By Pete Brieger
The university will hire at lease 78 more professors by September to fill positions made vacant because of retirements.
And the hiring spree isn’t expected to end there, said Ryerson’s v.p. faculty affairs Michael Dewson.
“We’ve approved more positions than we have for a long time,” he said.
Though the number of professors Ryerson plans to hire beyond 1999 hasn’t been determined, the University of Toronto and York University have already announced they are looking to hire 500 and 250 professors respectively over the next five years.
The hunt to hire more professors has been discussed for 10 years. Ryerson was predicting a faculty shortage in the early 1990s.
In 1991, the school said 182 teachers would reach retirement age by the end of the decade. Though Dewson doesn’t have a total figure on how many professors have retired, he said 60 professors opted for early retirement in 1996.
Ryerson has already begun an advertisement campaign. In one Globe and Mail display ad, 11 tenure-track positions are being offered in programs including journalism, image arts, graphic communications management, interior design and theatre.
But it’s the faculty of engineering that is slated to receive the largest number of instructors with 16 being hired for September, said Dewson.
Last September, the school of electrical and computer engineering decided to increase enrolment by 20 per cent, the minimum expansion required by the provincial government for grant eligibility under its “double-the-pipeline” program, an attempt to increase high-tech engineering and computer science graduates.
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