Jonathan Ray, an assistant theology professor who came to Georgetown in fall 2006, said Georgetown was a bit lax in its pursuit, especially compared to the aggressive recruiting he experienced at UCLA and Yale University.

Yulia Chentsova Dutton, an assistant psychology professor, said that her department was accommodating but that Georgetown still struggled to offer salary packages that could meet the high cost of D.C. living.

Richard Boyd, an associate government professor who came to Georgetown in January 2007 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that the less-than-competitive salary offering was similarly a challenge in relocating to the nation’s capital, but the chance to work with some of the best in the government field led him to Georgetown anyway.

As the faculty recruiting process becomes more and more competitive among U.S. universities, Georgetown is priming itself to rise to the top of its class in attracting and retaining top-notch faculty. But, to do so, the university must overcome a number of institutional challenges.

According to James O’Donnell, the university’s provost, the key to staying ahead in the game is playing to Georgetown’s strengths and maintaining a keen sense of university identity.

“I sometimes get frustrated when I hear people say, `We’ll never be Harvard.’ Well, they’re right, and I’m not sure I’d want to be [Harvard]. We need to be the best Georgetown we can be. Excellence is being aware of who you are,” he said.

O’Donnell cited a number of the university’s most attractive qualities that it markets to prospective faculty, including excellent undergraduate teaching opportunities and, perhaps most importantly, the central location of the Hilltop, which brings with it a number of recruiting advantages, including ample opportunity for a professor’s spouse to find meaningful work in the nation’s capital.

Yet, at the center of these challenges, O’Donnell said he believes it is the university’s responsibility to develop a long-term plan that addresses faculty concerns and provides for sufficient allocation of resources to Georgetown’s professors.

Faculty Growth – With a Plan

Since 1980, the number of both full-time ordinary, or tenure-track, and non-ordinary professors at Georgetown has almost doubled, rising from 378 to 728 professors as of 2007. Just in the last 10 years, the university has added 156 professors. Yet, for the next 10 years, O’Donnell said the university is, for the first-time, going to abide by a controlled faculty growth plan.

“We’ve grown a lot in the last 10 years, so let’s make sure the next steps of growth are under control and we have the resources to support it,” he said.

Under the plan, the present projection is that, in 10 years, the university would expand to house 795 total faculty members, only a 10 percent increase from its current figure. This pales in comparison to the over-27-percent increase in the number of professors added to Georgetown over the past 10 years.

Wayne Davis, professor and chair of the philosophy department as well as the president of the Faculty Senate, similarly said it is in the university’s interest to grow the faculty at a slower rate over the next few years.

“Unless there is some dramatic increase in enrollment or tuition or external fundraising, we really cannot afford to increase the size of the faculty much,” he said.

Controlled growth also helps the university better ensure its high academic quality, O’Donnell said. According to a report from the American Association of University Professors, there has been a decline in the percentage of classes taught by ordinary faculty as more and more adjunct professors have been retained by universities. Nationwide, adjuncts have grown to comprise 70 percent of university faculty. At Georgetown, O’Donnell said, language classes have the lowest percentage of instructors who are ordinary faculty, while natural science classes have the highest. Across the board, though, O’Donnell said this is a trend that is being closely monitored.

“I believe it is very important to have largely ordinary faculty in the classroom. This is not an acute problem yet, and it is necessary that faculty also have time for their research, which is very important,” he said.

Yet O’Donnell emphasized the high value of adjunct professors at Georgetown, which is in a position to attract some of the best as it draws from the large pool of talented practitioners working in the nation’s capital.

In addition, he said the university will be better targeting its growth under this new plan, beginning with the natural sciences. Currently, the university has around 70 natural science professors, and O’Donnell said the plan is to add 35 additional professors over the next few years.

“We know that we have an obligation to grow the natural sciences here, and it’s easily their turn,” O’Donnell said. “The quality of the work our science professors do is amazingly high, but we really do need to get serious about building their faculty from ridiculously small to what will still be fairly small, but a good start.”

Just as important as it is to attract bright, promising faculty members, Davis emphasized the importance of retaining the ones the university has.

“More and more, our faculty are the subject of poaching attempts by other universities,” Davis said. “Fortunately, our administration has become increasingly adept at making quick and effective counteroffers.”

O’Donnell, too, said the university does well in retaining its faculty, but improvement designed to enhance Georgetown’s recruiting appeal works simultaneously to minimize faculty losses.

Overcoming Obstacles

The university does, however, have room to improve in the perks it offers to better attract and retain world-class faculty.

O’Donnell said he believes Georgetown can only keep expanding its faculty if it is confident that it has the proper resources to support it, which includes competitive salary offerings and adequate office space on campus.

“We are certainly challenged [by our peers] to pay very competitive salaries to our faculty. We are still below where we would like to be in this regard,” O’Donnell said.

O’Donnell said the university is currently in the ninth year of the Main Campus Faculty Salary Plan, which was designed to include built-in cost-of-living increases so salaries would outpace the rate of inflation. While he said it has “worked pretty well,” there is much more that can be done.

“We’ve made progress against our original benchmarks, but we’re simply not keeping up enough with our . peer institutions in this regard,” he said.

Davis said that faculty salaries at Georgetown are simply not yet competitive enough.

“Full professor salaries are below peer schools on average. That is a real concern. [The Main Campus Faculty Salary Plan] has significantly increased GU salaries from where they were in 1999, but our peers have been busy doing the same thing,” he said.

Professors cite the high costs of living in the D.C. metropolitan area as the most pressing concern in current salary rates.

Ray said the current faculty salaries at Georgetown are not at a highly competitive level, particularly for the humanities.

Dutton, a psychology professor, said that while her salary is competitive for most peer universities, the majority of these universities do not have the high cost-of-living tag that comes with teaching in the nation’s capital. Dutton also expressed a desire for subsidized faculty housing, which she said many universities offer and would be a perfect fit for Georgetown. The university offers both a chaplain-in-residence and faculty-in-residence program, but does not offer subsidized housing.

Boyd further echoed these concerns. While he said his department and the dean’s office created a flexible salary package, he said it did not fully address or offset the cost-of-living hike.

“Unlike many other major universities in expensive metropolitan areas like San Francisco and New York, [the university has not] yet come to grips with the need to do something to subsidize the cost of housing for faculty moving to the D.C. area,” he said.

Another concern and challenge in the recruiting process is inextricably tied to the university’s relatively small, 104-acre location: an increasing lack of office space.

Since the Bunn Intercultural Center, the last academic facility addition to the university, was completed in 1982, Georgetown has added 340 new professors, but only a small amount of office space, consisting of the new Performing Arts Building, two floors of the Car Barn, one in the Basic Science Building and one in St. Mary’s Hall. Needless to say, O’Donnell said, everyone has gotten a bit cramped.

“When the new [McDonough School of Business] Building opens, we will get the second floor of the Car Barn for additional office space,” he said. “But that’s about it. We will still be crowded, but less so.”

Davis noted the most significant space crunch lies in the university’s science labs. For Dutton, the lack of sufficient lab space is one of the most pressing challenges at Georgetown.

“The lab space I have is inadequate, [as] I can barely squeeze two people in my lab for a meeting,” she said.

While Georgetown may very well have spelled out its aims for the future of its faculty recruitment and development plan, O’Donnell is aware that attaining them depends in large part on the success of the university’s current capital campaign.

“I would like to have more dollars per faculty salary, and I really hope our capital campaign can make this possible,” he said.

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