by Caleb Fort
Daily Lobo
Faculty Senate may begin conducting exit interviews for faculty who leave the University.
An exit interview is a interview given to a departing employee to find out information about a company that might be hard to obtain while the employee works for the company.
Christopher Smith, Faculty Senate president, said the senate is concerned some faculty members might be leaving the school and taking similar jobs at other universities.
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"The question becomes why people are leaving and if we can do anything about it," he said.
Provost Reed Dasenbrock said there is a problem.
"It's pretty clear that at the highest levels we are losing some senior key faculty," he said. "We are being raided by other institutions."
Dasenbrock said the problem is most frequent with upper-level, higher-paid faculty, because UNM cannot afford to pay them the six-figure salaries that some other institutions can offer. In 2003, the average salary of a full professor at UNM was $82,900, according to the UNM Web site.
Smith said the senate is trying to gather information about how many faculty are leaving and why.
He said much of the information is not readily available.
Between 1995 and 2004, the number of tenure-track faculty at UNM dropped from 889 to 852, according to the UNM 2004-2005 Fact Book. However, Smith noted those numbers only reflect a net loss. He said the total number of faculty leaving could be much higher.
He said there is no Universitywide exit interview, so it will probably be impossible to find out why people are leaving UNM. He said it is important to find out why people are leaving, and to do something about it.
He said it would be a good idea to conduct exit interviews over the next two or three years to find out why faculty are leaving.
He said it is bad to regularly have faculty leave the University, because the people who replace them often do not have as much training and experience.
He said it is expensive for UNM to train new professors to the level of old ones, and it is often expensive to hire experienced professors from other institutions. He said students pay those expenses with their tuition.
He said the quality of classes suffers if there are not enough high-level faculty teaching interesting classes. He said if full professors are replaced by too many temporary lecturers, there will not be enough consistency and excellence for classes.
Smith said there are several reasons why faculty might leave. He said the simplest reason is salary. However, he suspects there are several other reasons that add to the problem, he said.
He said professors in his field of computer science get paid much less than computer scientists working for businesses.
"I didn't choose to do this to make money," he said. "If people are making those decisions to work at a university, there might be other factors besides salary."
Tim Hanson, who left the UNM Mathematics and Statistics Department to work at the University of Minnesota about two months ago, agreed.
He said one reason he was unsatisfied with UNM was because some graduate students he worked with were not competent. However, he said other state universities have similar problems because of low admissions standards.
UNM requires graduate students to have a bachelor's degree and at least a 3.0 grade point average, among other requirements.
"You do get very bright students, but you also get students who are very underprepared," he said.
He said UNM's hiring policies can also be frustrating for professors. He said in order to recruit faculty, the University often pays them salaries similar to the salaries of professors who have been at UNM for years.
He said salary also played a role in his decision to leave. He said he gets paid about 30 percent more at his new job.
Hanson emphasized there were several things he liked about UNM and the Mathematics and Statistics Department.
"I really do like Albuquerque, and I really do like New Mexico," he said. "And that department has some of the best people I've come across."
Dasenbrock said if the Faculty Senate decides exit interviews are a good idea, he is willing to help implement them.
