Hiring Additional Tenure-Track Faculty as a TBED Strategy

The University of Michigan announced last month that it will spend $30 million in the next five years to hire an additional 100 junior tenure-track faculty members to build multidisciplinary research and degree programs. Additionally, the university will participate in the Michigan Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative, a partnership between the state’s public universities and foundations that would provide entrepreneur training to interested members of the faculty and increase the amount of gap-funding to push research discoveries to market.

 

Hiring additional faculty on the tenure-track is another strategy for building the research capacity of an institution, in addition to the popular policy of seeking and hiring extremely prolific “star” researchers.



Will the long-term strategy of hiring increasing numbers of tenure track faculty become more commonplace?

 

The move to increase the percentage of teaching faculty that are tenured or on a tenure-track at the school is contrary to the trends observed by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in its Contingent Faculty Index. For example, an AAUP study shows that the percentage of faculty that are on a tenure-track or have tenure has fallen from 57 percent of faculty in 1975 to 35 percent in 2003. Alternatively, the percentage of full-time non-tenure-track and part-time faculty has grown from 43 percent to 65 percent over the same period.

 

Even though the percentage of tenure and tenure-track faculty are decreasing in aggregate, how does the performance of this faculty compare to non-tenure-track employees? In An Empirical Analysis of the Propensity of Academics to Engage in Informal University Technology Transfer, Al Link, Donald Siegel and Barry Bozeman explore the characteristics of faculty engaged in certain formats of technology transfer. The authors find that tenure-track faculty, as opposed to non-tenure-track faculty, are more likely to work with industry to commercialize technology, are more likely to co-author a paper with industry personnel that has appeared in a journal or conference proceedings and more often serve as a formal paid consultant to an industrial firm. In their sample set of more than 1,500 tenured or tenure-track faculty, 52 percent reported they had some type of interaction with industry over the past 12 months.

 

AAUP’s Contingent Faculty Index is available at:

http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/research/conind2006.htm

 

An Empirical Analysis of the Propensity of Academics to Engage in Informal University Technology Transfer is available at:

http://www.economics.rpi.edu/workingpapers/rpi0610.pdf