With an unusually large number of University faculty members expected to retire soon — this year’s faculty is the oldest in Cornell’s 145-year history — University administrators are looking to hire large numbers of new tenure-track professors over the next several years.

This expected round of hiring will constitute the first major addition of professors since the late 1960s and early 1970s, according to Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Peter LePage. Since approximately 20 percent of Arts and Sciences professors are over 65, the new faculty will replace the retiring faculty born of the baby boom generation.

In the early 1980’s, around 20% of Cornell’s faculty was over 55; today, 47% of Cornell professors are over 55.

After shrinking the size of its professorial staff due to the budget cuts of the last few years, the College of Arts and Sciences “need[s] to get back to [hiring] 26-7 [professors a year] immediately just to replace the people leaving,” LePage said.

Provost Kent Fuchs said in an e-mail that this demographic is similar across “all the colleges and schools at Cornell.”

Both LePage and Fuchs said that the new spate of hires will not be used to bring certain departments back to their faculty levels from before the financial crisis.  

“The starting point [for adding faculty] is where we are today,” LePage said.

Fuchs confirmed this in his e-mail, saying that he has asked the deans to hire “in areas that are of the highest strategic importance and not to just regrow in the same areas as the past.”

The look of many departments will be “utterly transformed,” LePage said, because turnover caused by retirements will lead the College of Arts and Sciences to hire new professors to fill nearly half of its faculty.

Fuchs added that, since many other top universities “are expecting significant retirements over the next 10 years,” the universities “that will benefit the most during this period will be those that are able to hire excellent faculty now rather than waiting five to 10 years.”

Many faculty say they are excited about the possibility of large influxes of young professors.

Prof. Robert Morgan, English, said that there “hasn’t been this much optimism in years.”  

With the dean “suddenly” giving the department the green light to make “cluster hires,” it “seems like my colleagues are walking around on air,” Morgan said.

Prof. Rosemary Avery, policy analysis and management, said that bringing in new faculty brings “new life, new ideas [and] fresh new people with up-to-date skills.”

The new hires are necessitated by long-term demographic trends. According to LePage, the size of Cornell doubled roughly every twenty years, before stopping “very abruptly” in the 1970’s.

It is now that generation — the professors hired before the reduction in hiring in the 1970s — that have begun retiring and are expected to retire over the next few years.  

Without the recent financial crisis, the University would “be further along” in dealing with the mass turnover of the departments.

The University is also planning a “major fundraising initiative” to fill retiring positions, which will be paid for by “loyal alumni,” according to LePage. The University hopes to raise $100 million in a “Cornell Faculty Renewal Fund.” The University announced yesterday that a $50 million fund will match multiyear gift commitments of $500,000 or more from donors on a dollar-for-dollar basis with University funds.