Faculty numbers improve

Author: Scott Greene

Middlebury College's total number of occupied faculty positions went up only slightly this year, despite the addition of 36 new teachers. The change signals the beginning of the gradual implementation of part of the College's Strategic Plan, which proposes to "increase faculty resources and enhance student-faculty interaction."

"Thirty-six warm bodies have come to Middlebury," said Acting Dean of the Faculty Sunder Ramaswamy, "but that's not 36 new faculty."

The total number of faculty at Middlebury, measured as Full-Time Equivalents (FTE's), rose incrementally to 223 1/3 through the addition of 36 new teachers. However, the 26 new faculty and 10 assistants who comprise the group only account for a net increase of 2 5/6 total faculty positions.

"Of the new people coming, the majority of these are not what you would call incremental positions adding to the total number of faculty," Vice President for Academic Affairs Alison Byerly said. "Most of these are positions replacing people who are on leave or people who have left the college."

Middlebury often hires over 20 new teachers a year, though the majority of them fill existing lines or positions vacated when members of the faculty go on leave.

"A lot of faculty go on leave one year out of every six," said Ramaswamy, adding that once junior faculty get past their review in the third year, they go on leave in the fifth. "When these faculty go on leave you have to replace them."

The FTE provides a way for the College's Educational Affairs Committee to internally count their faculty for workload purposes. A full faculty member teaches five courses during the fall and spring semesters, and a winter term course. A teacher who teaches three classes only counts as 3/6 of an FTE. Of the 36 incoming teachers, only two represent a new incremental position.

The use of the FTE also reflects the College's dedication to flexibility in its ongoing attempt to balance the needs of students.

"All positions belong to the College, not to departments," Ramaswamy said, stressing the need for the power to move teaching resources around. Not only does the use of the FTE assist in filling positions vacated by faculty on leave, but the various departments also have the opportunity to reconfigure how they want to teach. "The teaching curriculum shouldn't be sacrificed because faculty is on leave," he said. Although the total faculty only slightly rose, the move highlights a goal established in the strategic plan of adding 25 FTE's over the next 10 years.

"The College has recognized the need for sufficient faculty resources to both accomplish what we want to accomplish in the curriculum, and to ensure the kind of close student-faculty interaction that is the hallmark of a Middlebury education," Byerly said.

But while the use of the FTE aids internal planning purposes, Middlebury no longer includes it when calculating its student to faculty ratio, a statistic largely responsible for Middlebury's rise in the recent U.S.News and World Report "America's Best Colleges" ranking of the country's top liberal arts colleges. The College began using a methodology for counting faculty called the Common Data Set, so as to align its student to faculty ratio with the other elite colleges that have also begun using the CDC.

"It's more of a reporting change than it is an actual change," Brodigan said, "but now that we know that everyone reports this way, we'll continue to report this way."

Whereas Middlebury previously used its own internal count, the FTE, when submitting a calculation to the U.S. News, it began to use the CDC calculation this year. The new methodology for counting teachers considers anyone teaching 50 percent or more of a normal course load to be a full teacher. Though Middlebury has only 223 1/3 total faculty this year under the FTE system, the CDC produces a figure of 269 full teachers.

Thus, Middlebury would have had a student to faculty ratio of 10.7 to 1 under the previous system, but the CDC technique generates a ratio of 8.9 to 1. The new ratio helped the College to go from 28th in that category to 11th. In adopting the CDC's prescribed equation for counting faculty, Middlebury can more easily compare itself to other elite institutions.

"If we want to make comparisons, we have to compare apples to apples," Secretary of the College and Dean of Planning John Emerson said. "So we have to report numbers that they ask for in the CDC."

The current standard for excellence among Middlebury's peers is a student to faculty ratio of 8 to 1, and the elite group consists of Amherst College, Williams College, Bryn Mawr College, Haverford College and Swarthmore College. The gradual increase in faculty resources over an extended period of time "would bring us in line with those that have the best student to faculty ratio," Emerson said. "Our logic is that what we have to offer that makes Midd a better college than even some of the Ivies is the intensity of faculty involvement directly with students."