Retention Requests, Partner Accommodations, and Targeted Hires

Texas Tech University (TTU) is committed to hiring and retaining excellent faculty members who advance our scholarly missions and priorities as they relate to research and creative endeavors, teaching, and outreach and engagement. 

Embedded within these goals is the explicit acknowledgement that a heterogeneous faculty:

• Adds breadth and depth to our scholarly endeavors; 
• Increases our ability to reach historically underrepresented students and community stakeholders; 
• Increases access to people and resources to support our strategic missions and those of the larger campus community; 
• Is consistent with our standing as a public institution, which seeks to serve the citizens of Texas and beyond; and 
• Is foundational as a Hispanic-Serving Institution with a Carnegie R1 research designation. 

To help us achieve the above recruitment and retention goals, TTU has established three funding sources to provide added support for faculty hires. These are the Partner Accommodation, Faculty Retention (formerly “flight risk”) and Targeted Hiring pools, which contain both one-time and recurring funding allocations.

Prioritization

Given limited department, college and university resources (both one-time and, especially, recurring resource allocations), it is important that we prioritize resources in a manner that ensures progress on key institutional goals and strategic objectives. 

The following principles should guide decisions about the use of resources to support partner accommodations, faculty retentions, and targeted hiring of faculty:

1. All partner accommodations add to the heterogeneity of our faculty through the primary and secondary hires, including but not limited to disciplinary expertise, educational background, demographic representation and content area specializiation.
2. Partner accommodations less than three years in duration will likely cause faculty members to go “on the market” within a year.
3. We commit to being honest and transparent about our ability to find a long-term arrangement for partner hires. 
4. A long-term plan for the accommodated partner needs to be outlined and invested in from the outset. We cannot find ourselves delaying these decisions. 
5. Our retention efforts should be viewed through a “preemptive-retention” lens. By the time a faculty member has a competing offer from another institution, they have already begun to mentally separate themselves from TTU.  
6. Preemptive retentions are always more cost-effective than attempting to match or exceed a competing offer. 
7. In particular, failure to retain assistant professors is exceedingly costly - financially, socially, and reputationally. 
8. When making targeted hires of faculty members from different backgrounds, (see #1 above for more detail) as well as when making partner accommodations, we must ensure we have necessary ingredients for their success (e.g. potential colleagues, programmatic fit, funding opportunities, etc.) either already in place or well underway prior to their arrival on campus.
9. Partner accommodations, faculty retentions, and targeted hiring of faculty from different backgrounds all merit shared investments from the campus community.
10. The greater the degree to which a current or prospective faculty member helps us meet multiple institutional goals, the harder we will work to find, attract, and keep them. HOwever, not every potential departure or hiring opportunity will merit such an effort.

Accommodation Requests

Partner accommodation requests should come from departments, through deans, to the Provost and Vice Provost for Faculty Development. Please complete the form even if you are not requesting funds. (The department or college hiring the primary hire should initiate the request for the partner accommodation.) 

Initial support for these hires can be accomplished over a three- or four-year period in one of two ways:

• No support is being requested;
• Two-third, one-third split (Provost Office/Department or College) over a three-year period; 
• Half split (Provost Office/Department or College) over a four-year period.

Please use the following forms to initiate the conversations around these hires:

• Partner Accommodation
• Retention Funding
• Targeted Hire