Of the 3,210 UT faculty members, 33 are members of the National Academy of Engineering, more than 20 are Guggenheim fellows, six are winners of the MacArthur fellowship, two are Pulitzer Prize winners, one is a Nobel Prize winner in physics and several have won the National Medal of Science.
UT faculty members continued to gather accolades this spring, earning among other awards another Guggenheim fellowship and appointments to the National Academy of Sciences.
In 2002, former UT President Larry Faulkner called together a group of 218 former UT System regents and community leaders to create 125 recommendations to improve the academic standing of the University. One of the recommendations was to recruit 300 top faculty members by 2010 and improve student-to-professor ratios.
Biology professor David Hillis does research at a field lab located on the Brackenridge Tract and was one of three UT scientists elected to the National Academy of Sciences in May. Hillis said his election to the Academy was largely a result of research made possible by a 1999 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
The fellowship is a prestigious national award, which comes with a large stipend to be spent at the winner's discretion.
"My research program has been greatly facilitated by the University and its excellent community of biologists," Hillis said in an e-mail.
Hillis added that his collaborations with several outstanding graduate students were critical to the success of his research.
"If we can attract the best graduate students, we will attract the best faculty," he said.
He said the University has not yet reached its full potential as a destination for top, award-winning faculty because the budget is too dependent on outside grants and tuition. The state provides less than 20 percent of UT's budget, he said.
UT President William Powers said the University is on its way to meeting the commission's goal and the student-faculty ratio has been steadily improving, but he said he would not sacrifice quantity for quality.
Powers said hiring top-notch professors while satisifying the need for more educators is a slow process. He said 30 new faculty members are hired every year with additional funds provided every year.
"To hire new faculty, the bulk of money comes from informal funds - it's very rare that we hire new faculty where the funds don't come from the internal budget," Powers said.
The availability of those funds won't preclude the University from looking for additional financial resources such as the 345-acre, UT-owned Brackenridge Tract, which includes a golf course and attractive amenities to top professors and students such as field labs and graduate student
housing. A planning firm is developing future uses of the tract that would be more financially beneficial for the University, Powers said.
Many advocates of the field lab have argued that if the lab is removed, the College of Natural Science's ability to attract top faculty and graduate students would be diminished.
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