Although the original timetable has been adjusted, professors are being hired to staff the new multidisciplinary initiatives as part of President Ruth Simmons' Plan for Academic Enrichment, according to University sources.
Brown will finish adding at least 100 planned new faculty positions in the next few years, according to the University's Academic Enrichment Web site.
In the past two years, the University has already added 14 new faculty positions and approved search proposals for an additional 51, according to the Web site.
Some of the new faculty members are "target of opportunity" hires, said Assistant Provost Brain Casey. Under the "target of opportunity" program, the University extends job offers to extraordinary and unique scholars, regardless of department needs. Examples of such hires so far are Robert Creeley, professor of English, and John Edgar Wideman, who has been named a professor of Africana studies for the 2004-2005 academic year.
But the majority of new hires will come in connection with multidisciplinary initiatives, Casey said. These initiatives - which include a humanities center and a center for the study of environmental change - provide a focus when hiring new faculty and strengthen several departments at a time, he said.
"It's easier to recruit someone when you say you are making a series of connections across the University," Carey said.
Committees of faculty are responsible for hiring for these multidisciplinary initiatives.
Susan Smulyan, professor of American civilization, chairs a search committee formed to hire three new faculty members for a graduate program in museum studies.
In order to fill one position during the past academic year, Smulyan's public humanities committee sifted through about 80 applications and invited four prospective faculty members to campus to give a lecture and meet with students and faculty, she said.
Smulyan said teaching ability is not the highest priority in making final decisions about hiring. The committee takes into account the candidate's published works, letters of recommendation and opinions of other leading scholars in the field.
"The University thinks it's a package. You can't be a good teacher without being a good scholar," she said.
Though committees make the majority of hiring decisions, high-level University administrators can veto any committee recommendation before an offer is made, according to Franco Preparata, a professor of computer science who is on the committee responsible for hiring new faculty members for the Center of Computational Biology.
He praised the multidisciplinary initiatives as a way to provide unique, interdisciplinary opportunities for students and strengthen a variety of departments with only a few hires.
The University's conscious promise to hire new faculty also allows departments to allocate its resources better, said English department chair Nancy Armstrong.
"We actually took advantage of being understaffed to figure out how to get ahead. We were not in replacement mode so we could strategically plan our hires," she said.
While Smulyan said she thinks joint appointments eliminate competition between departments for funding, she is concerned that "multidisciplinary" faculty may be asked to do too much.
"We worry that the new faculty members will be spread too thin by having to work in several different academic units," Smulyan said.
Despite their drawbacks, joint appointments through the multidisciplinary initiatives are a good way to encourage free thinking, Armstrong said.
"When institutional boundaries interrupt intellectual continuities, joint appointments make sense," she said.
