U.'s stature helps to lure top faculty

Dr. William T. Couldwell left New York Medical College to become chairman of the neurosurgery department at the University of Utah. With his rare expertise, he could have gone almost anywhere in the country.

James E. Graves jumped ship at Syracuse University to become dean of the U. College of Health.

The reasons Graves and others give for moving here into jobs with tenure, albeit sometimes lower pay, at the U. range from the casual to issues critical in the successes — or failures — of research universities.

Like every school in what college officials throughout Utah have repeatedly described as an underfunded public system, the U. loses its share of professors to other institutions where there's more state support. Some leave Utah for better pay elsewhere, others for different opportunities.

"This year we've lost more than a dozen tenure-track faculty," said David Pershing, senior vice president for academic affairs. That's because schools in other states can offer 50 percent more than what professors are making at the U. "We work very hard to retain them, but eventually, money becomes a factor."

Those losses, Pershing added, are pretty consistent with the past three years where the Utah Legislature has been unable to give higher education the funding boost it needs, which has meant little or no salary increases for faculty.

"The danger is," Pershing said, "we will not be able to retain the new people we've hired or the people we currently have."

But even so, the list of U. faculty who have left schools around the country for tenured positions in Utah is actually growing.

"It's very hard to recruit the right senior faculty because they are settled somewhere else and the best ones are hard to move," Pershing said. And when schools lose senior researchers, he added, all the research goes with them, and it takes time to build up that research again.

For the U., there is plenty at stake these days.

The U. is trying to become a member of a "top club" of sorts in the world of academe. If the U. can become a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities, which includes Ivy League schools, it may affect the school's ability to secure more private research contracts and federal funding in the future, according to Pershing.

"We believe we are very close in terms of stature," he said. "We certainly believe it can help indirectly."