SAS successfully recruits 22 profs

Fourteen professorships are still being negotiated. Those talks are expected to yield about seven profs. The School of Arts and Sciences recruited 22 new faculty members this year, with 14 more appointments currently in negotiations, school officials said yesterday. Of the 22 hirings, 19 are junior professorships, while three are senior appointments in Economics, Romance Languages and Physics, SAS Dean Samuel Preston said. Earlier this year, SAS authorized 40 recruitment searches in departments across the school. The 14 ongoing recruitments will likely yield about seven more hirings for next year, Preston said, while the remaining four will be deferred until next year. Eight of the 14 continuing searches are for senior appointments, but Preston said, "It's obviously increasingly unlikely" that they will result in hirings by the start of the fall semester. He noted that SAS will see only four senior faculty departures this year -- compared with 13 last year -- and nine senior faculty retirements, allowing the school to grow in size. "I'm very pleased with where we are right now," he said. Among the junior recruitments are 11 positions in the six departments targeted by the SAS Strategic Plan for additional faculty positions and increased funding. The Economics Department, which had planned to hire as many as five new faculty members, currently has two junior and one senior appointment confirmed. The department hired Antonio Merlo, a political economist at New York University, for a senior professorship next year. Preston said Merlo is one of the leading experts in the United States on political economy, "a field that we've been trying to build up" at Penn. Acting Economics Department Chairman Kenneth Wolpin said he was very excited about Merlo's decision to come to Penn. The two junior professors -- one of whom will start at Penn this fall and one in fall 2001 -- are both recent doctoral graduates. Wolpin added that the department still has two offers out to fill the remaining senior positions, but noted that all of the candidates also have offers from other universities, making it "a pretty complicated situation." Another of the three senior appointments next year will be in the Spanish division of the Romance Languages Department, which will also get one new junior professor in Spanish and one in French. After the departures of four Spanish professors last year, the department recently struggled to meet student demand for Spanish courses. "We are very fortunate this year," Romance Languages Department Chairman Ignacio Lopez said, adding that the new appointments in Spanish will "help correct the situation that we unfortunately had in the past year." The Political Science Department, which this year lost one junior and one senior faculty member, will get one new junior professor and one temporary fellow. The department, which had hoped to hire as many as four senior professors, still has searches underway, Preston noted, including "someone who says he is leaning toward coming to Penn" but is currently on leave from his own university. "I'm disappointed that the Political Science searches were not more successful," Preston said. "I don't blame the department for that." Political Science will likely receive additional authorizations for junior professorships next year, he said, a decision that outgoing Political Science Department Chairman Ian Lustick said would help the department grow. The department will also have a visiting professor from the University of California at Berkeley next year who specializes in Far Eastern politics, Lustick noted. Among the other departments targeted in the SAS Strategic Plan, the English Department hired two junior professors, Psychology hired three junior professors, History hired two junior professors and Biology hired one junior professor.

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