Recruitment for the Faculty 100 will unfold through a series of hiring initiatives, directed by our three key priorities for IUB: creating a distinctive undergraduate experience, growing graduate education, and elevating research and innovation.
In collaboration with leaders of the Bloomington Faculty Council, I am excited to introduce the first of these hiring initiatives today – Building on our Success.
We are fortunate to have numerous highly productive research faculty across our community, leading discovery and inquiry in diverse specialties. Many of these faculty are among the top researchers and scholars in their fields, leading areas of longtime success for IU.
It is also true, as I have heard from many of you in the past months, that some of our most esteemed and successful faculty researchers are advanced in their careers. Nearly 15% of the sponsored awards we currently hold come from faculty members who received their highest degree more than 30 years ago.
Our new Building on our Success faculty hiring initiative will invest more than $25 million to specifically target potential early- and mid-career hires in areas that strategically align with existing later-career faculty strength at IU. As part of this initiative, we will recruit up to 30 new tenure and tenure track faculty members to bring existing and emerging research portfolios to synergize closely with established researchers and strengths on our campus.
The campus, supplemented by the President’s strategic funds, will provide 75% of the salary plus benefits of the new faculty member’s appointment. Additionally, working collaboratively with Vice President for Research, Fred Cate, and Vice President for Capital Planning and Facilities, Tom Morrison, the campus will support start-up funding and necessary lab renovation to ensure that these faculty can transition their work to IU quickly.
This initiative and funding will be open to all schools, colleges, and centers, and all disciplines. We are open not only to established faculty and strengths within individual departments but to imaginative and interdisciplinary collaborations among units. Proposals for cluster hires, including ones that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries, are encouraged.
To prioritize areas for potential recruitment, over the coming weeks, academic deans will work to bring forth proposals and identify the strongest areas of opportunity.
I am thrilled for this new chance to bring in additional dynamic talent to our faculty and bolster our already vibrant research community. Our established faculty leaders offer our best way to attract the next generation of talent from around the world. With their collaboration and mentorship, our new faculty can greatly expand the scope and potential of current and future research.
As we launch this exciting new effort, I am mindful that in adding new faculty we do so in ways that continue to improve the broader ecosystem of departments and faculty efforts across IU. In Building on our Success, we will continue to learn how best to augment and extend our strengths, and fashion ongoing and future faculty recruitment efforts, to benefit us all.
To that end, we anticipate future phases of the Faculty 100 initiative to move forward as our upcoming campus strategic planning process unfolds this fall. These efforts are alongside, and in addition to, the ongoing, seven-year, university-wide Presidential Faculty Diversity Hiring Initiative, which is already having great success.
Through Building on our Success, new faculty colleagues will open even more fantastic opportunities ahead for our Bloomington campus. I look forward to joining you in this endeavor.
