The College is expected to soon begin a $130 million fundraising campaign to support the hiring of new professors, as school administrators anticipate a wave of professor retirements in the next five to seven years.
College Dean Meredith Woo said she expects more than 100 professors to retire from now until 2019. Based on past trends, 40 to 50 professors are also expected to leave either voluntarily or involuntarily, Woo said.
The current turnover largely reflects a rapid increase in faculty that occurred in the 1970s, as the University became a co-ed institution. As a large number of women joined the University, the University increased its hiring efforts to compensate. Now, those professors have aged and are poised to retire. Woo clarified this is assuming that “people retire around age 70 or so.”
“We are at a historically important and critical time,” Woo said. “It happens only once in your lifetime to have this kind of turnover. This is a terrific opportunity for the University of Virginia.”
The campaign, titled Faculty Forward, calls for a combination of long- and short-term funding initiatives. An estimated $100 million of the $130 million goal will comprise the Endowment Goal, while the remaining $30 million will fund immediate impact gifts.
The Endowment Goal will build upon the College’s current endowment, which was $474 million as of June 2013. For a school as large and ambitious as the College, administrators consider the endowment to be undersized. Immediate impact gifts will be used to attract top professors to the University in the near term.
“A great university is only great by having great students and great faculty,” Woo said. “And finding great faculty is an arms race, especially with our peer institutions. We want to be sure that we create an environment where excellent faculty can prosper — that it’s a place they want to come.”
Woo said she wants to see the number of professors in the College increase from the current 560 professors to about 600. The projected increase in student enrollment will fuel a need for more faculty, she said.
“As the student body grows, we need to hire more faculty members,” she said. “We would also like to … improve our student-to-faculty ratio.”
Competitive faculty salaries, increased research opportunities and better scientific laboratories are all a part of making sure that the University will attract better professors, Woo said.
Woo expects the funding to come from alumni, parents and friends of the University and praised donors’ generosity in previous campaigns.
“Alumni have responded with incredible enthusiasm [to past campaigns],” she said. “We also have foundations that show great support by supporting the hiring of humanities faculty. For instance, the Mellon Foundation supported us in the endeavor to bring in 10 new faculty members in the humanities. So, that’s a vote of confidence for people who are not necessarily our alums.”
Woo also praised the donations and funding efforts of parents in recent years.
“Parents have been absolutely enthusiastic too,” she said. “I think they feel that it’s very important to have a great professoriate to make transformative changes in their children’s lives.”
The College campaign follows the recently completed $3 billion “Campaign for the University of Virginia,” which started in 2006. In May 2013, University President Teresa Sullivan announced the University had exceeded the $3 billion goal.
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