The Tisch family’s $35 million donation to enhance University faculty came at the right time for the Big Red.

Recruitment and retention of talented faculty has become an increasingly serious and immediate issue at Cornell. The school’s professors aren’t getting any younger, and the cost of hiring new faculty isn’t getting any lower.

Comforting perhaps is that this problem is nothing new. In March 2007, then-Provost Biddy Martin spent most of her first Academic State of the University address focusing on the impending retirement of University faculty and the need to up the ante in faculty recruitment. Martin projected then that fully one-third of the University’s faculty would retire by 2022, making current efforts to hire new and talented professors an absolute necessity.