This year, the members of the class of 2019 are not the only ones who are starting their journey at Cabrini. The college has taken on 12 new faculty members, one of the largest group of new hires ever recorded.
“There’s actually several reasons [for the new hires],” Dr. Mary Harris, the Dean for Academic Affairs, said. “We had quite a few faculty that have retired…so some of them are replacement for those faculty.”
She also mentioned that a few of the new faculty were for the new Leadership and Organizational Development Department.
This department contains the new doctoral program in organizational development, the masters of Science and Leadership program and the Leadership Studies minor and degree completion program.
In addition to the new department’s programs, there’s also a new education doctoral program in Educational Leadership and a new masters in Religious Studies.
To find the candidates for the new positions, each department head chairs the search and department faculty help review resumes and conduct interviews. Once they are down to two or three candidates, they are brought to campus to meet with Harris and Dr. Jeffrey Gingerich, the provost and vice president of academic affairs. This process was an extremely busy time for them.
“We did have several weeks where we were meeting with candidates, because… for 12 positions, we probably met with 30 to 40 different candidates,” Harris said.
According to Gingerich, when the candidates were brought to campus, they spent the entire day meeting with the search commit- tee, who helped to find the candidates, with the deans, the provost, other faculty members and, most importantly, with students. “It’s kind of s grueling day for the candidates,” Gingerich said jokingly.
After being hired, all of the new faculty members go through training both within their own departments and with the college as a whole. They begin right away, working with the faculty chair to help integrate them into the department.
Then during the week prior to the start of school they attend a two-day orientation where they learn everything they need to know about teaching at Cabrini, from Cabrini’s mission and history, to the academic honesty policy, to how to login to Blackboard. Throughout the year they meet with the center for teaching and learning fellows, a group of senior teachers who will meet monthly with the new fac-
ulty members to ensure that they are integrating well into the com- munity.
“Teaching is so important to us, so having the right teachers for students is really worth putting everything into,” Gingerich said. “I want the students to know that we really put a lot of careful thought into this because we know how important it is to have good classes. I’m very excited about the quality of this incoming class of teachers.”
