This month, we speak to three experts on the topic of “cool.” How can an institution’s image impact faculty recruiting? The panel is comprised of Paul Baldasare, President of St. Andrews Presbyterian College, a small liberal arts college in Laurinburg, North Carolina; Jason Cook, Vice-President of Communications and Marketing for the Texas A&M University System, a large research university with tens of thousands of students all across the state of Texas; and Tom Gariepy, District Director of Marketing and Communications for Maricopa Community Colleges, which has ten campuses with nearly 250,000 students.
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Questions to All Three Schools:
Andrew Hibel, HigherEdJobs: When considering your school’s brand or image within professional circles, what do you try to highlight?
Paul Baldasare, St. Andrews Presbyterian College: I highlight three qualities that are related to one another — academic excellence, creative exploration, and the value of community. First and foremost, we strive to maintain academic excellence in all that we do, from the professional qualifications of our faculty, to the expectations and demands we place on our students and on one another. With that commitment to excellence paramount, we also encourage and celebrate creative exploration so that faculty and students feel free to study outside their disciplines as broadly as within it; to take advantage of different opportunities, whether attending or participating in a theater production, a musical event, or a sporting event; and to put forward new ideas. We want faculty and students to be analytically critical when listening to a lecture, reading in an area that may not seem at first glance to connect to their primary areas of interest, or simply solving a problem in the classroom, in a residence hall, in a faculty meeting, or in the president’s office. There are no ideas beyond consideration and discussion.
Our first response to a new idea is to analyze it. If it seems like a good idea, then the second response is to think about how we might make it work. And here, a good idea from a junior faculty member is treated with the same seriousness as a good idea from a senior faculty member. It’s the idea that matters, not the rank of the person proposing it. Finally, our hope is that all of the members of this academic community will be intentional about living and working creatively and cooperatively in this academic community.
We like to think of St. Andrews as “a college where you can…” There are too many places where the greater emphasis is on what you “can’t” — you can’t focus on teaching or student advising the way you might want to, you can’t develop new courses as easily as you’d like, you can’t go a year without a publication, you can’t teach an interdisciplinary general education course, and so on. Our ideal is a place where people, opportunities, connections and experiences all come together — for students as well as faculty members — to create an exciting, enriching intellectual environment.
Jason Cook, Texas A&M University System: The combination of world-class academics (teaching and research) and our overwhelming spirit of purpose, leadership and service. Typically, universities are strong at one or the other. Here at Texas A&M, we believe that we are strong in both areas.
Tom Gariepy, Maricopa Community Colleges: In terms of the professional circles from which we can attract talented prospective employees, it’s important that prospective employees know as much as possible about our mission, vision and values to ensure the best fit possible. So we try to ensure that people know about our emphasis on teaching, learning and student success. We also highlight our size and the fact that each of our colleges has its own proud history and strong ties to its community.
Hibel: HigherEdJobs recently did a poll1 of faculty job seekers, and one of the things we asked was, “What is the most important attribute of a new opportunity?” Forty-seven percent responded with, “Opportunity to work with colleagues I respect” as being the most important to them. What do you think such results say about the importance of a school’s image?
Gariepy: This response says that colleges need to ensure that all their audiences — including prospective faculty members — recognize the fact that faculty members are valued and play a crucial role in the college’s mission. So an institution’s efforts to market itself and maintain a strong brand need to include messages that stress the quality of the faculty and the contributions faculty members make to the success of their students.
All of the Maricopa Community Colleges go out of their way to stress the importance of teaching and learning and to emphasize the importance of faculty members as valued teachers.
Baldasare: Of course, a school’s image is very important. But it’s the reality behind the image that is even more important. Deliberate image-making/image-creating is a form of public relations and marketing, and like all public relations and marketing constructs, it tends to exaggerate what an organization views as its positives while drawing attention away from what might be considered its less attractive attributes. So, if image is reflective of institutional reality, it means everything. On the surface, the image of a small liberal arts college in a rural setting might seem less than attractive. Yet after getting to know the reality behind that particular stereotype/image, new faculty almost uniformly observe that the college is much more dynamic, more vibrant, more intellectually interesting and engaging — more professionally attractive — than they had at first thought it might be. Faculty members who have been successful and happy at St. Andrews would strongly agree with this last statement. It is working with colleagues they respect that allows them to challenge themselves and experience growth and recognition from a job well done. Without that support, input, criticism, and engagement from colleagues, faculty would find it difficult to sustain themselves in a small environment.
Cook: These results speak volumes about a school’s image. Faculty want support (financial, facilities, etc.) and the freedom to explore new ideas, collaborate across academic silos, and develop the next generation of leaders. It’s up to us to ensure that we fulfill our brand promise in a meaningful and authentic way as we position the university in these areas.
