Testimony, March 2005, Office of the President, University of Maryland

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Fighting an Uphill Battle

As the funding base falls farther behind cost increases, the challenges to our ability to maintain previous achievements and subsequently fulfill the State mandate for national competitiveness are formidable and increasing. Because of the pressures of budget cuts and rising costs, we are losing more top faculty than we are recruiting. As a result, our upward trajectory is stalling.

The outstanding educational experience that we offer our students, the excellence our faculty brings to the State, and our first-class facilities form the basis of the national reputation for excellence that has been growing steadily over the past decade and that we now enjoy. However, after several years of support falling behind increasing costs, we are now at a critical point, and we are in jeopardy of losing some of our hard-won gains. Negative consequences are felt throughout the University. In this business, when you stop moving forward, you fall backwards. There is no holding still.

Growing Difficulties in Hiring and Retaining Faculty

The University's rise in academic rankings puts it in competition for faculty and students with the best public and private national universities. When a university is not able to compete for outstanding faculty against others, it will lose top scholars. A stark contrast in hiring exists now compared with earlier years as a direct result of the budget cuts. Each college has its anecdotes. I will list only a few. Most troubling is the precipitous decrease in hiring of young scholars at the assistant professor rank [Click Here to View Chart.] who are beginning their academic careers. They create the future. The total number of faculty at the assistant professor rank has decreased sharply strictly because of our curtailment of recruitments.

The College of Behavioral and Social Sciences (BS0S) hired three professors each year in 1999, 2000, and 2002. Included were some of the most well-respected (and well-funded) faculty in the College, Ben Barber, Tom Wallsten, John Rust, and John Laub. In 2003 and 2004 the College was not able to hire any professors. From 1999 to 2002 the number of BSOS tenured or tenure-track faculty grew by five percent but since 2002 it has declined by four percent.

The A. James Clark School of Engineering recruited 14 faculty in FY02; in FY05, it recruited five. The School was in an expansion mode in FY02 and since FY03 has been shrinking. Successful competition for faculty in engineering and the sciences depends on considerable initial investment for facilities and equipment. In the past two years the School only hired three senior professors, one in partnership with NIST and another is fully funded by the National Aerospace Institute (NASA). Even with these external resources, over the past three years there has been a seven per cent net loss of faculty members.

Losses in the Clark School faculty include young rising stars and established experts. In the summer of 2003, Professor Ramamoorthy Ramesh, world renowned for his work on nanostructured functional oxide materials, left for the University of California–Berkeley.

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