Testimony, February 19, 2004, Office of the President, University of Maryland

Recruiting and Retaining Faculty Who Rank Among the Best

Because a great university is built on the shoulders of its faculty, for the past decade or more, the University has made recruiting and retaining top faculty a high priority. It is the faculty who set the standards for excellence in every area, and the University has worked vigorously to put itself in a competitive position, in terms of salaries and, equally important, facilities and working conditions, to recruit the best faculty.

By balancing recruits of top-caliber senior faculty with a steady stream of the most talented young professors, we are building a solid base for the University's future leadership across the disciplines. The investments pay off, as the following examples of a senior and a junior faculty member hired within the past five years illustrate.

With the passing in January of the Omnibus Bill, Congressman Hoyer announced an enormous coup for the State and for Prince George's County: The bill includes funds for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) to build a new Operations and Science Center for Weather and Climate Prediction, which will be located near the University of Maryland. The proximity will allow for expanded partnerships between the University, NOAA and NASA/Goddard. The proposed facility, expected to be completed in 2007, will be approximately 285,000 square feet on 10 acres and will house about 800 employees, including federal employees, contractors, visiting scientists and academicians. The Center will lead the world in climate prediction. Its impact will be huge in essentially every aspect of life, science, and the economy.

It is thanks in part to a senior hire at Maryland in 2000 that NOAA is eager to partner with the University and chose a site in Prince George's County for the building. In 2000, the University hired Dr. Anthony Busalacchi, an established and widely recognized oceanographer, to serve as director of a new center based on a partnership between the University and NASA/Goddard. The Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC) was established "to facilitate research and educational activities between the University and NASA in global change." Dr. Busalacchi has built the Center into a major operation pulling in over $5M in grants a year, with approximately 50 externally funded researchers and staff. Thanks in large part to his efforts, UM has become a world leader in understanding climate, climate change prediction, and the study of the physical-biological models of the Earth. ESSIC's prominence has attracted partners like NOAA, and it will be a key participant in the work of the new Center. The recruitment of Dr. Busalacchi would not have occurred without the support of the State.

Promising young scholars also reward the investment. Sarah Tishkoff, hired in 2000 as Assistant Professor from special recruiting funds for faculty in the biosciences, received a prestigious Lucille and David Packard Fellowship for 2002-2006, and was named in the September 2003 issue of Popular Science to its "Brilliant 10," a list of the nation's 10 most exciting young scientists. Dr. Tishkoff's pioneering work in molecular anthropology has yielded insights into human evolutionary genetics and the genetic basis of infectious disease. She is the lead principal investigator in establishing a doctoral training program in Human Evolutionary Biology that encompasses the University of Maryland, Howard University and the George Washington University. The training grant was funded by NSF for $2.6M over 3 years.

From 1998 to 2003, the number of National Academy members on our faculty has increased from 17 to 27, and we now count one Nobel Prize winner, a Japan Prize winner, and six Pulitzer Prize winners among the faculty. We have invested heavily in recruiting of junior faculty, those rising young scholars who will become the leaders of the future. The Assistant Professors at Maryland fare extremely well in competition for such national awards as the NSF Career Awards, given to encourage and promote the nation's most promising young scholars.

Productivity in research is measured typically by research expenditures. The graphy below tells the story of the extraordinary rise in UM's rate.

A Case Study of Faculty Productivity

The average salary for faculty at the University is $86,000. The average research funds in grants and contracts per faculty member is $226,000, a 163% return on the investment.

Now let us consider 10 of the most research-active faculty in the A. James Clark School of Engineering, whose average salary is $115,000. These 10 productive faculty bring in about $21M in research contracts and grants and employ 200 students and 60 engineers and scientists. The research advances knowledge; the funds fuel economic development in the state at the rate of $6 for every $1 invested (according to the 2001 Jacob France Center "Economic Impact Study"); and the students and researchers are all taxpayers. This is an amazingly good investment of the state's resources. The faculty do this work in addition to their regular teaching and service responsibilities.

Given this type of return, it is no surprise that there is intense competition among universities for leading scholars and researchers, the free agents of academe. One instance of a professor who has been lured away shows why we must make a constant effort to retain our best faculty.

In December we learned that a Distinguished University Professor of Physics was lured away by the University of South Carolina (USC) to lead its nanoscience programs. An Associated Press story noted that the physicist is one of only two members of the National Academy of Sciences now at USC and that the university "hired its first top scientist with the help of the state's lottery-funded endowed chairs program. The state set aside $30 million in state lottery proceeds to help USC, Clemson University and the Medical University of South Carolina recruit top scientists.—The research they produce is expected to jump-start the state's economy by drawing high-tech businesses."

Alumni Membership and Donor Activity

It was only about 20 years ago that the University first made a serious effort to reach out to alumni and friends and include them as active partners in the educational enterprise. As word of our accomplishments has spread, pride is growing in our stakeholders and is being translated into support of every kind. The number of members joining the Maryland Alumni Association has climbed at a rapid pace over the past five years, and a successful campaign was completed two years ago.

The size of an institution's endowment is in part a function of the length of time during which a university has cultivated support. Our very late start has kept us well behind our peer universities in the size of our endowment and in annual giving. We will continue to play catch up for some time as we build the appropriate infrastructure necessary to capture most effectively alumni enthusiasm and donor generosity. This area is still a challenge, but recent successes are encouraging. Last year, the most difficult year in recent fundraising history, the University fared very well. Our private contributions revealed new gifts and pledges of $81 million—up from $77 million in 2002. Furthermore, the contributions came from 41,420 donors.

>>Economic Impact

Office of the President, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742