Despite crunch, some colleges go on hiring spree

BROADENING HER SEARCH Keyu Jin, a Harvard PhD candidate, said today's job searches are nerve-racking, "but everybody's expectations adjust."

Amid the gloom of hiring freezes across much of academia, some New England colleges are seizing on the opportunity to scoop up the brightest newly minted PhDs to bolster their faculty ranks and gain ground on their competition.

A few are recruiting tenure-track faculty in droves even as the majority of colleges, most notably Harvard, have curtailed faculty searches as part of belt-tightening measures. Northeastern is conducting a search for 46 professors in fields ranging from nanotechnology to public health. Tufts is moving forward with 52 faculty searches. Others, including Emerson, Holy Cross, and Amherst, have created teaching positions.

They're able to do so amid the economic downtown by cutting back in other areas: delaying construction, limiting travel, even whit tling the number of applicants flown in for campus interviews.

"We look at it from a strategic perspective," said Joseph Aoun, president of Northeastern. "Does it give us an advantage to hire when others may not be hiring? Yes. Financial challenge always provides you with opportunity, and this is one of them."

Applicants, meanwhile, are flocking to the open positions, stiffening competition in an already cut-throat field.

Northeastern has seen its applicant pools swell between 10 percent and 25 percent, depending on the position, compared with last year. At Emerson, more than 100 candidates have applied for an assistant professorship in world history - four times as many as in a similar search several years ago.

Amherst, Colby, Middlebury, and Lasell are reporting an exceptionally qualified applicant pool as more job candidates graduate from top doctoral programs. Some college officials, in the midst of interviews as the hiring season peaks, say they expect to have the pick of the litter when it comes time to make offers.

"If other people are treading water, then we'll be relatively better off," said Michael Alexander, president of Lasell College in Newton, which is looking to hire eight professors. "Given that there are a reduced number of jobs available this year, new hotshot people are probably going to be more plentiful."

Jeff Abernathy, a vice president and dean at Augustana College in Illinois, explained his decision to accelerate hiring by quoting billionaire investor Warren Buffett.

"The path to riches, he says, is to be 'fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful,' " Abernathy wrote in a column this month for the Chronicle of Higher Education. "Being greedy now, in this most fearful of markets, might just be the right path to the kind of riches we value most: excellence in student learning and growth."

Hiring binges are an anomaly, however, as colleges and universities across the country scramble to adjust to the new economic reality that has seen endowments plummet 30 percent for many schools. Nearly half of the colleges that responded to a December survey by the Chronicle of Higher Education and Moody's Investors Service said they have instituted partial or total faculty hiring freezes. This has made it much harder for young scholars, especially those in the humanities and social sciences, to find that all-important first tenure-track job.

About 20 percent to 25 percent of the academic positions that Harvard graduate students applied for in the fall have been put on hold, said Robin Mount, interim director of the Office of Career Services at Harvard.

"All the hiring chills or whatever they want to call it went into effect, even in places like Harvard," Mount said. "That became very disconcerting for PhDs on the job market. A lot of them feel they're in this limbo situation."

Keyu Jin, who is finishing a doctorate in economics at Harvard this year, is interviewing this week for teaching positions at European business schools - including the London School of Economics and Insead, just outside Paris - because she did not find opportunities at elite business schools in the United States.

In normal years, top candidates in her program would have job offers from such schools as Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, and Columbia, she said. But given the tight market, the best students are settling for jobs at lower-tiered schools.

"It was nerve-racking in the beginning and people are disappointed, but everybody's expectations adjust given your choice set and they become content with what they have," said Jin, who said she was also recruited by Tufts and Boston University. "You can see this kind of behavior among second-tier schools aggressively hiring the best they can, so that squeezes out the people who normally would have gotten those jobs."

Most schools that have continued to hire are doing so at a slower pace.

Wellesley is going forward with 12 of the 15 searches originally authorized this year. Even if the decision to move ahead was "not a conscious strategy to exploit the market," said Andrew Shennan, dean of the college, "it would be shortsighted not to hire."

Amherst has delayed four of its nine searches, something Gregory Call, dean of the faculty, says he regrets because department heads have noticed a stronger- and larger-than-usual pool of candidates.

More than 80 solid applicants, twice as many as last year, are hoping to land an assistant professorship teaching statistics at Amherst, a position for which the liberal arts school has had trouble in the past finding the right match. Many of this year's applicants also come from highly regarded statistics programs such as those at the University of Michigan and Penn State.

"It's like when the market's down, you ought to be buying stock," said Mark Marshall, chemistry department chair.

Colleges with open positions have scrambled to fill them when the right candidate comes along, sometimes months ahead of schedule. The College of the Holy Cross, which has expanded its usual number of faculty searches from eight to 14 this year, lost two top candidates to tenure-track offers elsewhere in November, said Timothy Austin, vice president for academic affairs and dean of Holy Cross.

"Those institutions who do have permission to search want to get people wrapped up and signed to contracts before the economy takes a further downturn," Austin said.

Tracy Jan can be reached at tjan@globe.com