CSUCI Close to Selecting Its 1st Slate of Professors

Ventura County’s first four-year public university is a step closer to hiring its initial batch of full-time professors, after a final round of in-person interviews that wrapped up over the weekend.

From 60 finalists--men and women from the United States and abroad--up to 23 will be selected as faculty members at the fledgling Cal State Channel Islands.

“The faculty will build the programs and the quality of the programs,” said Richard Rush, the university’s newly appointed president, adding that he hopes to make his final staffing selections by the end of May. “Without that, we don’t have the kind of university everyone wants. It is the No. 1 priority for me.”

The pool of candidates, flown in from as far away as Australia and Mexico to tour the Camarillo campus, was narrowed from 2,300 applicants, said Ira Schoenwald, associate vice president for academic resources at Cal State Channel Islands.

The finalists, vying for jobs that will pay an average of $72,000 annually, were interviewed over the last two weekends.

The task of securing almost two dozen highly qualified professors was daunting enough for Schoenwald and another staff member assigned to the hiring process, and it was made more difficult by a tight budget and constrained time frame.

So they got creative.

With a $50,000 grant from the Cal State Channel Islands Foundation, a group of campus supporters, Schoenwald hired a local software company that leases land at the developing campus. Camarillo-based Rieger and Milliken Corp. created a new system for recruiting and screening applicants for a variety of academic positions solely over the Web.

The customized computer program, which the university has helped test, will be sold to other educational institutions nationwide, said the company’s co-owner Ron Rieger. And 5% of the proceeds will be given to CSUCI for scholarships, Schoenwald said.

“There are only two of us, we had a short timeline, and we had limited resources,” he said. “The Internet became the solution.”

Rieger and Schoenwald said several universities, including others in the Cal State system and a few well-known other institutions, including Notre Dame, have expressed interest in the software called the College Recruiting System.

Schoenwald estimates that the cyber-search will have saved the university more than $1 million in travel, mailing and paper reproduction costs, because everything except the meetings with the finalists and telephone interviews was done via the Web or e-mail.

Although not without some drawbacks--such as the need to log on frequently to the Internet--the process has received a positive response overall, officials said. Using the Internet in hiring faculty is nothing new, but Schoenwald said Cal State Channel Islands is the first university that intends to hire all of its professors online.

“The Internet process has given us visibility we don’t normally have,” he said. “It really gives us a window to the world. And the quality of our candidates is outstanding.”

The sentiment was echoed by Lynne Cook, a professor at Cal State Northridge and chairwoman of the faculty search committee for Cal State Channel Islands. That 12-member panel conducted the personal interviews and will make final recommendations to the university president. The original group of applicants was narrowed by various committees totaling about 30 university faculty members from all over California, who reviewed applications and resumes online, Cook said.

Final choices will be difficult, she said, and must be made carefully to ensure that the people hired are not only experts in their own disciplines but able to work well with colleagues in other departments.

“The trick here is we’re not hiring faculty members--we’re hiring a faculty,” Cook said. “This is a group who will build a university. You have to look at how Barbara’s skills fit with Jim’s.”

She said she hopes to forward the committee’s recommendations to Rush by the end of the week. Once on board--by August, it is hoped--the professors will begin mapping out the university’s curriculum and preparing for fall 2002, when the first group of upper-division transfer students is scheduled to be admitted.

Cal State Northridge currently uses portions of the sprawling, Spanish-style grounds as a satellite campus. But if enrollment goals are met, that program eventually will merge into a new four-year university.

Freshmen are scheduled to begin taking classes at Cal State Channel Islands in fall 2003. By then, the university should have at least 100 professors hired, about half on a part-time basis, and will continue to use the online system to recruit and screen additional applicants, Schoenwald said.