There is a lot of activity in the creative arts involving digital media. There is a whole constellation of things that fall into the area of faculty competitiveness. It's not just a matter of salaries, for which we have developed a plan. It's adequate funding for new faculty startup. That's increasingly not just a problem in the physical sciences, where a new professor can require as much as half a million dollars for a lab, but also the acquisition of library resources to support teaching in the humanities.
Competitiveness also means having funds on hand to do cost-sharing on federal grants.
I'm not sure the humanities are easy to fix. They are less costly to fix, but faculty in the humanities need time for research more than anything else. The teaching load in natural sciences here is normally somewhat less than in the humanities. That's not something that has a cheap solution. One knows in theory that it's much more difficult to have a highly ranked sciences program if you're small than it is to have a highly ranked humanities program if you're small.