Faculty
DEVELOPING FACULTY STRENGTHS TO POWER ACADEMIC INNOVATION
A
wellspring of new ideas, Northeastern builds faculty strengths that align with
today's national imperatives and tomorrow's global challenges. Today, new
fields are emerging in response to an increasingly complex world, research is
growing more collaborative, and talented undergraduates are seeking
greater opportunities to work with faculty on knowledge creation. As a result,
universities must approach faculty recruitment more strategically than ever
before.
Under
the Long Range Plan, we will cluster faculty expertise around current and
emerging areas of strength at the intersection of disciplines, creating new
knowledge and new fields for a changing world.
Goals
- Depth of faculty expertise necessary to establish a broad
base of interdisciplinary research programs
- Improved ratio of students to faculty and
tenure-track faculty to full-time faculty
- Active mid-career faculty enter academic leadership pipeline
and mentor early-career faculty
- Further increase in faculty honors, including membership
in national academies
- Continued rising trend in numbers of outstanding young
faculty attracted to Northeastern
Action Steps
- Add 150 new tenured or tenure-track faculty positions,
in addition to filling an estimated 150 openings caused by attrition
- Leverage the potential for partnerships with local, national,
and global institutions
- Take advantage of opportunities to develop leadership
in emerging fields through cluster hiring and other recruiting strategies
- Further align faculty recruitment with primary research
themes of health, security, and sustainability, and continue to recruit faculty
with an interdisciplinary focus
- Advance recruitment and mentoring of women faculty in STEM
and social science fields, and continue to increase faculty diversity
- Improve faculty mentoring and leadership development
- Develop faculty recognition program, and actively promote
faculty for membership in national academies and for highly prestigious
fellowships
Selected Metrics
- Total number of tenured and tenure-track faculty
members
- Student-faculty ratio and faculty diversity
- Early-career faculty recruited from leading PhD
programs
- Number and range of citations of faculty work in
scholarly publications and news media
- Faculty honors and awards
