Two Yale professional schools are in the process of expanding and expect several new faculty hires in the coming years.
After a major building expansion, the Yale School of Medicine plans to hire a significant number of faculty members in the coming years. The School of Management, meanwhile, plans to begin a fund-raising campaign as it continues a nearly six-year-long effort to build its faculty, SOM Deputy Dean Stanley Garstka said.
Yale President Richard Levin said the increased investment in new faculty and facilities are designed to pay off in the long run.
“We’re investing pretty substantially in faculty recruitment [in both schools] and making program investments to strengthen the schools,” Levin said. “We believe they will later lead to increased research grants and increased nonprofit support.”
The School of Medicine’s plans to expand its faculty size follows the completion of the Congress Avenue Building, a new research facility that increased the medical school’s research space by 20 percent. School of Medicine Chief Operating Officer Irwin Birnbaum said the next step is to hire faculty members to match the medical school’s new size.
“This is what is needed to fill that building,” Birnbaum said. “It’s no good having bricks and mortar if you don’t have faculty to fill it.”
Birnbaum said the medical school will expand its faculty over the next 10 years, allowing for 6 percent growth in clinical programs and 8-9 percent growth in research programs. He said the appointments will be “across the board,” but that many will be at the assistant professor level.
While some appointments will be replacements for planned retirements and other standard changes, there will be a net gain in professors, Birnbaum said.
Provost Susan Hockfield, a former medical school professor, said medical schools nationwide have increasingly focused on clinical programs in recent years. She said the planned faculty increase will help the University keep up.
“The economics of academic medicine have changed really dramatically over the last five years,” Hockfield said.
Birnbaum said the expansion will ultimately be profitable.
“That will produce a sustained growth in research and clinical revenue,” Birnbaum said.
The SOM, which began expanding its faculty approximately six years ago, is now beginning a fund-raising campaign to pay for the increased faculty size. A new associate dean for development, who will take over next month, will coordinate the campaign.
Garstka said the SOM is about two-thirds of the way to its goal of adding 10 new tenured faculty members.
But Garstka said the funds will come from the SOM’s own reserve fund because SOM is responsible for its own revenues and expenses.
“But it’s an issue in the long run because it’s not sustainable,” Gartska said.
Hockfield said one of the reasons the SOM is making plans to raise funds now is that it has recently experienced a “tremendous increase in visibility and rankings.”
This January, the London Financial Times ranked the School of Management 12th in the world and 10th in the United States among the top 100 full-time international MBA programs. Two years ago, the SOM ranked 20th internationally.