With a campuswide academic planning process getting under way, Provost Virginia Hinshaw has decided to "pause" faculty hiring for new positions connected to growth in 2007-08 — an estimated 25 jobs in all.

Academic units can continue hiring for faculty positions allocated in previous academic years but not yet filled. Allocations for 2005-06 and 2006-07 totaled 125 full-time equivalent positions: 75 connected to growth and 50 to retirement.

In addition, hiring can continue for faculty vacancies created by retirement, resignation or death. Indeed, deans will have the authority to fill these vacancies as they see fit, Hinshaw said, "to ensure that the existing base allocation of each school and college does not erode while we plan for growth."

The hiring pause for the 2007-08 positions will give the university the opportunity "to develop resource plans to ensure that we are able to grow in a way that preserves and enhances our core academic strengths," Hinshaw wrote in a Jan. 30 letter to the deans.

She wrote that the pause "will allow us to align future faculty FTE allocations with enrollment and academic plans that emerge from our planning process."

The provost consulted with the Academic Senate before declaring the hiring pause, and she has the senate's support — for now.

Senate Chair Linda Bisson, a professor of viticulture and enology, said the appropriate senate committees will be involved in the commentary phase of the planning, but she cautioned that the senate will withdraw its support if the process "drags on too long and impacts filling teaching needs."

Bisson noted that the campus's previous faculty allocation initiatives focused on research, with teaching as a minor component, even while the senate "argued that core teaching needed to be addressed, (and) addressing those needs was in fact critical."

The senate, then, in this new round of planning, sees an opportunity to re-examine teaching needs. Bisson acknowledged the difficulty in predicting the number of entering students and their fields of interest, "thus the planning process is needed to direct where we want to grow in the curriculum."

Under normal circumstances, the campus would be looking at the addition of about 25 instruction and research faculty positions annually for the next two to three years, Hinshaw said, basing her projection on estimated enrollment growth of 500 full-time equivalent students annually, which she labeled as "modest by some measures."

"However, resource constraints including space, start-up funds and academic support necessitate that we exercise some caution in allocating these positions," she wrote. "Moreover, our forthcoming academic planning process dictates that we move forward on allocation of growth positions in a very deliberative fashion."

Hinshaw and Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef recently invited the campus community to join a conversation about UC Davis' future, as the university prepares to celebrate its centennial in 2008-09 and begin a second century of service.

During his State of the Campus address on Feb. 5, Vanderhoef began the conversation by asking several questions. Among them:

• How do we build on the excellence established during our first century?
• Is our array of academic programs what we want? Are there particular transformative areas that are essential to our future?
• What global trends in higher education will influence our future?

"Virginia and I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the months ahead," Vanderhoef said during his State of the Campus address to the Academic Senate.

The campus conducted a similar planning process two years ago, as it studied how to allocate new faculty hires for the academic years 2005-06 and 2006-07.

To start with, the provost, the Office of Resource Management and Planning, and the senate worked together to develop an allocation formula: 50 percent based on each college and school's base share of instruction and research, 30 percent based on a competitive process, and 20 percent to a provost's reserve for unexpected opportunities and-or challenges.

With the formula in place, the university opened the competition for the 30 percent share. Twenty-five proposals came in, and they called for a total of 183 new ladder-rank instruction and research faculty members.

After consulting with the deans, a senate committee and other faculty groups, Hinshaw selected nine program areas as the campus's highest priorities — all related to globalization, food, agriculture, energy, transportation, health and the environment — all playing to the campus's existing strengths.

Under the established formula, the university allocated nearly 40 full-time equivalent faculty positions to the priority program areas, or 30 percent of the 125 positions expected to come open from 2005 to 2007.

Some of that hiring is still going on, and will continue, said Kelly Ratliff, associate vice chancellor for budget resource management. She added that the number of hires devoted to the priority program areas is probably closer to 80 — taking into account the 40 positions that emerged from the competitive process, and the base positions that the deans can allocate wherever they choose.

After using the new faculty allocation formula for the first time in 2005, Hinshaw had planned to use it again for 2007-09 and for every two-year period thereafter. But, in view of the academic planning process, she decided to forgo using the formula, at least for 2007-08, and to put growth hiring in the pause mode.

She said she would wait until next January to decide whether the pause would continue into 2008-09, and that she would base her decision on the progress made in the academic planning process.