Carolina Alumni Review - November/December 2009

With so many retired faculty members wanting to help, Strauss stressed that the association can be selective in who it asks to return. “There is an incredible variation in who is in the retired faculty group,” he said. “The only request we have is that the liaisons from Retired Faculty Association take into account the readiness of the faculty returning.”

Strauss emphasized that neither the administration nor Chancellor Holden Thorp ’ 86 is equipped to partner specific retirees to tasks without knowing departmental needs. So, Strauss said, that process is being handled on a departmental basis.

Strauss said he alerted department heads across campus this fall and plans to again in the spring. Then decisions are up to individual department heads to evaluate needs and whether a retiree is the right match for that need.

“[W]e feel this is a process that has to bring a department and a faculty member together,” Strauss says. “It would not be a good idea for the University to make that match. That is a very special match, and it doesn’t need someone who doesn’t know anything about the two units to make that decision. It takes a lot of magic to it.”

William Andrews ’ 73 (PhD), senior associate dean for fine arts and humanities, is one of those people looking for a match. Andrews formed an informal committee of retired faculty this year to discuss how they could maintain a connection with UNC and the College of Arts and Sciences. The committee also is examining how such a connection could be coordinated by departments.

“The things we thought about were the retired faculty being able to present their research in an ongoing symposium,” said Andrews, who predicts discussions will continue. “We talked about retired faculty serving as mentors for new faculty” and serving on dissertation committees.

The College of Arts and Sciences has had to be creative in finding solutions to an 8 percent budget reduction over the past two years. Karen Gil, dean of the College

of Arts and Sciences, says she is planning for another 5 percent cut.

Gil said that in 2008-09, the college suspended 30 faculty searches. There were 60 job openings that year. The college, she says, cut 25 staff positions — 15 were layoffs and 10 were unfilled positions. So far, faculty members have avoided being cut, though some class sections have larger numbers of students than in the past.

“The mission is to create new knowledge, to find solutions to problems, to educate the student body,” Gil said. “[The budget] doesn’t change that, but it threatens to erode it.”

It’s that erosion that Lubker hopes to help stop. “We recognize an opportunity for those who would like to to offer their academic and professional skills in a time of stress,” she said.

Lubker says much of the discussion so far has focused on retired faculty returning only to teach. But she sees other possibilities.

“We want to emphasize some trans-departmental skills,” Lubker said. “We could help young professors get published.”

UNC’s law school has used retired faculty to sit in mock trials as witnesses and jury members. Omar Rushdee, the administrative support specialist for the school’s clinical programs, oversees the trials and has appreciated resources the retired faculty have provided. “We got connections from the retired faculty,” he said. “They helped us branch out to the University network and put us in touch with resources that I didn’t even know were there.”

The desire for retired faculty to stay active at Chapel Hill, Dobelstein says, comes from “a yearning, a hunger, to stay involved with young people.”

And it is that hunger, not the money, that keeps Steiner in the mix at UNC. Cultivating relationships with students in and out of the classroom is his reward.

“Every week, I have intensive discussions with students where I go to Caribou Coffee [on Franklin Street],” he says. “We discuss where they want to go in life.”