Campus Stars : Stakes High in Raiding for Faculty

He is, by most accounts, a “franchise player”--one man around whom a successful big-league team can be built; an individual good enough to attract and inspire other talent and make the entire franchise a winner.

It’s not surprising, then, that major universities compete fiercely for his services. What is surprising is that the object of all this attention isn’t an athlete. He is a professor. A physics professor.

Paul C. W. Chu, a leading figure in the unfolding superconductor revolution, has been the focus of a very visible recruiting tussle between UC Berkeley and the University of Houston, where Chu last year did his ground-breaking work in high-temperature superconductivity.

Major Inducements

Both universities have offered Chu entirely new, well-funded, fully staffed laboratories; both have offered accommodating teaching assignments; both have offered generous salaries. As of Thursday afternoon, Chu remained undecided.

Berkeley has given the scientist a deadline of today to accept its offer, which some admiring colleagues have wryly noted could make Chu the first academic equivalent of a highly paid baseball free agent.

Whichever way Chu decides, the trend toward more aggressive--and expensive--recruitment of college professors, particularly in the sciences, is likely to continue for some time. It’s a trend that professors themselves believe is good for the entire country, because it could renew student interest in science.

“Maybe, for God’s sake, we will stop producing so many lawyers and MBAs,” said Gerald Wasserburg, a respected Caltech geologist who recently resisted recruitment by Berkeley, “and produce instead people who will discover new things and help manufacture them.”

Common Practice

Faculty recruiting has been around for centuries--indeed, one humorous but apparently apocryphal story making the rounds is that Harvard bid for the services of Galileo in the 1640s. But as Chu’s case illustrates, the practice has evolved into a more intense activity known as faculty raiding.

Big schools seek to protect their leadership in some disciplines by hiring promising scientists from smaller schools, while small schools try to improve their standing by wooing a few top names. Virginia’s little-known George Mason University, for example, is trying to use a new $25-million endowment to buy its way into the academic big leagues--with some success.

There are several factors behind the trend, according to university officials, including the recent clamor for “academic excellence,” the conviction among state officials that a respected university can spawn “the next Silicon Valley,” and decisions by researchers to leave academia in search of higher salaries in industry. There also is a shortage of middle-level professors caused by hiring freezes imposed a decade or more ago.

“If there’s a pendulum, it’s swinging in the direction of more raiding,” said law professor Julius (Jack) Getman, who was himself recently recruited from Yale by the University of Texas and now serves as president of the American Assn. of University Professors.

“This reminds me somewhat of the Sputnik era, especially the competitive aspect,” he said, referring to the Soviet satellite that in 1957 became the first man-made object in space. “In the Sputnik period, we saw this kind of thing because there was this sense the Russians were getting ahead of us. Now people seem to have a sense that the Japanese are getting ahead of us.”

The professors’ association said figures are not available to document the increase in recruitment or raiding, but few academicians dispute it, while many offer anecdotes supporting it. One man, requesting anonymity, said that to satirize raiding on its campus, the comparative literature faculty at a major Midwest university voted to advertise the whole department as “for sale.”

The most widely publicized case recently, however, involves Paul Chu.

Chu broke onto the national scene last year as a leading figure in the stampede to develop a practical superconductor--that is, a material that can transmit electricity without the resistance inherent in most conducting materials, and do it at or reasonably near room temperature.

Such materials excite engineers because they would allow super-efficient electric motors, super-powerful magnets and super-fast semiconductors that may someday revolutionize everything from transport to computers to household appliances.

Chu did not discover superconductivity. That was done in 1911. Nor did he renew interest in the phenomenon by demonstrating that it can happen at relatively warm temperatures. That was done by Swiss scientists in 1986.

New Material

What Chu did was develop a material that is superconductive at temperatures that are fairly easy and cheap to achieve, though still not practical for many everyday applications. It was enough to make the somewhat obscure, 47-year-old Taiwan-born physicist one of the hottest scientists in the nation in decades.

He was summoned to lecture all over the globe. He was written up in scholarly journals and the popular press. He was asked to help the National Science Foundation decide which research projects to fund. He was deluged with offers of financial help for his own work. He was mentioned as a possible contender for the Nobel Prize.

Chu also became an inspiration in economically distressed Houston, and even a minor international celebrity. Lee Hogan of the Houston Economic Development Council said that when he and Chu were in Japan to explore economic ventures for the city, people in the airport recognized Chu and wanted his autograph.

“It was similar to going through there with Michael Jackson,” he said.

His future at the University of Houston, a 61-year-old state university, seemed secure. His annual salary jumped to $150,000--the highest at that university and among the highest in the nation. In the summer he was free to make $50,000 more in outside research. Administrators also promised to build a 20,000-square-foot Texas Center for Superconductivity.

At the same time, however, Chu was getting inquiries from the University of California, a premiere center of physics study. Berkeley wanted to add someone to its physics faculty who also could run a superconductivity center recently established at the affiliated Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

Chu was an obvious match for Berkeley, and Berkeley seemed perfect for Chu. Chu’s father-in-law is a professor emeritus there, and Chu’s wife graduated from the school. Berkeley also has a host of Nobel laureates, distinguished professors and outstanding graduate students who could help with his work.

