Dear students, faculty members, and friends,

As this is my second to last In Focus message, it would probably be more befitting for me to wax reflective about my time as dean. I will defer that conversation for a bit longer and talk about institutional change and the future of our school, specifically as it relates to an Inside Higher Ed opinion piece I came across titled “The End of Faculty Tenure.” (If you’re unfamiliar with how tenure works in high education, the author provides sufficient context.)

I’ll share the main thrust of the piece as written in the article:

Over the course of the last several decades, tenure density—the proportion of faculty in tenure-track positions—has been declining in the United States. This decline now constitutes the greatest threat to higher education that the United States has ever experienced.

I don’t bring this up to challenge the author’s claim so much as to note that this isn’t something I’m seeing at Rochester. Our school had a period of time with very little tenure-track hiring, largely due to COVID. More recently, I felt that every other half hour I was interviewing a faculty candidate. For the 2022–23 fiscal year, we’ve had more than 20 tenure-track searches, which have included more than one position in biology, chemistry, political science, and psychology, not to mention cluster hires in Black and East Asian studies.

Hiring tenure-track faculty members not only raises the bar for quality within our school—not to mention the content of their respective courses—but it also raises the research portfolio of the University.

Rochester has seen an 18 percent increase in undergraduate students choosing to apply Early Decision. Roughly 41 percent of the Class of 2024 will be composed of Early-Decision applicants. Why does that matter? In short, it signifies that Rochester is increasingly a prospective student’s top choice of schools.

I wanted to share all of this because I think it’s another way of demonstrating that our institution’s values, commitment to research, and high regard for a liberal arts education are resonating with people outside the University. And that’s something we can all take pride in.

Gloria Culver
Dean
School of Arts & Sciences