UNC-Pembroke struggles to fill faculty positions

UNC-Pembroke takes pride in its reputation as a teaching university.

But fewer opportunities to do research, coupled with a systemwide pay freeze, have made it difficult for the university to retain and hire faculty.

According to its website, UNC-P has 14 open teaching positions and three dean positions.

The university’s business school and the School of Graduate Studies and Research have had open dean positions since 2008.

The university launched a nationwide search to find new deans in 2008, but those searches failed. The school still hasn’t been able to find permanent replacements.

In order to maintain the university’s average class size of 21 students, UNC-P’s faculty teach about four classes each semester.
The teaching load at UNC-P makes it harder for faculty to pursue research interests.

“The thing about a regional university is we’re not research-oriented, so people aren’t coming to our faculty, our super-star faculty, and recruiting them,” said Scott Bigelow, spokesman for the university. “They can go away and there’s not a whole lot we can do about it.”

UNC-P Provost Kenneth Kitts said the difficulty of retaining faculty stems from recent budget cuts.

“There’s no getting around the fact that raises have not been plentiful lately,” he said.

As of Oct. 5, 22 faculty members had left the university this year, as compared to the seven faculty members who left in 2006.

At UNC-CH, 33 faculty members who received offers from other universities left during the 2007-2008 academic year. That number jumped to 78 faculty members for 2010-2011.

The tight budget has also made it harder for UNC-P to look at reducing faculty teaching loads, Kitts said.

“Right now the budget’s just so tight that it’s almost impossible to have those conversations.”

But Kitts said faculty who come to UNC-P come to teach.

“Most of the faculty who come to work at Pembroke are those who make a conscious decision they want a teaching oriented school,” he said.

In an effort to attract professors who would want to both teach and conduct research, UNC-P built its Biotechnology Research and Training Center, a $1.9 million facility that houses five labs and offices.

The center was completed in March 2009 after years of planning, and it succeeded in luring Alzheimer’s researcher Ben Bahr away from the University of Connecticut, a Research I university.

Bahr has been teaching at the university for the past two years, where he says he’s able to focus on his own research instead of graduate students.

“I’m actually getting more done,” he said.

“Now I’m focusing on undergraduates. I think that’s the big focus now. We need to get more undergraduates to know what’s out there.”

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