UConn Hiring Plan Includes

65 New Faculty In Fall

STORRS (AP) — The University of Connecticut is moving forward with a plan to hire 275 new faculty members and said Wednesday that 155 should be in place before the fall of 2013.

UConn President Susan Herbst announced the initiative earlier this year, saying the school wanted to increase the faculty by about 300 over four years to reduce the current student-teacher ratio from 18-to-1 to 15-to-1.

UConn was at that lower ratio until about 10 years ago, when enrollment started climbing but hiring didn’t keep pace.

Uconn’s fall 2011 enrollment was more than 30,000 graduate and undergraduate students.

The school announced that it will hire 65 new faculty members this fall and another 90 for the fall of 2013. It said the hiring will focus on research and teaching positions.

“UConn is pursuing this aggressive strategy to transform our institution by generating more research that has national and international impact, increasing our research productivity, building great graduate programs, providing excellent teaching and service to our undergraduate students and expanding course offerings,” Herbst said.

The school says the new positions will be funded mainly by the tuition increase plan passed by the university’s Board of Trustees in December. The plan calls for annual increases of at least 6 percent, totaling 17 percent over the next four years.