Focus on faculty brings University acclaim

The transformation of the University of Delaware during the tenure of President Roselle can be seen distinctly in the faculty.
One of the administration’s key goals from the outset has been to provide for competitive compensation of faculty, an important means by which to attract the best and brightest to the Newark campus.

Compared with 24 other universities in the region, UD ranked in the bottom half in total compensation for full professors in 1990, at $79,300. Following a concerted effort over the last 17 years, UD has moved into the top quarter with a total compensation package of more than $141,000 for full professors. Adjusting the earlier figure for inflation, that is an increase of about 23 percent.

The administration also instituted a plan to increase the number of endowed professorships, of which UD had perhaps six fully funded positions at the outset, to better recruit talented researchers and teachers.

Today, named and endowed faculty positions number 110, and the University has backed those positions with about $70 million.
One measure of the success of the program is that faculty members now bring in grants and contracts of about $160 million per year, quadruple the $39.8 million received in 1990.

Through the focus on compensation and endowed positions, UD has been able to attract some of the leading academics in a wide range of fields in recent years. Those include Charles Elson, the Edgar S. Woolard Jr. Chair and director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance, who is one of the world’s leading experts on corporate governance issues and invites nationally recognized corporate leaders, academics, journalists and jurists to campus for lively discussions of key issues.

Another internationally renowned member of the faculty is Xiang Gao, associate professor of music and considered one of the world’s finest young violinists. Gao is a member of the acclaimed China Magpie ensemble, and the “Xiang Gao and Friends” concerts have brought world-class performances and sold-out shows to UD. He performs on the G.B. Ceruti violin created around 1800 and purchased by the University, and in 2007 was named a Fellow of the Stradivari Society and given the use of a Stradivarius violin.

Pamela J. Green, Crawford H. Greenewalt Endowed Chair in Plant Molecular Biology with a laboratory at the Delaware Biotechnology Institute, is among the world’s leaders in research on small RNAs in plants and in 2006 was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest scientific society.

Faculty members have established centers of excellence in many fields, including art conservation, composite materials, energy and genomics. Art conservators trained at UD are among the world’s best, and the University has leading genomic researchers across an array of disciplines. Work in composite materials has yielded a variety of results, from “green” plastics to liquid body armor, and research in energy covers a wide range from solar cells to policy to fuel cells.

Roselle has developed what he calls a “medical school without walls,” with UD scientists working in close cooperation with regional medical centers.

Increasingly, the University is turning its strengths into centers to better enable collaboration among disciplines. New to campus are the Center for Critical Zone Research and the Avian Biosciences Center, which pools talents in areas related to the region’s huge poultry industry.
There has been a strong emphasis on UD’s Land Grant mission to undertake research and share results that benefit the state and the region, from coastal zone studies to K-12 education. The University also was instrumental in the establishment of the Delaware Biotechnology Institute, a cooperative venture of the state’s institutions of higher education, government and industry.

“I’m very proud of our faculty,” Roselle says. “Not in any of the places where I have worked have I encountered a faculty that is so involved in the lives of undergraduate students as is the case at the University of Delaware.”

A priority of the administration has been to change the face of the faculty through diversity, something that is increasingly important in a changing and shrinking world. At a faculty meeting in 2006, Roselle said that of the University’s 1,070 full-time faculty, 37 percent are women, placing UD second among comparator institutions in the region. With 45 African-American faculty members representing 4.4 percent of all UD faculty members, only the University of Maryland at 4.8 percent has a higher percentage. Other minority groups include Hispanic faculty, who represent 1.9 percent of the faculty, and Asian-Americans, who represent 7.8 percent.