When he browsed through the course catalog several years ago, the politics department's then-director of undergraduate studies, Jeffrey Herbst, saw something wrong. The courses were the same as they had been for ages. Some fields, like international relations, had scant offerings. Professors were few; they had aged, retired, left.
As the department faculty numbers declined, though, more students were becoming interested in majoring in politics. From 1995 to 2003, the student to faculty ratio increased from 4:1 to 6:1.
When Herbst became politics chair in 2000, he set out to change things. The department hired 12 new faculty members this fall, the largest group in the department's recent history, building on about 12 other hires in the past four years.
Despite some external studies indicating that Princeton's politics department still has more work to do, Herbst's efforts are paying off as the department gains recognition.
How did he — and the Tilghman administration in full support of his efforts — get the department to its present state?
It was a long, concerted effort that began long before the recent recruits took to their lecture podiums and Corwin Hall offices this fall.
The plan called for gathering enough well-known professors to attract others, a change in the intellectual environment from Cold War to post-Cold War to post-Sept. 11 and, possibly, a commitment from the department and administration to be financially competitive.
The problems that faced the department can be traced to a number of sources. Retirements of prominent professors coupled with a gradual inflow of student concentrators had been wearing on the department since the mid-1990s, said Herbst, who is on leave this year. There were 196 majors and 48 full-time faculty members in the 1995-1996 school year. By the 2002-2003 year, the number of concentrators had swelled to 280, while faculty numbers had decreased to 44.
National reviews highlighted the decline. The U.S. News and World Report's graduate school ranking placed the politics department sixth in the nation, half a point on a scale of five behind programs at Harvard and Stanford universities and the University of California, Berkeley.
A more recent report from the London School of Economics, one based on the reputation of a program among fellow institutions, made it clear that the past few years have not been good for the politics department.
Ranking the politics department ninth on a global scale — based on the number of articles published by faculty, the number of citations of those published articles and the prestige of the journals in which they were published — the study placed Princeton behind Ohio State University, the European Union University and the University of California, Irvine. The data was gathered over a five-year period ending in 2003.
Reasons
Herbst said the dwindling faculty stems largely from the widespread changes in academics that emerged after the Cold War.
In the 1960s, the University hired a young class of professors focused on the threat of communism. Acclaimed academics such as Robert Gilpin and Richard Falk were part of this class. By the mid-1990s, with the Soviet Union thoroughly defeated, many of these professors were ready to retire.
Prominent politics professors Henry Bienen and John Waterbury left to become the presidents of, respectively, Northwestern University and the American University in Beirut, while others died or retired. A particular weakness was evident in the international relations field at the University, from which Gilpin, an eminent political economist; Falk, an expert on international law; and Michael Doyle, a democratic theorist, retired or left.
"The department [was] going through a very profound demographic shift," Herbst said, adding that nearly all faculty members in the department began to take notice of this.
Despite the retirement of many professors, only when Herbst became chair and started clamoring to rebuild the department did the administration become aware of the problems.
Herbst came up with a specific plan — to aggressively pursue the best professors in the field. And he received the administrative support to do it, first from President Shirley Tilghman and, later, from Dean of the Faculty David Dobkin.
"In the Princeton system," Herbst said, "you can't hire aggressively without the full support of Nassau Hall."
Strategy
The University says the hiring strategy succeeded because of a shift from offering positions one at a time to established professors to offering multiple positions at once to many rising stars. But another politics chair with a knowledge of Princeton politics thinks the success is due to the University's large financial commitment.
"Princeton has showed its willingness to throw money" at potential hires, said William Foltz '57, a former teacher of many of Princeton's current faculty and Yale's politics chair. "It's a marketplace. That's clear."
The University, however, maintains it was the change in strategy, not money, that was key.
Casting a large net meant the department no longer had to wait for one prospective professor to respond to an offer before moving to another candidate.
Moreover, multiple offerings allow prospective professors to see what their colleagues were doing. If a few accept Princeton's offer, more might follow suit.
"It's momentum," Herbst said. "Success builds on itself."
Yale's politics department has also ratcheted up its effort to hire new faculty.
Under a plan called "The New Initiative," which has been under way for a few years, Foltz said Yale is trying to attract new people based on their merit as scholars rather than based on openings in specific fields such as international relations or political theory. He said that focusing on getting the best professors regardless of their areas of focus gives his department more leverage to pursue topnotch professors throughout academia.
Yale's department has also felt the crunch of low rankings. The London School of Economics had ranked it 10th, a slot below Princeton.
Regardless of Yale's approach, University efforts have seemed to work. The effects are most readily seen in the field of international relations, in which five new faculty members — three tenured professors and two assistant professors — have come on board in the last year.
Wilson School Dean Anne-Marie Slaughter '80 played a crucial role in attracting faculty to this field, helping the politics department to assemble an academic dream team and create deeper links with the Wilson School.
"Jeff Herbst in politics and I simply convinced [the prospective faculty] that Princeton was the place to be," Slaughter said. "We were serious about building the finest IR [international relations] faculty in the nation."
Some recently hired faculty members also said financial incentives played little role in luring them.
John Ikenberry, a former Georgetown University professor who was also offered a position at Yale before deciding to come to the University last year, said the salaries at other top universities are comparable.
He said salary was not a factor in his decision to leave Georgetown, turn down Yale and come to Princeton. Rather, he said it was Slaughter's "vision and enthusiasm for bringing people together" that convinced him to join this fall.
Officials said the University could afford to hire new politics faculty because there were many unfilled positions for which money was allotted.
Other renowned international relations scholars who came to the University this fall include Andy Moravcsik, who left a tenured position at Harvard, and Helen Milner, from a tenured position at Columbia University.
For junior faculty openings, the politics department worked to let many young academics know that Princeton was trying to recruit new scholars and that they could go through the usual hiring route, said acting politics chair Nancy Bermeo.
"Between 100 and 200 people apply for most openings, and they are hired on the basis of huge amounts of written work . . . and then job talks and interviews which take a great deal of time," she said in an email. The assistant professors come fresh out of graduate schools like Cornell University, University of Rochester and international universities, as well as assistant professorships at rival institutions.
Administrators and professors see more work to be done despite the progress made. Slaughter said she wants to fill positions in international law, human rights and Russian, Japanese and Middle Eastern politics at the Wilson School.
Herbst said the politics department will slow down its hiring rate. Now the department will focus on cultivating the faculty it has already hired.
"The work doesn't end when someone signs an acceptance letter," he said.
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