Don't be competitive.'"

Chair of Physics Daniel Gauthier also said generous recruitment packages sometimes aren't enough to attract top candidates.

The physics department has been looking to fill an endowed professorship in experimental condensed matter physics for a few years, and last year made what both Gauthier and McLendon described as an unusually lavish offer to a target.

Although the recruit told Gauthier he was taken aback at Duke's generosity, he ultimately declined the named professorship and decided to stay at his home institution.

Pratt looks to innovate

For Robert Clark, interim dean of the Pratt School of Engineering, the new professorships offer a chance to burnish Duke's reputation as a leader in interdisciplinarity.

"Their No. 1 focus is undergraduate education, but not just the status quo," Clark said. "It's about a really transformational experience."

He added that he has spoken with administrators in the Fuqua School of Business, the Sanford Institute of Public Policy and the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences about developing new courses to introduce liberal arts students to engineering and engineers to other disciplines.

"This is the kind of thing that really differentiates Duke nationally and internationally," Clark added. "It really defines what I would say is the fabric of our university."

The focus on undergraduate education is also novel in some engineering disciplines that are centered on complex research.

"It has us look at faculty recruiting differently and makes us emphasize teaching much more than perhaps we have usually done," said George Truskey, chair of biomedical engineering.

"Our current approach has been when we bring in new faculty we look at their teaching, but we haven't explored new initiatives that they might develop."