As a large portion of Cornell’s faculty approach retirement age, Cornell started a new faculty hiring initiative — which administrators call “faculty renewal” — last year that will fill the 50 percent of positions that are expected to be vacated over the next 10 years.

Prof. Nicolas Ziebarth, policy analysis and management, garnered two first-place awards for his dissertation research on sick leave and economic incentives.

Following two years of relative stagnation, the average full-time faculty salary at Cornell increased 2.8 percent from the 2009-2010 to the 2010-2011 academic years.

The meeting between CALS leadership and students, faculty and administrators is a step in the right direction to foster better dialogue on major decisions that should be continued moving forward.

University administrators are looking to hire large numbers of new tenure-track professors over the next several years to replace rising levels of faculty retirements.

Bill Fry, Dean of the University Faculty, outlines some of the actions taken by the Faculty Senate in response to the suicides earlier this year.

Faculty salaries at major universities across the nation remain unaffected despite widespread budget and general economic woes.

Salaries for professors across the country rose by 3.9 percent last year, well above the inflation rate, according to the American Association of University Professors. According to USA Today, Weill Cornell Medical College Prof. Zev Rosenwaks, obstetrics and gynecology, allegedly earned a paycheck of $3.1 million last year, the fifth highest salary at any U.S. college.

The median salaries at the endowed colleges during the 2008-2009 school year were $93,500 for assistant professors, $109,800 for associate professors and $154,300 for full professors, according to data from the AAUP.

Florence Babb, an endowed professor at the University of Florida, is getting hit hard by the $69 million that was slashed from the university’s budget last year. Ignoring her contractual agreement issued when she was appointed in 2004, the university asked Babb to up her commitment to the school, teaching three courses per year as opposed to the two to which she had initially agreed, according to InsideHigherEd.com.

A statewide union now stands behind Babb in her fight against the university, which alleges that a collective bargaining agreement with the faculty union permits adjusting course loads despite prior appointment arrangements. Under the contract, UF can determine the “mix” of a faculty member’s responsibilities, which encompass teaching research and service.

In an auditorium filled to the brim with students, faculty and administrators, the Faculty Senate Committee met yesterday to discuss Cornell’s state in the recent financial downturn. After Provost Kent Fuchs discussed Cornell’s reaction to the economic crisis, Prof. Abby Cohn, linguistics, introduced a resolution to pause construction of Milstein Hall, the proposed new building for the College of Architecture, Art and Planning that has been in the works for over a decade.

“This resolution is neither for nor against Milstein Hall, but is about the process and decisions made during these difficult [financial] times,” Cohn said.

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.