Poli Sci aims to fill holes in dept. staff

Crippled by departures, the department seeks to vastly increase its ranks. More than 200 years ago, Benjamin Franklin wrote, "May the first principles of sound politicks be fix'd in the minds of youth." But today, despite having that statement as its creed, the University's Political Science Department finds itself short-staffed to teach the principles of sound politics to Penn students. The department came into the year already small in comparison to its peers. While the average top-10 political science department has 42 professors, Penn's is only half that size. Now, at semester's end, the department faces the loss of six faculty members. Political Science Professors Daniel Deudney and Marissa Golden, both non-tenured assistant professors, will leave after this term for the Johns Hopkins University and Bryn Mawr College, respectively. Additionally, four full professors have announced their plans to retire in the near future. Political Science Professors Frederick Frey, Chong-Sik Lee, Alvin Rubinstein and Donald Smith will each phase out their teaching responsibilities over the next one to three years, according to Department Chairperson Ian Lustick. As part of her five-year master plan, 1995's Agenda for Excellence, University President Judith Rodin singled out Political Science for increased hiring. Its parent School of Arts and Sciences, meanwhile, has been aiming to keep its total faculty size steady at 460. Under the American and Comparative Democratic and Legal Institutions initiative, the University has spent the last year trying to recruit a number of junior and senior faculty to the Political Science Department. But thus far, only State University of New York at Buffalo international relations scholar David Rousseau has signed on to join the Stiteler Hall-headquartered department. Faced with declining numbers and an aging faculty, the department is aiming to build from the ground up. But it must overcome several obstacles to finally become truly sound. Publish or perish? For Deudney and Golden, the decision to leave Penn centered on the University's rigorous tenure process. Last May, in his sixth year of teaching at the University, Deudney -- consistently rated as one of the most popular professors in the department -- was denied tenure by the Provost's Staff Committee after being endorsed by committees from SAS and the Political Science Department. Deudney and several administrators attributed the rejection to his lack of a published book. He is currently at work on six manuscripts. Since Deudney's tenure file did not change since last spring, the department decided not to appeal last year's Staff Committee decision, forcing him to leave Penn after this term. In March, he accepted a post with JHU in Baltimore, citing the school's superior standing in international relations and its proximity to Washington, D.C. Golden, who came to Penn in 1993 after earning her doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley, decided to leave Penn on her own. Although she would not have been up for a tenure review until next spring, the American politics scholar said she felt insecure about her prospects. "I came to be fond of Penn," she said last month. "[But] it was not clear what my future was here." Though Columbia University Press will publish her first book next spring, Golden said she was worried about meeting the University's research standards before her tenure decision. "Penn is quite up-front that it views itself as a research university," she said at the time. "They're not misleading about what their mission is." Golden added that she applied for the position at Bryn Mawr, the all-women, liberal arts college outside Philadelphia, mainly out of "concern" for her tenure prospects at Penn, a feeling she does not have about her new post. "Once the book is out, [Bryn Mawr officials] indicated that I'll be set," she said. SAS Dean Samuel Preston agreed that Golden, like others, is justified in her insecurity. "Junior faculty are aware that the standards for promotion to tenure at Penn are very high," he said. "They're very apprehensive about whether they're up to those standards." With less than 50 percent of assistant professors staying on at Penn in tenured posts, no one at Golden's level could be guaranteed tenure, College Dean Richard Beeman noted. Deudney and Golden were not the first junior faculty members to leave Penn for other programs. Three years ago, Russian politics scholar Steven Fish left for Berkeley, home of one of the nation's top departments. In 1996, Kerry Haynie, the department's first ever black professor, left for Rutgers University in New Jersey over what Lustick termed a disagreement over the pace of change in the department. Lustick, while granting that Golden's upcoming book would have been a "major factor" in her tenure review, maintained that these faculty departures demonstrated the effectiveness of the tenure system. "Like Marissa and Steven Fish, the problem is that we hire such great junior faculty that they are so attractive to other schools," he said. "Everybody in academe has their antennae out. That's the way to play the game." The numbers game With the retirements of Frey, Lee, Rubinstein and Smith and the imminent departures of Deudney and Golden, the department is in the process of a major rebuilding effort. Lustick estimated that in order to reach his goal of just short of 30 professors in the department, the University will have to hire three new political science professors in each of the next five years. "I have a plan for the growth of the department which is consistent with what the deans want me to do," he said. "We won't be able to achieve those goals without that pace." Based on current efforts at recruitment, there may between one and three new faculty members at Penn in the fall, Lustick added. He plans to ask the SAS deans later this month for authorization to fill three more faculty positions next year, at least two at the junior level. While Preston predicted that only 10 or 11 appointments would be made over the next five years, he made it clear that the department was in a mode of regrowth. "Recruitment of senior faculty is an extremely time-consuming business," he said. "[But] by the end of next year we will have made a substantial number of new senior faculty positions in Political Science." Meanwhile, Lustick said he views this period of retirements and recruitment as an opportunity to create a younger, higher-profile department. Faculty members in the aging and overwhelmingly-tenured department have held their doctorates for an average of 26 years. Several have been criticized for not contributing any new research in decades. "One of the things a department gets known for it how many of its faculty are publishing in high-profile journals in the profession," Lustick said. "That has not been happening for a number of our colleagues who have been in the department the longest." "It does affect the image of the department," he added, indicating that the hiring of junior and "young" senior faculty would increase the department's visibility. "It creates turnover and turmoil," Preston said. "But in the end it can create a stronger faculty." 'Light' at the end of the tunnel The University's highest-profile senior recruitment effort to date has focused on Paul Light, 45, one of the nation's foremost American politics scholars. "Paul's terrific," Golden said. "He's as good a scholar and as good a teacher as anyone in political science I know." Light, the subject of a large feature in The Washington Post last month, is currently a director for the Philadelphia-based Pew Charitable Trusts, one of the country's largest private philanthropies. An author of 10 books, Light previously taught at the University of Minnesota. "Dr. Light is someone we are working very hard to recruit and we will continue to do so," Interim Provost Michael Wachter said. "He would be a terrific asset to our community and we hope to succeed in bringing him to Penn." When contacted Monday, however, Light indicated that he has no current plans to leave his post at Pew, where he is in charge of distributing $16 million this year to programs working to improve government. "It's sort of an ongoing conversation I have from time to time with lots of places," he said of his meetings with department and administration officials at Penn. "I don't want anything to be misconstrued." Much of the discussion of Light's recruitment has fallen on the Fels Center of Government, the University's non-accredited graduate program run out of the Provost's Office. According to University President Judith Rodin, Light -- who taught at Fels this past semester -- would be attracted by the opportunity to run Fels, which has fallen on hard times administratively and financially since former director James Spady resigned in 1996. She added that he would likely not come to Penn unless the administration followed through on plans to "build it up." "Suddenly, we see the possibility of not only having someone who can run Fels, but could raise it to the stature of the University," Lustick said. Though he would not explain Light's denial of plans to join the Penn faculty, Lustick was confident in the prospects of recruiting him to both the Political Science Department and Fels. "I'm operating with a 95 percent confidence that we're going to have Paul here," he said.

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