MTU to launch second phase of Strategic Faculty Hiring Initiative

Soon, the University will be launching for the second time the mysterious acronym SFHI and its associated program, the Strategic Faculty Hiring Initiative. Second, you say? Yes, this will be the second time the SFHI is being organized, out of a total of 10 planned runs. What is the SFHI? It is its name: a hiring initiative. However, it’s more than that. The first SFHI was the first time an interdisciplinary hiring run was done. Prior to last summer, hiring always took place in an intradisciplinary manner; people were promoted from within the department, and new hires, prohibitively expensive to such an internal operation, were almost unheard of. The first SFHI changed all that. With its theme of sustainability, the first committee brought together people and funds from across campus, resulting in seven new hires as well as the promotion of three endowed chairs. All 10 were people who were researching issues related to sustainability, and all were people willing to work in an interdisciplinary manner. Why an SFHI? Because “environmental problems are inherently interdisciplinary,” said Kathy Halvorsen. You may be asking what sustainability is. According to one of the committee co-chairs, John Gierke, “[Sustainability is] meeting the needs and demands for today without compromising the availability of resources for the future.” The second SFHI will be themed around computing. It may not seem like computing is as “inherently interdisciplinary,” but computing is rapidly becoming global, and MTU plans to be ready for it.