This article contains some interesting data about the increasing pace at which state research universities are being raided for faculty:
The University of Wisconsin at Madison is facing the same type of trouble [as Berkeley]. Of its 2,220 faculty members, 116 outside offers were reported in 2005-6. The prior two years also saw over 100 outside offers reported — which is twice as many as were reported five years ago, according to the university.
Excluding preemptive offers in which no negotiations took place with another university, Wisconsin’s success rate in retaining faculty is about 57 percent, compared with a previous six-year average of 75 percent retained. The average salary associated with the outside offer was about 30 percent more than the faculty member’s current Wisconsin salary. For those the campus did not retain, the competing salary was about 40 percent higher.
Outside offer packages also included more comprehensive start-up packages, more research support and greater research leave and domestic partner benefits, Wisconsin officials say.
“What’s at stake here is the future of public higher education,” said John D. Wiley, Madison’s chancellor. “State universities are where much of the research is taking place, and their ability to keep the top researchers is in jeopardy.”
The situation in philosophy is a bit more complex, since one of the most competitive departments, Rutgers, is at a state university, which has fared well in retaining faculty against, for example, Princeton, and frequently raids private universities for lateral talent. When Michigan, another top department and a much stronger research university overall, has lost faculty recently, the majority have been going to private universities (e.g., Darwall to Yale, Velleman to NYU--but Ludlow went to Toronto, a public university), but the sample is too small to warrant any generalization. Of the top five departments in philosophy in the U.S., three (Rutgers, Michigan, Pittsburgh) are still at state-supported research universities. And if one looks at departments which are not as strong today as they were 15 years ago--examples would have to include Princeton, Harvard, Berkeley, Cornell, Chicago, and Northwestern--state universities are hardly over-represented on that list. Conversely, departments that have made a big push forward during that time (NYU, Rutgers, Columbia, Yale, Texas, North Carolina, UC Riverside) also include a significant number of state research universities. The dynamics of the market for philosophy faculty may, of course, be singularly affected by the PGR, where state and private universities can demonstrate to university administrations in a fairly timely way the professional impact of appointments.
