Cluster-hiring initiative shows signs of delivering on its promise

Laurie Beth Clark distinctly remembers the 1999 national academic conference where former Chancellor David Ward first outlined the university’s bold new hiring experiment, the “cluster hiring initiative,”

“After the meeting, nobody could talk about anything else,” says Clark, an assistant vice chancellor who now steers the initiative. “They were absolutely riveted by the idea of this model.”

The program was truly noteworthy back then as a means of reloading the university’s “intellectual firepower” during a time of heightened faculty retirement. It came about through an unprecedented partnership with the governor and state Legislature, which ultimately led to three rounds of hiring in 49 distinct “clusters.”

What really set the initiative apart, however, was the creation of a centralized funding pool and the opportunity for faculty across campus to aggressively compete for new positions with innovative and vital “cluster” proposals. The goal: Get people outside of the “academic silos” of departments, collaborate across disciplines and go after new challenges that demand interdisciplinary solutions.

Seven years later, the initiative is beginning to produce a formidable track record of accomplishments. Those successes are detailed for the first time in a comprehensive online progress report launched in April for the cluster hiring steering committee. View the site at http://www.clusters.wisc.edu/.

Collectively, the initiative has led to tens of millions of dollars in new federal research initiatives, generated by either individual faculty or interdisciplinary teams. Scores of new courses were developed, graduate training programs were launched, and new academic majors were created.

The initiative is also helping solidify the university’s leadership in key emerging fields such as nanotechnology, stem cells, energy policy, global environmental challenges, genomics, and the studies of poverty, religion and American culture.

“One of the great strong points of this university is the lack of institutional barriers to this kind of thing,” says Michael Pariza, a food science professor who serves on the cluster steering committee and runs his own cluster in food safety. “In some very top-down universities, it’s very hard to collaborate with people outside your departments, if not impossible. But here, it’s quite open and has been for quite some time.”

African languages and literature professor Teju Olaniyan, a steering committee member hired to be part of the “African Diaspora” cluster, says he is most impressed with the level of enthusiasm the program fostered across campus.

“When I was being hired, I thought (the African Diaspora cluster) was something being dictated by the people in authority, and I was shocked,” Olaniyan says. “When I got here, I found out that it was just a group of people who wrote a very elaborate proposal and decided to submit it. This has been initiated from the ground up, and that’s what made it very, very strong.”

Environmental studies professor Jonathan Foley, who leads a cluster group on global environmental threats, notes that cluster hiring professors may comprise only about 5 percent of all campus faculty. But they serve a critical role of exploring the “interdisciplinary frontiers” that are changing all the time. “Whatever today is an emerging discipline will in 20 years likely become an established field,” he says.

And its influence goes beyond just the new hires, Foley adds. While his cluster resulted in three new hires, it also attracted close collaborations with a half dozen more faculty who shared similar interests. That three-person hire has now gelled into a 12-person team, he says, and that development was critical to the cluster landing a $3 million National Science Foundation training grant to produce a new generation of graduate students in the field.

Foley says he also sees evidence of the hiring initiative building trust and “a lot of goodwill” among the campus community. “When departments do this right, they create a lot of other parallel benefits that can pay off for years to come,” he says.