UF has hired 37 professors, who may begin as soon as this Fall, as part of the university’s preeminence drive.
Last year, the Florida Legislature allocated UF $15 million annually for five years to help the university become a top 10 public university, an amount President Bernie Machen pledged to match with private donations.
“We felt we couldn’t use it on facilities,” Machen said during a Board of Trustees meeting Friday. “From the very beginning, this has been a faculty-driven process.”
Last Summer, the university sought out proposals for areas of preeminence study from deans and institute directors.
They received 52 “well-thought-out” proposals and narrowed it to 26 initiatives that would build on UF’s current research as well as “new trends on the horizon we can’t afford to overlook.”
UF committed more than $18 million to the 26 initiatives, dwarfing its, at the time, $15 million in preeminence funding.
“We assumed, kind of like airline scheduling, that we would overbook,” Machen said. “We were encouraged by the quality of the proposals and the breadth of the proposals.”
Luckily for the university, Florida’s 2014 budget included an extra $5 million for UF’s preeminence campaign.
The initiatives include topics like big data, cyber security, renewable energy and storage, social network analysis and online learning. UF has hired professors in 15 of the 26 initiatives.
Machen said UF expects to have 40 faculty acceptances by July 1, with 50 to 60 more hires in the next fiscal year.
“The idea was to hire midcareer and distinguished professors that could immediately contribute to their field of research,” he said.
Machen said his team decided against hiring junior faculty, citing the time it would take for less-experienced faculty’s research to mature.
Meanwhile, UF’s $800 million preeminence plan, of which $285 million has been raised this year, has been divvied up as well.
The plan, which aims to fund faculty endowments, allocated $8 million going to undergraduate support, $21 million to research, $140 million to program support, $85 million to faculty support, $17 million to graduate support and $15 million to campus enhancement.
Provost Joe Glover called this an exciting and chaotic period for the university.
“We moved from a period of recession where the university did almost no hiring at all to a period where suddenly the deans found that they were having to interview one or two people every day,” he said.
This has led to some faculty grumbling, but Machen doesn’t seem concerned.
“That’s the kind of complaint I like to hear,” Machen said.
[A version of this story ran on page 1 - 4 on 6/10/2014 under the headline "UF hires 37 for Fall semester"]