The university has declined to discuss its salary offer, but one university spokesman said the school’s most senior professors earn up to $75,000 during a nine-month academic year. In addition, Berkeley has offered from $1.5 million to $2 million a year to fund Chu’s research.

When Berkeley’s offer became known, the eyes of Texas turned upon Chu.

Extraordinary efforts were begun to keep the University of Houston’s only academic superstar from leaving. The public wrote letters urging Chu to stay; elected officials appealed to him; the university raised $27 million to finance three years of research, with the promise of $9 million more.

Houston officials reportedly even offered a part-time professor position to Chu’s father-in-law, Shiing-Shen Chern, 77, a respected differential geometry scholar. Houston Provost Neal Amundson declined to discuss the matter, but noted, “Even independent of Chu, we would like to have him (Chern) here.”

Despite this, Berkeley officials say that Chu twice last month appeared to accept their more modest offer, only to back down both times--once after the university already had publicly announced his successful recruitment.

On Wednesday, Chu told The Times he still was not close to a decision.

“To tell you the truth, I have been so busy I haven’t given it any serious thought,” he said. “I think right now that either place is good. I could not ask for more from either place.”

Deadline Confusion

It was not clear whether Chu could meet Berkeley’s deadline. He was in New York on Thursday, discussing superconductivity, after spending Tuesday and Wednesday in Washington, meeting with NASA officials and participating in a National Science Foundation seminar at George Washington University.

Geoffrey F. Chew, dean of physics at Berkeley, said Thursday he may let the deadline slip to give Chu enough time to prepare and transmit his response.

But, he added, “if we don’t hear within the next few days, we will have to reluctantly conclude he has decided to remain in Houston.”

For all its drama, Berkeley’s bid for Chu was in itself relatively low-key. The candidate was carefully considered, an offer was made consistent with the university’s existing resources, and no additional incentives were offered in response to Houston’s efforts to keep him.

Universities are eager to offer large salaries and research budgets to Chu and other top scientists because those big-name scientists in turn draw large government and industry research grants, said David Goodstein, a vice provost at Caltech. Such grants can constitute up to 60% of the entire budget of some universities.

“A university is willing to bet on you because they expect you to be able to bring in grants,” Goodstein said. “Part of it (the attraction of famous scientists) is prestige, but much more than prestige is at stake.”

Because such incentives are offered as investments more than gifts, people in the field see the Chu case as setting a new outer limit for universities to consider when recruiting. They generally do not see it as a new standard.

“Every institution is limited by its resources and cannot spend them in a profligate fashion,” said Caltech’s Wasserburg.

But some universities, particularly state-supported institutions, do see their resources being expanded by legislatures eager to attract the industry that tends to gather around the nation’s great universities. Silicon Valley, near Stanford and across San Francisco Bay from Berkeley, is perhaps the best-known, but by no means the only, example.

The University of Texas at Austin is one well-known example; George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., is less well-known but somewhat more surprising.

Founded in 1957 as a division of the University of Virginia, George Mason enrolled only 4,000 students by the time it was accredited as an independent state-supported university in 1972. Since then, it has tried to develop some hallowed halls in a hurry.

One of its methods for recruiting some distinguished senior faculty members is to have junior faculty members nominate teachers at other institutions whom they would like to work with at George Mason.

Opening Letter

“When they decide on someone,” said Provost Wade Gilley, “they send them a letter saying: ‘Do you know someone like this who would be interested in one of our endowed Robinson Professorships?’ Generally speaking, the description fits the very person who receives the letter.”

What this approach lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in novelty--and, in many cases, effectiveness. Since the campaign began in 1982, the university, now enrolling 18,000 students, has filled 11 of 20 endowed professorships.

The first Robinson Professor hired by the university, James Buchanan, won the 1986 Nobel Prize in economics. Others who have come to the school under the program include a political scientist from Harvard, an anthropologist from Amherst, an Africa scholar from Northwestern and historian Roger Wilkins, the chairman of the Pulitzer Prize committee.

“In 1982, we had no ‘name’ professors with national reputations,” Gilley said. “Now we have 41--and we have money in hand for 28 more of them.”

Instant Status

There is little doubt that such raiding can confer instant status on some schools--Stanford, for example, bought instant national stature for its law school by raiding Columbia in the late 1960s--but Getman warns that raiding is not always enough.

“It’s tempting and it can be useful,” he said, “but raiding is rarely successful by itself.”

Hiring a few highly paid superstars runs the risk of irritating the rest of the faculty, he said, and thus actually lowering the overall quality of the institution. Quality graduate students also are critical to a university, and they are more difficult to attract, he added.

In addition, facilities are important to doing good science research, and they usually are awarded through federal and industry grants to universities with long-established reputations.

Still, many professors welcome the faculty raiders. Because even if they decline the raiders’ generous offers, they often can parlay them into better positions at home.

Goodstein, for example, was one of those scholars to receive an unsolicited letter from George Mason University. Although he eventually turned down their proposal, he first made sure that his colleagues at Caltech knew what was offered to him. Professor Goodstein thus became Vice Provost Goodstein.

Such benefits are not uncommon. Paul Chu, whichever university he selects, will have an entire research center at his disposal.

Mark A. Stein reported from Berkeley and J. Michael Kennedy from Houston.