Nobel
Laureate Dudley R.
Herschbach
Next month, Dudley R. Herschbach will officially join the Texas A&M University faculty, marking only the third time in the school’s 129-year history that its professorial ranks will boast a Nobel laureate. Herschbach, a 1986 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, is one of approximately 215 new faculty members hired in the first three years of Texas A&M’s faculty reinvestment program, an ambitious program that aims to add 447 new positions to the Texas A&M faculty and hailed by Texas A&M President Robert M. Gates as “unlike anything going on in America today.”
As the former head of the CIA, Gates has grown used to the quips that he can “make people disappear,” but, ironically, it’s those hundreds of new faculty members he plans to make appear in university classrooms and laboratories that most likely will be considered the hallmark of his presidency at Texas A&M.
Though only about halfway to completion, the five-year program is already making an impact on the quality of education at Texas A&M, not just in the caliber of instruction offered from such esteemed academic minds but also in the reduction of the student-faculty ratio from 22:1 to 20:1 and the number of classes with more than 50 students dropping from 33 to 25 percent. The positive trends should continue, Gates said.
The initial success of the program has provided validation of a belief Gates underscored when he introduced the plan during a time of shrinking state appropriations—a belief that investing, not retrenching, was the right thing to do for the future of Texas A&M and the future of higher education.
Leaving no room for doubt about the course Texas A&M would plot, Gates announced his plan during the 2003 academic convocation, saying, “While others are hitting the brakes, we will hit the accelerator.” Texas A&M used $20 million in funding from the 2003 session of the Texas Legislature to get the faculty reinvestment program off the ground at a time when most universities were cutting back. It’s an action he said demonstrated to legislators as well as the school’s key constituencies that the university was committed to expanding and retaining its faculty. In the session that just ended, the Legislature also approved an additional $20 million over the next two years for this effort.
The result of such dramatic change? In the first 18 months of the program, the university hired more new faculty members than it lost between 1992 and 2002. The campus, itself, is in the midst of a physical makeover, driven by the reinvestment program. In an effort to accommodate the increasing number of faculty, more central-campus space is being allocated to academic functions, and some support services are moving to the periphery of campus. New additions on campus include the Jack E. Brown Engineering Building and the Jerry and Kay Cox wing of the Wehner Building. Several construction projects associated with health sciences, veterinary medicine and agricultural sciences are planned for West Campus in the next two years.
The university is also in the detailed planning stage for a $100-million interdisciplinary life sciences building, the school’s largest investment in teaching and research in its history. This new facility will enable Texas A&M to play a critical role in some of the most advanced scientific research and teaching. Gates said Texas A&M could realistically have upwards of $250 million of construction under way in support of teaching and research.
Such accomplishments remain critical to the university as it pursues the aspirations set forth in “Vision 2020,” the school’s blueprint for propelling itself into the ranks of the consensus top 10 public universities nationally by the year 2020. So far, Texas A&M has made significant progress toward its goal. Aided by the momentum generated from the faculty reinvestment program, the university has advanced five places among public universities, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. But for Gates, the impetus for faculty reinvestment is far from a rankings-driven one; it’s undeniably about improving the quality of education for Texas A&M students and ensuring they benefit from any and all changes.
“It is absolutely essential to this effort that our students – our undergraduate students, in particular – see an improvement in the quality of their educational experience as a result of the faculty reinvestment,” Gates said.
“Our students are bearing a not inconsiderable part of the burden for this effort, and I have told them, I have told the Legislature, and I have told our regents that we are not going to wait five to 10 years to feel the impact of this program. Whether it’s more faculty available for mentoring and advising, whether it’s more courses and sections available or just being more responsive to student needs, we expect to track and measure real increases and improvements in the quality of the undergraduate experience across all of its dimensions."