Hibel: What types of proactive outreach to potential faculty members do you find most effective for your school?
Cook: We reach prospective faculty members through higher ed media, and intentionally target prospective faculty and students through our web and social media inventory. While these initiatives are important and can help validate the school’s brand, the value of professional networking amongst the faculty cannot be overstated. Of course, when all of these personal and media interactions are in sync, that’s when you see the full power of the Texas A&M — or any university — brand.
Baldasare: First, we try to network with faculty and staff at other institutions to find faculty members who would be good fits for St. Andrews. Second, it’s the personal contact at the early stage of a search process, when a lot of telephone interviews are conducted by our faculty and staff. A prospective faculty member, we hope, will get an immediate sense of the kind of faculty who work here — how they treat and interact with other people, what they value, where their passions are, etc. Bringing potential faculty members to campus for a day or two is a critically important step in the process as well. We want prospective faculty members to meet with St. Andrews faculty, staff and students in formal and informal settings. It’s important for the applicant to give a presentation so we can get a sense of how this potential member of the St. Andrews community interacts in a classroom setting. We’re also very interested in how this person is perceived by his current faculty colleagues and former students.
Gariepy: Word-of-mouth, reputation and personal contact are still the best for proactive outreach. If you treat your current employees well, they tell friends and professional colleagues. We’re known as a good place to work, not only within Maricopa County, but in community college circles around the country, and we remain proud of that fact. We’ve found that one of the reasons we receive a large number of resumes every year is that word gets around. While we receive thousands of resumes each year, and while it’s difficult to get hired here, we want people to know that we look for employees who will be strong contributors.
Hibel: How does your institution go about creating a sense of “coolness” around them in order to attract the best-fitting faculty and administrators for their schools? How do you balance that out with what makes a school attractive to students?2
Baldasare: As I pointed out earlier, I think “coolness” is a reflection of what students and faculty members are doing on campus and the extent to which the institution promotes and celebrates faculty, staff and student interests and accomplishments. “Creating your own cool” and finding support for it by the institution is what attracts. I don’t think the “cool” that attracts faculty and staff is necessarily different from the “cool” that attracts students. I think of St. Andrews as a place where a junior faculty member asks if it would be OK to pilot a new course and is told, “Sure, give it a try,” and says, “Cool, thanks a lot.” Or a faculty member says that he or she wants to focus professional development for a few years on exploring new teaching strategies and is told that will be just fine and the faculty member says, “Cool, thanks.” What’s cool for students and faculty members are foreign travel/study programs that are led by a wide range of faculty. For example, we have a semester-long program in Ecuador and the faculty leaders/mentors have been from fields as diverse as Biology, Education, Business, Foreign Languages, Physics, Religious Studies and English. What’s cool is the main office corridor in the science building with offices deliberately assigned so you’ll find a biologist next to a psychologist, next to a religion professor, who is next to a political scientist, who is next to a historian, who is next to a creative writing professor whose immediate neighbor is a mathematician. I think those are some of the ways in which St. Andrews is “cool.” And as I said earlier, I think it’s also the combination of people, opportunities, connections and experiences that adds to the “cool” factor.
Gariepy: We’re located in the middle of Arizona, so most of the coolness we concern ourselves with has to do with air conditioning. But let me tell you a little about our branding, and by branding, I mean the image we project to students, faculty and administrators alike. We say — and we believe — that every one of our 10 colleges is “The College of You.” That’s not just a branding slogan. It’s a statement of how we serve a large and wildly diverse student body made up of people who are designing their own educational futures. We offer a large number of courses and programs that allow students to make the choices that will help them on the path to success, however each student defines it. So attracting the best faculty and administrators, on the one hand, and making our schools attractive to students, on the other, are not opposite concepts. They work hand in hand, because so much of our mission is student success.
Cook: We want Texas A&M to be seen as a leader in social media and on the web — this sends a powerful signal that we truly are a progressive and energetic educational environment. We also seek co-branding opportunities with corporations. Take Apple, for example: Texas A&M was the largest and first major public university to launch an app in the iTunes store last June. These are activities that don’t necessarily fit the stereotypes about Texas A&M. They are “wow, I didn’t know that” moments about Texas A&M that hopefully create some intrigue about our campus. On many levels, faculty and students both want a sense of place, belonging, institutional values and a support structure.
Questions for Paul Baldasare, President of St. Andrews Presbyterian College:
Hibel: As a small liberal arts college in rural North Carolina, I would imagine you would have many of the same advantages and disadvantages recruiting faculty as you do with staff? What are some of the things your faculty says attracted them to St. Andrews?
