STAFF EDITORIAL: Supporting Penn's faculty

Christopher Browne's $10 million gift to the School of Arts and Sciences will help SAS attract quality professors. Browne's decision to give $10 million for endowed chairs -- rather than a building or wing bearing his name -- sets a strong and admirable example for others to follow. The gift will fund five faculty chairs in SAS, which currently has only 52 endowed professorships. Simple economics demands that hiring new senior faculty -- or keeping those sought by other schools -- requires the level of funding and the academic prestige afforded by endowed chairs. Faculty improvement, however, has been one area of notable weakness during Samuel Preston's two-year tenure as SAS dean. Hiring difficulties have been most noticeable in the Political Science Department, which has failed several times to meet its announced goals for new faculty hiring. Retention has been a problem in the English Department, which lost five professors last year to other universities. And classes in the Economics and Romance Languages departments have experienced overcrowding on account of chronic faculty shortages. Preston's strategic plan for SAS, unveiled last April, calls for increased hiring in six key departments, including Economics, English and Political Science. But whether Penn can actually compete for the very best faculty across such a spectrum is an entirely separate issue, one dominated largely by market forces. Browne's much-needed donation is a step in the right direction. We expect that Preston will use this windfall to judiciously recruit top-notch scholars and teachers from our peer institutions, and to hold onto professors at risk of being lured away by the promise of large salary increases. Last week's donation will go a long way toward helping Penn compete more successfully with the best and wealthiest universities in the country in the area of faculty hiring.