Hillsdale College advertised two new faculty positions this year. It got almost 230 applications for tenure-track positions in the college’s physics and psychology departments.
The majority of those were for an opening in the physics department. The nearly 200 applications for the job were narrowed down to three “very talented candidates,” who were flown to campus for an intense series of interviews and guest lectures, Professor of Physics Jim Peters said.
The last man standing was Paul Hosmer ’99, who graduated from Hillsdale with a bachelor of arts in physics and a minor in French.
“[He] was our overwhelming choice,” Peters said. “We know him. We’re very proud of him.”
Hosmer received his doctorate from Michigan State University, where he ran the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory for nuclear science and isotope research. While there, he and his team discovered a nuclear reaction important for understanding how stars make elements, Peters said. He then went into the Navy for five years and taught nuclear physics to soldiers, and afterward taught for year-long stints at Spring Arbor University and Carson-Newman College.
Hosmer plans on taking Hillsdale students to the cyclotron laboratory to do research during the school year and hopes to set up paid physics internships for them at MSU during the summers.
“I never would have imagined that I’d be coming back to teach [at Hillsdale],” Hosmer said. “I’m excited to come back.”
The other position is in the psychology department, which Dean of Social Sciences and Assistant Professor of Education Jon Fennell said has been short a faculty member for several years. This is the college’s second attempt to find a suitable candidate, after the first search was abandoned without hiring a professor a few years ago.
Fennell said that Hillsdale’s size, lack of a graduate program, location, and strongly conservative mission statement can make it hard to find a good fit.
This time, the college kept the search open until it found Collin Barnes. Barnes graduated from John Brown University in 2003 and received his doctorate from the University of Oklahoma in 2010. His specialty is in social psychology, but he also has expertise in quantitative psychology.
“The [psychology] department was under some stress to offer all the courses that it wanted to offer, so this should relieve some of the burdens there,” Fennell said.
Senior Meghan Haines, a psychology and sociology double major, met Barnes for lunch during his visit and said she thinks he will be a good fit for the college.
“He seems really interested in students and how they feel and think about things,” she said. “He said he was very interested in finding out what students want to learn and teaching those things. Which I think is very indicative of Hillsdale.”
