NYU Shanghai Provost Joanna Waley-Cohen sat down with On Century Avenue to get the inside scoop on exactly how NYU Shanghai builds its faculty base. According to Professor Waley-Cohen, NYUSH has four main hiring categories: the tenured track and tenured faculty, affiliated faculty and visiting professors, long term contract professors, and local adjunct faculty. "Most of the people NYU Shanghai hires are tenure track," Professor Waley-Cohen noted, "but in the case of people who would come in at the tenured level, we have a cross school promotion and tenure committee and a faculty review committee who write a further report. Tenure is a job for life, so you want to make sure you have people only of the highest standards.”Mirroring the faculty recruiting process of NYU New York, NYU Shanghai first establishes search committees to recruit potential faculty members. In the past, the search committee was formed by NYU New York faculty, but as of this year, NYU Shanghai has grown large enough to participate in these committees. The committee first creates a recruitment advertisement that presents an overview of theposition’s responsibilities and necessary qualifications. After going through all the applications, the committee arranges interviews (usually via Skype) of approximately 10 to 12 potential hires. The next step in the hiring process involves person-to-person interaction between the top three applicants from the Skype interviews and NYU New York faculty. During their visit to New York, potential faculty present job talks, participate in meetings with NYU New York faculty, and spend significant time speaking with current faculty. Professor Waley-Cohen notes this stage in the hiring process as a method to ensure that new faculty not only have the resume and professional qualifications necessary to teach at NYU Shanghai, but also possess character traits compatible with the NYU Shanghai community. During this time, the applicants are interviewed via Skype by Professor Waley-Cohen herself and NYU Shanghai’s relevant Dean. As a final step, the search committee recommends a potential hire to Professor Waley Cohen and Ron Robin, the Senior Vice Provost at NYU New York and head of faculty recruitment. If everyone is in agreement, NYU Shanghai offers a job to the applicant. Professor Waley-Cohen also adds that any faculty who joins NYU Shanghai on the tenure track must have an associated position with a department or unit in New York, which helps NYU Shanghai integrate and communicate more effectively with NYU New York. An associated position, Professor Waley-Cohen explains, means at a minimum that NYU New York would be happy to have the particular faculty member teach the department’s undergraduate students and advise its graduate students. “We have a lot of visitors at the moment, and a lot of the visitors are here for their second or third time, so although they’re visitors, there is still continuity," Professor Waley-Cohen said speaking on the division of faculty at NYU Shanghai. Long term contract people are mostly writing faculty, English for Academic Purposes faculty, and Chinese language instructors.” Currently, the school faculty is also comprised of local adjuncts-- people who work locally but also teach courses at NYU Shanghai. Professor Waley-Cohen explains that the reason the school hired so many visiting professors during NYU Shanghai’s early years was that it “didn’t want to rush into hiring people because it’s potentially a job for life.” She notes, “If you’re going to be working with someone for life, you want to be very confident that it’s going to work out.” “There are different models," Waley-Cohen continued. "Yale-NUS recruited a lot of people and planned [the school] with them rather than having people who were not going to be directly involved doing the initial planning. There are different ways of doing it. How we did it was plan it in New York, and then start recruiting people.” As NYU Shanghai continues to expand, the responsibility of initiating the faculty recruitment processes will also include a growing number of faculty. Professor Waley-Cohen recalls that until this year, she and Senior Vice Provost Ron Robin were the primary decision makers in determining which type of faculty members to hire. However, for the first time this year, NYU Shanghai faculty members created what Professor Waley-Cohen refers to as a “wish list.” The “wish list”, which is also is used by NYU New York faculty in choosing who to hire, covers positions that faculty believe needs to be filled, such as US foreign policy historians, or additional statistics professors. The “wish lists” are then sent to Professor Waley-Cohen and the school’s Deans, and if approved, the hiring process begins again. Through the wish list, “faculty have much more input into who we hire next”, says Professor Waley-Cohen. The reason NYU Shanghai business and finance majors have had so many visiting professors, explains Professor Waley-Cohen, is that the school had a “different hiring model for business [than other majors] which we realized after a year or two was not producing permanent faculty.” She continues, “This year, we’ve really focused on hiring business faculty. Of the three people we’ve signed this year so far, two have been business faculty, and I’m hoping for a couple more as well.” The original model for hiring business professor included asking different Stern departments to do their own searches for NYU Shanghai faculty, but NYU Shanghai will now be devoting its efforts to directly searching for long-term business faculty. In terms of contract lengths, writing EAP and language instructors are hired mostly on three-year contracts, which can be renewed at the end of each contract term. Visiting professors are hired on a semesterly or yearly, basis, but Professor Waley-Cohen notes that visiting professors will occasionally ask to return to NYU Shanghai on a long-term contract. Speaking toward the incentives to retain visiting professors, Professor Waley Cohen explains that in addition to research opportunities, “Some people like being part of a start up operation. It’s not very established, and it's different. It’s a small and intense community and some people really like that.” When reviewing and promoting faculty, NYU Shanghai also has an extensive process. Senior faculty at NYU Shanghai observe most professors’ classes at some point during the year, review student evaluations, and assess faculty research and publishing progress. Professor Waley-Cohen explains, “Formal review only takes place every three years. If you’re a tenure track faculty member, there’s a third year review and after six years you come up for tenure. The third year review is where the NYU Shanghai faculty will give suggestions for improvement, and the tenure process involves outside evaluators. NYU Shanghai will write to senior individuals in the faculty member’s field, and ask ‘What do you think of this person? How do you compare his or her work to other people in the field who are on the tenure track?’ It’s very intense.”Professor Waley Cohen continues, “One of the difficulties for us here is that because we’re a start-up, people generally get asked to do more than they might in an established university. When we bring in faculty on the tenure track we give them an extra year before they get onto the tenure track to take into account that they’re probably doing more service than they otherwise would be had they gone somewhere else.” In terms of faculty salaries, the vast majority of professors are paid in RMB. Occasionally, visiting professors from New York who only come for a semester will be paid in US dollars, but instances of this are rare. In order to keep the salaries stable, the RMB salaries of NYU Shanghai faculty are fixed, meaning that they do not change in relation to the RMB USD exchange rate. When asked about her experience with visiting NYU Shanghai faculty, sophomore math major Aiwen Xu said, “I personally love my visiting professor. He was really good at explaining things and made math a lot of fun. I hope he can become a long term professor, but the fact that he is only visiting also makes me treasure the experience more.” Double major in Humanities and Social Science Benny Zhang also weighed in on the discussion of NYU Shanghai faculty, saying, “The reason I chose Humanities first and then Social Science, other than the fact that I love them, is because the faculty members are amazing. [They] help me a lot not only because they are good and knowledgeable professors, but also because the scale of these two majors is really small, which can allow students a lot of chances to talk to professors and work with them on different projects. To my knowledge, I’ve only had one visiting professor. I had several appointments with him and it was definitely a nice experience. However, one problem is that in Humanities we really don’t have a whole faculty that can cover every discipline of humanities, and many areas only have one professor—that’s not enough.” Business and Finance major Ryan Friedman, commenting on the high number of visiting professors in his major, says, “I like the visiting professors because they’ve all been great quality, and I don’t mind them leaving after a semester or year because we get to meet a wide range of people and hear from their perspectives.” This academic year, NYU Shanghai has undertaken 21 faculty recruitment searches, with three of them ending in a definitive hire. In the coming years, NYU Shanghai hopes to employ a total of 250 faculty members, with approximately 170 as permanent long-term contract faculty. This article was written by Lizzy LeClaire. Please send an email to [email protected] to get in touch. Photo Credit: NYU Shanghai