Efforts should be made to create endowed chairs to bring in top quality researchers. These researchers would revitalize their home departments and form the focal point for interdisciplinary teams of faculty. This requires the dean's office to work with focused teams of faculty to generate interest among former students, the general public, or New Jersey industry in supporting and setting up endowed chairs. A long term hiring plan must be created along programmatic lines to strengthen multidisciplinary interactions and interdepartmental cooperation. This will allow advertising for new faculty hires in early Fall rather than Winter as is the current situation.
Advertising earlier increases the caliber of the applicants.
The wave of the future is multidisciplinary research. This is the result of our increasing levels of knowledge and the need for researchers with complementary skills to bring each others' research to a new level. All of the major grant agencies recognize this fact and provide large monetary incentives for the formation of interdisciplinary teams to work on a common problem. Mount an internal interdisciplinary grants competition to support the formation of faculty teams to work in a common area. These grants should be awarded on the assumption that the interdisciplinary teams will eventually obtain significant external funding.