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Marketing and University Communication UW-Green Bay, CL 815 2420 Nicolet Drive Green Bay, WI 54311-7001 (920) 465-2626 E-mail: hildebrs@uwgb.edu Last update: 9/27/07 |
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In
the News Archive - Year:
August 16, 2004 Retiring faculty strain UWGB UW System turns to academic staff By Cynthia Hodnett
Ashmann, 39, of Green Bay was already several years into a teaching career at a college in Illinois when he learned about the position at his alma mater. It was a chance that he couldn't pass up.
"I have been affiliated with the university for 20 years, both as a student and as an instructor," said Ashmann who began teaching at UWGB last August. "Coming back, it just felt like putting on an old baseball glove that was in the back of the closet that I hadn't worn for a number of years, and I put it on, and it's a good fit."
Ashmann is among 26 new faculty members hired at UWGB over the past two years. Like Ashmann, many of them are filling positions vacated by retirement. Sixty-three faculty members have retired since 1995.
Meanwhile, with the supply of new faculty instructors unable to keep up with the need created by the retirements — at UWGB and across the UW System — academic staff members have filled in the gaps and have become a larger percentage of those teaching on state campuses.
"We have made wonderful hires in education, the sciences, social sciences, humanities," said Sue Hammersmith, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at UWGB. "We've hired an African-American Ph.D. in the education field. That's going to be a significant plus for the university."
According to UW System statistics, almost 40 percent of UW faculty members are expected to retire by 2008. UWGB, which became a four-year university in 1968, is one of the youngest universities in the system. University officials have said the university's age is responsible for the wave, which started in the late 1990s.
Faculty members at UWGB and those at colleges and universities nationwide are reaching retirement age at the same time, and there aren't enough people available to replace them, Hammersmith said.
"The one area where we were unsuccessful was in nursing, where there is a major shortage of faculty on the national market," she said. "There are not nearly as many nursing Ph.D.s being produced as there are openings as people retire.
"The other reason is great competition for nurses — shortages in universities, technical colleges, and the medical field. Other tough areas are social work and business, although we did succeed in filing a business professorial position that had been open for three years."
Also, the amount of federal funding available in the 1960s and 1970s used to train people for careers in higher education is no longer available because of severe budget cuts nationwide, Hammersmith said. Universities now compete with other industries for those with Ph.D.s.
It takes an average of six months to hire a professor, Hammersmith said. To address this issue, the university now advertises faculty openings in the fall and conduct interviews by January.
Academic staff members are paid less and are not eligible for tenure.
Data from the UW System show there were 5,416 full-time UW faculty members and 1,406 full-time academic staff members a decade ago. During the 2002-03 academic year, there were 6,718 full-time faculty members and 11,139 full-time academic staff.
That trend toward more academic staff is unlikely to be reversed soon. Wisconsin's 26 campuses are dealing with a state budget cut of $250 million over the two years that began July 1, 2003.
Budget cuts will require the university not only to reduce its class offerings but also to increase class sizes to accommodate increasing enrollments, Hammersmith said. It will also pose further challenges in hiring faculty to replace those who have retired, she said.
The UW System reported that the retirement crunch could hit hardest in the state's 11 four-year universities besides UW-Milwaukee and UW-Madison. Those smaller universities typically do not have the depth in faculty to withstand frequent retirements.
"In the sciences area, many of those who are retiring now are some of those who came to the university when it was originally started in the late 1960s," Ashmann said. "They've given the university its stability. To lose that living history of the university is something that is difficult in making some decisions because you don't always know the context and what has happened in the past.
"However, having new blood and new ideas is good, as well. But I don't know if it's always good to have a huge amount of turnover in a short amount of time."
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