Baldasare: Our faculty members say that they like the fact that a small institution gives them the opportunity to teach outside the very narrow confines that are typical of larger schools — where each faculty member tends to teach in one very narrow area of specialization. Many are also attracted to the opportunity to teach in an interdisciplinary general education program. They find that preparing and teaching these courses gives them new insights into other disciplines as well as their own. They also like the chance to interact regularly, on a common professional topic, with faculty from other disciplines. In short, our faculty members enjoy working in a small, close-knit community with faculty colleagues from across disciplinary lines who share a common sense of institutional purpose and mission.
Hibel: As a liberal arts college, you have a different focus on faculty research than a research university or community college.3 How does your position on faculty research at St. Andrews help you with recruitment?
Baldasare: At St. Andrews, professional development is understood more broadly than at a large university. It can take many forms (not just research and publications). For our faculty, research informs teaching and is connected to improving their knowledge, developing new instructional techniques, developing skills and abilities to teach across disciplinary boundaries, and developing new approaches to discover and deliver the material. With this emphasis on classroom teaching and student advising, the publish-or-perish threat is not present. Here, it’s more develop/grow-or-perish. So faculty members have more freedom to follow their passions and interests, and perhaps to follow them in new and interesting ways. Here, research is often (but certainly not always) directly classroom-related. So this is another area, like teaching, where a greater degree of faculty freedom and creativity can often be found here than in larger environments.
Hibel: In your role as President of St. Andrews, how much are you personally tied to the sense of “coolness” around the school’s image?
Baldasare: Yes, I think so because a small college president is often the “face” of the institution to all constituencies, and in many ways, personifies the ethos of the school. He or she is likely to be out more on campus and at campus events, know more students personally and interact with a larger percentage of faculty, staff and students on a more regular basis than would the president at a larger school. While the hierarchical realities can never be put entirely to the side, faculty and staff members at a small college have a greater expectation that the president will be a colleague, and will enjoy interacting with him or her in a more casual fashion. As much as we might try to influence image, I think “coolness” really is driven by what students and faculty members are doing on campus and what aspects of their activities are publicly celebrated by the institution. At St. Andrews, I think “coolness” is best summed up as descriptive of a place where students are encouraged to create their own cool! St. Andrews is a place where faculty, staff and students are encouraged to be creative, and to be open to new ideas. We share an appreciation and a “go-for-it” attitude about diverse interests that reflect different kinds of cool. For example, we celebrate and encourage the baseball player from New Jersey who writes and reads his own poems at a regular Thursday night poetry reading; the African-American student from rural N.C. who is majoring in history, active in student government and performs with our Scottish Bagpipe band; and the extremely gifted young woman from Hawaii who is a star equestrian, an excellent student, and a leading voice in the College choir. Likewise, we encourage our faculty to share their “cool” outside activities with the campus community, such as the chemistry professor who paints regularly and shares his art work with students and faculty colleagues; or the political science professor who teaches an evening course in tai chi to members of the faculty, staff and students. In my view, “coolness” — whatever that means — can’t be manufactured by teams of public relations experts unless students, faculty and staff actually see it, feel it, and believe it in their day-to-day experiences with one another on campus.
Hibel: Do you think that a liberal arts college president has a greater link to a school’s image than a larger state school?
Baldasare: In my experience I think so. I worked for a number of years at a large public university, and I did not have the impression that the university’s president was linked to the image of the school in the minds of students, faculty and staff. At a small college, where just about everyone knows the president, or certainly has met and talked to the president in both formal and informal settings, the link to image is much stronger. I’m an alumnus of St. Andrews and in my particular case I think that my own personal views, style of leadership, intellectual interests and even sense of humor are more widely known and do influence how others view the school.
Hibel: What would you like a candidate to know about your school that might not be obvious or easily found out?
Baldasare: I’d like a prospective faculty member to know that, even though the college is, as you said earlier, small and in a rural setting, it does not lack for intellectual vitality and professional challenge (as well as opportunity). Faculty members have an opportunity to grow personally and professionally in this environment. They are given opportunities early in their careers to serve the college in many different capacities and to explore different areas of interest. While this can be a welcomed opportunity, it can be a daunting task to some who are interested only in their own discipline, or simply feel uncomfortable outside of what is professionally familiar. Faculty members who thrive in this environment are those who relish the opportunity to teach and develop excellent teaching skills, to further their scholarship in new areas, and to serve the larger community. St. Andrews provides an environment in which a faculty member can experience broad professional satisfaction across a range of areas from the classroom, to professional activity, to enriching and stimulating collegial relationships within and across disciplines. All of this while working with others in a close-knit campus community.
