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BY ALEXANDER ROLLE

In print | Published February 12, 2009 — Updated February 17, 2009 21:48

Correction Appended

Due to the economic downturn, several departments at Swarthmore have been forced to change their hiring plans for the upcoming year. While some searches for new faculty members are going forward without interruption, others have been changed or cancelled in an effort to cut costs.

A standard proposal to hire a leave replacement professor by the department of chemistry and biochemistry was denied recently, according to Paul Rablen, an associate professor and chair of the department.

While some departments at Swarthmore are staffed in such a way that one or even two professors can be on leave during a year without necessitating a replacement, others, such as the chemistry and biochemistry department, have in the past needed to find fill-ins when members of faculty take time off from teaching. The department will be stretched thin next year as Rablen will be on leave and the remaining faculty will have to do without a replacement.

The shortage of teachers will result in changes to the course offerings of the chemistry and biochemistry department. According to Rablen, Chemistry 001, the introductory course offered primarily for non-majors, and Chemistry 010S, the first-year seminar that parallels General Chemistry, will probably not be offered next year. However, “no course that’s required for the major is going to be compromised,” Rablen said.

In the linguistics department, a new full time position has been canceled in favor of two or three part time positions, a cost-cutting move on the part of the college, according to Ted Fernald, associate professor and chair of the linguistics department.

While several short-term hiring decisions have been affected by the economic crisis, the college has been unwilling to sacrifice on long-term decisions. According to Professor Stephen Maurer, chair of the department of mathematics and statistics, an application to fill a new tenure-track position was accepted this year by the administration.

For the past six years, the department has argued that a new statistician was needed to ease the growing class sizes in statistics courses, whose enrollment have been on the rise for years.
According to Maurer, many statistics classes at Swarthmore have 35-40 students enrolled, a number that makes it difficult for students to receive individual attention from their professor.
While Swarthmore is trying to be “as frugal as possible with all the money in the college,” according to Constance Hungerford, provost, the administration decided to allow the mathematics and statistics department to begin the process of hiring a new statistics professor with an eye towards the future of the college. “Other small colleges weren’t withdrawing searches for statisticians, so if we didn’t go ahead [with our search], we’d be falling behind,” Maurer said.

A meeting held on Jan. 30, in which the faculty was able to comment on the decision to hire, was “stormy,” according to Maurer. However, he went on to say that it was “argued in a nice way … It was heated because jobs are on the line, but [the argument] was on principles.”

According to Maurer, the provost indicated to him that there is a “reasonable chance” that the mathematics and statistics department will not be able to hire a leave-replacement professor that they had requested for next year.

Other departments have been unaffected. According to Steven Hopkins, associate professor and chair of the religion department, a new position in the department is to be filled soon.
“We feel very grateful to the college for the opportunity to fill the position of Jewish Studies in this time of tightening resources, a truly unprecedented time in the college and in the country,” Hopkins said in an e-mail. While the decision to hire was approved by the administration, Hopkins mentioned that “budgetary constraints” will be kept in mind during the search process.

The modern languages department is currently involved in a search process for two temporary positions in Japanese and Spanish.

“I haven’t heard any rumblings that these searches might be suspended or canceled … probably because these are temporary positions, not committing the college to anything in the long term,” Sibelan Forrester, associate professor and chair of the modern languages and literature department, said in an e-mail.

According to Forrester, the modern languages and literature department is also seeking to hire two leave-replacement professors for next year and has not yet heard from the provost about the status of those searches.

Colleges and universities across the country have been affected by the economic downturn, and the job market for academics has reflected that. While a tenure-track position in the English literature department, approved last year, is still underway, “many schools about to hire in literature and language positions, including Harvard, cancelled these job searches at the Modern Language Association convention in December (where the majority of job interviews take place, for both English and modern language depts.),” Peter Schmidt, professor and chair of the English literature department, said in an e-mail.

“I’ve read that over 20 percent fewer full-time jobs teaching language and literature at the college/university level were advertised in the MLA’s listings this year, compared to last year,” Schmidt said.

Correction: Feb. 17, 2009

Correction: This article incorrectly quotes linguistics professor Theodore Fernald as saying that a full-time position has been canceled. A more accurate characterization of the situation would be that a position that ordinarily would be full-time is instead being filled with several part-time hirings.

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