Dive Summary:
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Chancellor Phyllis Wise announced this week that the flagship campus will hire 500 professors over the next five to seven years to fill vacancies left by numerous retirements, departures and job freezes.
- Since the 2007-08 academic year, tenured faculty on the campus has dropped from around 2,100 to 1,856, and Wise told faculty and staff at a Monday town hall meeting that the new hiring plan was also part of an initiative aimed at making the campus the top public land-grant university for research.
- As part of its "Visioning Future Excellence" process, the new hires will be grouped into six areas that include economic development, education, energy and the environment, health and wellness, information and technology, and social equality and understanding.
From the article:
... "We will focus on bringing in groups of faculty, some at the senior level, who can help us address the grand challenges even more effectively than we currently do," said Barbara Wilson, executive vice provost for faculty and academic affairs. ...