Provost Biddy Martin spoke with Communiqué magazine about the high quality of Cornell teachers and scholars and the need to continue recruiting the very best faculty for the future. A professor of German studies and women's studies at Cornell since 1983, she is an award-winning teacher and author. Martin previously served as senior associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and was appointed provost in 2000.

Why do we need more funding to support Cornell faculty?

It will permit us to recognize, honor, and reward our best current faculty for their teaching, advising, and research. To recruit senior faculty, whom we may need to cement our standing in a particular field, we need to offer the prestige of endowed professorships. We want to ensure that we attract the best, keep the best, and provide incentives to faculty.

What distinguishes Cornell faculty from those at peer institutions?

Since its inception Cornell's faculty has been among the best in the country. I think Ezra Cornell's and A. D. White's vision attracted the best and the brightest right away. Today the scope of what we do in this unique setting of endowed and state-supported colleges, combined with Cornell's land-grant mission, attracts great faculty and keeps them here. Our culture has a specificity that isn't matched elsewhere. Our faculty cross disciplines and collaborate to pursue knowledge rather than adhere to traditional disciplinary boundaries. We have an enterprising faculty that is devoted to undergraduate education. Our most distinguished scholars, for example, do undergraduate teaching—including teaching freshmen—at a rate that's higher than at some of our most well-known peer institutions. That tradition has been fostered here and will continue to be promoted. Whether they're in small classes or large classes, our students have a good chance of learning from the very best minds. Fine undergraduate teaching is rewarded and expected. There's a very strong culture in favor of having everyone do his or her part to give our undergraduates the best possible education. That's a great thing.

To be a successful faculty member at Cornell, as at other top-ranked universities, you have to focus on doing well nationally and internationally in your field. But we see more faculty members also train their attention on what they can do on campus. That's in part a consequence of the North Campus project, the West Campus project, and the particular ways in which we have made good undergraduate teaching and advising a top priority. We have one of the best faculties in the world when it comes to scholarly distinction, a growing number of whom seek the rewards of direct interaction with our undergraduate and graduate students, and I think that is all to the good.

What makes Cornell attractive to faculty?

Cornell has a reputation for being interdisciplinary and for its enormous scope. For decades that has taken the form of very low walls between and among disciplines within colleges and permeable boundaries among the colleges. Faculty here move much more easily than they do at some of our peer institutions in pursuit of collaborations to do research at the cutting edge of science, the social sciences, and the humanities. We know Cornell has this reputation because we are successful at recruiting faculty from places where you would think it would be difficult to lure them: Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley. They say the reason they came to Cornell is because of the extraordinary ease with which it's possible to pursue interdisciplinary work.

We attract adventurous minds. The best work in any discipline is typically done at its boundary, where frontiers get pushed and where the definition of the project is constantly transformed. Faculty who want to work at the boundary-and work with colleagues who are doing work that may overlap but is quite distinct-come to places like Cornell because of its reputation for being flexible, for changing with the times, and for permitting collaborations across boundaries.

Because we're not an urban, commuting campus, our faculty tend to spend more time interacting with one another and with students. The faculty member's day here doesn't end with teaching classes and holding office hours. We have a very strong sense of intellectual community, and that includes students who wish to participate in the intellectual life of the campus at a high level.

What challenges does Cornell face to maintain the high caliber of its faculty in the years ahead?

There will be many retirements over the next five to ten years. We will see a hiring bulge of the sort we haven't seen since the 1960s, when many people retired and there was an expansion of the number of faculty at many institutions. We're now seeing faculty hired through the 1960s and early 1970s reaching retirement age. This is true at other institutions as well. And because the economy was so good in the 1990s, not as many outstanding students went into graduate school and academic life. In some disciplines, there are fewer young scholars to choose from. The consequence is that competition for faculty is fierce.

Salaries have risen more quickly at other institutions than they have at Cornell. We have a faculty salary program that is now in its third year, but we still can't guarantee our faculty that they'll be rewarded as well as they would be at another institution. Attracting the best new scholars and teachers to Cornell is going to be a challenge. We will succeed in doing it, but we need the resources to offer faculty competitive salaries and travel money. In the sciences, start-up costs for labs, equipment, and the bridge funds that new faculty need until they secure their first major grants have risen exponentially. For faculty in the humanities and social sciences, we must offer excellent space, topnotch research resources, an outstanding intellectual community, and the best students.

At the moment we also lag significantly behind our peers in the amount of research funding we can provide faculty. It's an embarrassment, really, in such fields as the humanities, that we offer so little in comparison to what our peers offer in research and travel money. To compete nationally and internationally, young scholars need to be able to travel to present their work and to have their work vetted by senior scholars in the discipline. We're simply not providing them the resources required to do that.

But it is an enormously exciting time because we're about to hire the faculty that will lead this university for the next 40 years. In many disciplines we will always compete for faculty with Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, Chicago- schools with much bigger endowments. Cornell is less well endowed, but it's a very scrappy and ambitious university. That's true of our students, faculty, administrators, and alumni. We are making Cornell resources available to sustain our great faculty and look forward to establishing a partnership with alumni, parents, and friends who want to help the university achieve this goal.

We can't rely on what the current endowment will yield. Increased funding will help us tremendously by enabling Cornell to pay competitive salaries and offer faculty other funds they need. It will also help us renovate classroom and laboratory facilities.

Why are endowed professorships important?

Endowed professorships permit us to honor and reward professors who do the best job at the range of tasks that faculty are asked to perform at Cornell. Our faculty members feel very honored to carry the name of alumni. Endowed professorships are a very big deal to faculty. Along with endowed prizes for teaching, advising, and research, named professorships provide incentives to strengthen a culture in which faculty understand that all they do really matters. I know our faculty. I admire them. I adore them. I'm very enthusiastic not only about how extraordinarily smart and creative they are, but just how dedicated they are to Cornell and to the students.

Why should alumni, parents, and friends of Cornell support efforts to recruit the next generation of faculty?

Because they want us to have the best faculty. Without the best faculty we're not the great university that we have always been and mean to be in the future. All of us should be concerned about the particular challenges we face now. We've got to be in a position to attract scholars who are going to create the knowledge that makes the most difference in the 21st century and who are most able to transmit that knowledge, along with the curiosity and excitement of discovery, to Cornell students.