Questions for Jason Cook, Vice-President of Communications and Marketing for the Texas A&M University System:
Hibel: As one of the largest universities in the country,4 faculty recruitment at Texas A&M must be a continuous effort. What methods of reaching out to potential faculty do you utilize? How are you keeping the image of your school fresh and updated?
Cook: Yes, the recruitment and hiring of faculty is a continual effort for us. Last year, we completed a five-year effort known as the Faculty Reinvestment Initiative. It was started by then-President and now-Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, to add 450 faculty positions across the university. At that time, we believed it was unprecedented in all of higher education. Faculty recruiting is all about networking. In the past, it has been professional-based, but now we are seeing it evolve more and more into the social space. We have many efforts in place to position the Texas A&M brand through social media, partnerships and targeted marketing at higher ed.
Hibel: When you refer to the social space, do you think that the methods of networking with faculty have changed, and if so, what do you think they are?
Cook: Technology is affording all of us different ways to network than previously existed, whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Faculty is also part of this trend. We have been very intentional in demonstrating a “community of spirit” through our social media inventory here at Texas A&M, which we hope provides a window into our campus for prospective faculty members, students or staff.
Hibel: Do you think that the “coolness” factor of your school has a value that impacts the types of compensation packages you find yourself offering? Are you able to offer less money to a person because they are attracted to being affiliated with your school?
Cook: We are definitely using social media as a “cool” way to tell the Texas A&M story, or to introduce people to the Aggie Family who may not be familiar with us. While compensation is important, there are many other avenues that are a part of the decision process. For Texas A&M, that’s a clearly defined purpose for our state, nation, and world; adherence to our six core values; a vibrant local and state economy; and a tremendous community. And not being in a major city, the cost of living here is somewhat lower. All of these factors come into play … it’s the overall fit that is most important.
Hibel: Do you find named positions or endowed chairmanships/professorships5 effective in recruiting top talent?
Cook: Yes. Endowed chairs are important in that they signal stability for the faculty member, as well as the support of academics from our former student population.
Hibel: What would you like a candidate to know about your school that might not be obvious or easily found out?
Cook: It’s often difficult to get a sense of Texas A&M’s overall spirit and dedication to selfless service through social media or traditional media channels. Texas A&M is unique in this area. Also, many people do not realize our size and scope — 49,000 students and nearly $600 million in research expenditures. Our university is relatively young, but we have made some tremendous progress in the past couple of decades. And while we are known primarily for agriculture and engineering, Texas A&M is truly a comprehensive university — our business school, political sciences, and many liberal arts programs are among the nation’s best.
Questions for Tom Gariepy, District Director of Marketing and Communications for Maricopa Community Colleges:
Hibel: There is a lot of focus on recruitment of students to community colleges. Given the recent national increase in community college enrollment, including a 12-percent increase in Maricopa’s enrollment,6 has Maricopa had to change any of its focus to recruitment of faculty to accommodate the growing student rolls?
Gariepy: Our colleges have always been known as places that welcomed all students, so we’re happy that our enrollment has increased by 12 percent. We expect that enrollment will increase again this fall. But just because 12 percent more students enrolled does not mean that, somehow, we got a 12 percent increase in our operating budget. The fact is, we’ve had to work extremely hard to keep costs down so we can accommodate the growth that we’ve experienced. We expect that will continue to be the case in at least the near future.
In terms of faculty, we have not been able to hire the number of full-time faculty that we might have in the past. We’ve had to hire more adjunct faculty to accommodate the extra classes. To give you an idea of the difference, our HR people tell me that five or six years ago, we were hiring more than 120 full-time faculty members in a year, where last year it was around 30.
Hibel: It has been observed that faculty recruitment at two-year institutions takes up a considerable amount of time and resources.7 What has Maricopa done to mitigate those expenditures of time and money in this climate of reduced state support?
Gariepy: Because we are not hiring at levels we used to, we don’t have to spend as much time and effort on recruiting. You might say we do a softer form of recruiting now than previously. We advertise and place our profiles in the places where higher education professionals would expect to find us. We also receive literally thousands of resumes each year, both for faculty and non-faculty positions. We’re always looking for employees who can make a strong contribution to the organization and who will be a good fit with our mission and vision, but we have less opportunity to hire people than we would like.
Hibel: What would you like a candidate to know about your school that might not be obvious or easily found out?
Gariepy: I don’t know that either of these factors is hard to find out, but they can’t be stressed enough. First, candidates really need to know our students. We have a highly diverse group of hardworking students who want to succeed, and have strong expectations about how our faculty and staff will help them succeed. And second, they need to know that we’re about teaching, learning and student success. Our colleges are not research institutions. They are institutions where we value the interaction between our faculty and our students. In short, they need to know that we care passionately about our students.