Author: Ben DeLuca & Kaitlyn Reeser
The DWA and UEP departments are currently on the hunt for faculty to join them next fall according to the Occidental student digest.
The UEP department will be adding one full-time faculty member, while the DWA department will be adding two, according to Department Chairs Professor Chase (DWA) and Professor Dreier (UEP).These hires will come at the end of an extensive search on the part of both departments.
The search process first began in the Spring of 2010 with over one hundred candidates for each position. From this pool, each search team chose either four or five possible professors to visit campus. Many candidates have already visited, but more are scheduled to come in the next few weeks. Each candidate must interview, give a lecture, and meet with students. They remain on campus for almost a week.
Both Professor Reddy, DWA professor and head of the department’s search committee, and Dreier, who is heading the search committee for the UEP department, have led numerous searches at Occidental. They know that the search process is very trying for the applicants who remain.
“They’re probably scared,” Reddy said.
During the application process, each applicant is encouraged to demonstrate his or her abilities as an intellectual and a leader. The lectures, open to the student body, offer the applicant the opportunity to teach for an hour.
“At some point, what you’re doing is trying to assess their potential to become a great teacher,” Dreier said. The goal is to expand the department with a faculty member who will remain at Occidental for many years, according to Dreier.
For the DWA department, this search has been three years in the making. Frequent changes in the administration have made the search for new faculty difficult, but President Veitch stepping in improved the process according to Reddy.
“Jonathan Veitch has been very supportive of the search,” Reddy said.
Additionally, the need for new professors within the DWA and UEP departments has grown especially urgent due to the increase in first-year class sizes.
“The average size of the first-year class through much of the past decade has been around 450. The class target for the Class of 2013 was, minimally, 465,” Vice President of Admissions and Financial Aid Vincent Cuseo said.
Admissions enrolled 573 new first-years in the class of 2014, the largest class yet to join Occidental, according to Cuseo. Competition for admittance to Occidental has also increased considerably, with this year’s applicant pool boasting more highly qualified students than ever, according to Cuseo.
“We experienced an increase in the number of students who applied to Oxy as their first choice through the Early Decision program, and we’ve attracted over 6,000 applications for the first-year class, the most in the history of the college,” Cuseo said.
Along with an increase in numbers, the Admissions Department has noticed a considerable shift within the indicated interests of the newer student body, with higher demand for majors such as DWA and UEP.
“The intellectual interests of our new students are a reflection of the world at large. Greater cross-national interdependence and environmental awareness has spawned heightened interest in our DWA and UEP majors; we’ve seen a spike in students identifying them as possible majors,” Cuseo said.
In 1998, there were 13 declared UEP majors among juniors and seniors, according to Dreier. Currently there are 50.
“We [the UEP department] have over 75 majors and only 3 full-time faculty — one of the highest student-to-faculty ratios at Oxy,” Dreier said.
The DWA department has also seen a large increase in the number of majors. Over the past five years, the number of majors has grown by 20 percent, bringing the current number to 121 declared majors according, to Chase.
“I would anticipate that we will end the year with roughly 130-140 declared majors, which would represent another 5-10 percent increase,” Chase said.
This increase in the number of majors has caused increased class sizes in both departments due to the lack of professors.
“We’ve had to rely on some adjuncts, and that’s problematic,” Reddy said.
Due to the wide range of topics covered within the DWA and UEP departments, students want teachers specializing in today’s critical issues. The DWA department is looking for one professor who specializes in Globalization/Transnational Politics and one who specializes in International Political Economy, according to Reddy.
“It makes sense to have more Latin American or Middle East focuses,” DWA major Jessie Durrett (sophomore) said. Both Dreier and Reddy have found that locating the perfect candidate has been difficult.
“It’s like dating. You find out whether the two people have chemistry,” Dreier said.
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