From left: Henry Braun (education), formerly of the Educational Testing Service; Patricia DeLeeuw, vice provost for faculties; Amy Hutton (accounting), formerly of Dartmouth’s Tuck School; and Mary Ann Glynn (organizational studies), formerly of Emory’s Goizueta School. Photograph: Gary Wayne Gilbert

One held an endowed chair at the University of Exeter, in England. Another was director of the School of Social Work at California State University, Los Angeles. A third was a prominent researcher at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey, and the holder of an ETS Distinguished Presidential Appointment; and a fourth was a full professor at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. In all, the eight senior faculty who make up one-third of Boston College’s new faculty appointments for 2006–07 are evidence of a University hiring policy that has been in place for more than a decade, designed to speed growth in academic strength and reputation. Says vice provost Patricia DeLeeuw, who has overseen faculty hiring for the past seven years, “The best way to enhance a program, a department, or, on a larger scale, a school, is to make strategic senior hires” from other university faculties.

“Senior hires,” which universities define as faculty who have been tenured at another institution, generally arrive with research grants, solid professional contacts, and productive careers in place, and as such they make an immediate impact on the reputations of the institutions that land them. “Reputation matters hugely,” says DeLeeuw. “It matters as we try to hire faculty, it matters as we attract students, it matters as we attract funding.” She mentions social scientist and writer Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, who came to Boston College in 1999 from Boston University. From the moment he was on the payroll, says DeLeeuw, Wolfe raised the University’s profile, not only in political science circles but more widely, through frequent contributions to newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, New Republic, and Atlantic Monthly.

Since the mid-1990s, when the University targeted the economics department for development, six tenured economists from other institutions have joined BC as full professors, beginning with Roche Professor Arthur Lewbel, hired from Brandeis University in 1998. Today, BC’s department ranks among the top 30 in the United States, according to a survey published in the Journal of the European Economic Association. Other departments targeted for strengthening by the University have included theology, which acquired moral theologian James Keenan, SJ, from the Weston Jesuit School of Theology and Roberto Goizueta, a specialist in theology and culture, from Loyola University in Chicago; and the philosophy department, which added Richard Kearney from University College, Dublin, John Sallis from Penn State University, and Jorge Garcia from Rutgers University.

This strategy, a distant cousin of the free agency approach in baseball, was not, of course, pioneered in higher education by Boston College. Harvard University, for example, has long been famous (infamous, in some circles) for not promoting its own junior faculty to tenure, preferring instead to hire permanent faculty from among those who made their reputations elsewhere.

An important factor in attracting senior men and women is the ability to bestow named endowed chairs, which not only confer prestige on the recipients but usually come with funds for travel, research, and other supports for career advancement. Among the 35 chairs created by Boston College donors during the past decade is the Louise MacMahon Ahearn University Chair that enabled the Graduate School of Social Work to attract James Lubben from UCLA in 2003, says Alberto Godenzi, the school’s dean. A leading researcher in gerontology, Lubben has since become a pivotal figure in Boston College’s recent efforts to build a multidisciplinary center for the study of aging.

“You have to find great talent and do whatever it takes to bring it in,” says Andrew Boynton, dean of the Carroll School of Management. And talent attracts talent. A key element in wooing the organizational change specialist Mary Ann Glynn from Emory’s Goizueta Business School this fall, says Boynton, was the presence at CSOM of the scholar Jean Bartunek, holder of the Robert A. and Evelyn J. Ferris Chair. (The Legal Sea Foods lobster dinner Boynton sent to Glynn in Atlanta may have helped as well, he concedes.) Glynn is the first faculty member named to the Carroll School’s new Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics, and Boynton views her appointment as strategically important: a way to “jump-start” the center’s work and brand.

If the hiring of Glynn was in line with strategic planning for CSOM, the acquisition of accounting specialist Amy Hutton from Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business was pure opportunism, says DeLeeuw. Hutton, who taught at Harvard Business School for 11 years, and whom Boynton calls “a worldwide figure” in accounting, was seeking to move to the Boston area for personal reasons. BC responded by creating a new associate professorship in accounting. Indeed, there is no downplaying serendipity. Alan Wolfe’s conversations with Boston College began after the dean of A&S at the time, Robert Barth, SJ, wrote to compliment an article Wolfe had published.

Nationally recognized Islamicists Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom jointly accepted the Norma Jean Calderwood Chair of Islamic and Asian Art in 2003 when Stanford Calderwood established it in memory of his wife (who had taught Islamic art at BC for many years). The husband and wife team of Bloom and Blair were living nearby in New Hampshire and were drawn to the prospect of sharing a position so that they could continue scholarly careers that include a great deal of travel and publishing. Their presence became a factor in attracting one of this year’s appointees, James Morris, former holder of the Sharjah Chair of Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies. Morris is a translator and interpreter of key Islamic intellectual and spiritual texts (see his article, page 60); the institutions where he has taught include Princeton University and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, in Paris. Turning back to the matter of academic strategy, the presence of Blair, Bloom, and Morris will anchor the University’s new interdisciplinary minor in Islamic studies, a program that Provost Cutberto Garza sees as an essential contribution to fulfilling BC’s mission to prepare students “for the complexity of the world.”

By whatever route prospective senior hires arrive at the negotiating table, whether by patient search or pure chance, the process that follows is “a courtship,” says DeLeeuw. And as in any courtship, blandishments are essential and rival suitors a threat. “Stars are social entrepreneurs. They sell themselves; they will be negotiating with other schools. Each dean will try to top the others,” says GSSW’s Godenzi.

As a cultural center, Boston has obvious attractions, but “the Boston thing can only go so far” in offsetting the area’s high cost of living, high housing prices, and long commutes, says Boynton. “Salary’s crucial,” agrees DeLeeuw, as prospective hires often come from places with lower living costs and need assurance that they will be able to match their current standard of living. Housing assistance and help with relocating spouses and families are routinely provided, and international scholars can expect BC to cover visa and green card fees.

Hiring stars can still be a delicate business. “It doesn’t make sense to hire a diva who upsets the chemistry of your school,” says Godenzi, who scrutinizes the personalities of prospective hires as carefully as their books. A key question, says Garza, is whether the prospect has the wholehearted support of the appointing department. Boston College, says A&S dean Joseph Quinn, is not in the business of hiring “mercenaries,” and a crucial measure of success, Quinn and DeLeeuw agree, is the high proportion of senior hires who stay on, rather than using Boston College to leverage their next step up the academic ladder. It’s a “very rare instance,” says DeLeeuw, when a senior hire “just doesn’t work out.” She can think of only a couple of occasions when this has been the case. “BC tends to be the kind of place where people come and stay,” she says.

Jane Whitehead is a Boston-based writer.

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