Daniel Simmons, a UC Davis law professor who is chairman of the UC system’s Academic Senate, called Rice’s success in recruiting the San Diego trio “a stunning example of where we are losing” and said the numbers of such departures could increase.
UC Davis, for example, saw the number of firm outside offers to faculty double to 61 this year from last, and its retention rate drop from 90 percent to 72 percent as it lost professors to such universities as Brown, New York University, Penn State, and Rice, according to Barbara Horwitz, vice provost for academic affairs. Those schools are pursuing established experts at UC in part “because there is so much uncertainty in the state,” she said.
At UC Santa Barbara, the number of recruitment attempts rose 15 percent this year to about two dozen, according to Lucas. UC Santa Barbara tries to match the offers as much as possible, but it could not compete with two packages from a Swiss university that doubled the salaries of professors in science and engineering. Others on campus said it was the elite Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.
Last year, about 75 percent of UC faculty who received firm offers from other schools were persuaded to stay, about the same as in recent years, according to Lawrence H. Pitts, the UC system’s provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. This year’s figures were not yet available, but Pitts said he did not expect much change.
However, he and other UC leaders are concerned about the university’s ability to keep top talent in a tough budget climate. “The chance of having more recruiting and retention problems in a year is entirely possible,” Pitts said. “We are all worried about it.”
A recent report to the UC regents showed a troubling trend. Of tenured professors hired in 2000-01, 28 had left UC eight years later, compared with 19 hired the previous year, the study said. The most common destinations were Stanford, NYU, USC, Columbia, and Harvard—private schools that tend to pay more—and the University of Michigan, a top public university.
The rise in departures of tenured professors “is of particular concern, because these are high-quality faculty in whom UC has made a substantial investment,” the authors wrote. In addition, new faculty hires dropped from 607 in 2008-09 to 379 last year, the most recent figures available.
Private research universities increasingly pay professors more than public institutions, with the gap growing from an 8-percent advantage in 1980 for full professors at private doctoral-granting schools to about 25 percent this year, according to the American Association of University Professors. Private schools’ growing use of the wage gap to lure faculty hires “is definitely an issue nationally,” said John W. Curtis, director of research and public policy for the faculty group.
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