Dive Brief:
- Cluster hiring has been used to break down silos across departments and increase diversity on campuses for more than 15 years, yet adoption of the practice lags.
- University Business reports that the University of Wisconsin-Madison was perhaps the first campus to hire faculty in clusters, bringing on researchers at the intersection of agriculture and ecology who have authored more than 100 publications and earned more than $6.5 million in external grants.
- HR departments taking a lead in building infrastructure for such programs can pre-empt the downsides of cluster hiring, which can create friction across departments and leave faculty members feeling like they don’t belong anywhere.
Dive Insight:
Cluster hiring has begun to take off at institutions across the country in the last five years as administrators increasingly recognize the campuswide benefits of the practice. Higher education is notoriously criticized for creating silos of information inaccessible to faculty in other parts of the same institution, but cluster hiring helps break down those walls.
One key challenge is obviously organizational infrastructure. Administrators must make sure revised hiring and tenure policies are in place before putting together the first cluster. The program’s success likely depends on it.