Faculty who stay

There's a version of CRNA program staffing that institutions fall into without ever deciding on it. You post a faculty line written the way every other faculty line on campus is written. You get thin applications. You eventually hire someone, they teach for two or three years, and then they leave — usually back to full-time clinical practice, usually citing something about being away from the OR. Then you post the line again.

That revolving door is expensive in ways that don't show up as a budget item. Every departure costs you institutional memory, relationships with clinical sites, and continuity that the COA very much notices. And it's almost entirely self-inflicted, because the underlying cause is a mismatch between what the position offers and what the people qualified to fill it actually want.

Here is the thing that surprises most deans: CRNAs who go into education overwhelmingly want to keep practicing. Not as a hedge, and not for the money. Clinical currency is the source of their credibility in the classroom, and the work itself is a large part of why they became CRNAs. A faculty package that treats clinical practice as a distraction to be minimized is, to the exact candidates you most want, a package that asks them to give up the best part of their professional life.

The programs that retain faculty do the opposite. They build protected practice time into the appointment deliberately — real, scheduled, defended time, not an informal understanding that evaporates the first busy semester. Counterintuitively, this does not make the program more expensive. It makes it more efficient. You recruit from a far deeper pool, you close searches faster, you hold onto people long enough for them to become genuinely good at teaching, and your students learn from someone who was in a room last week.

The condition, of course, is that the work gets done. Protected time is a structure, not a favor, and it works when expectations on both sides are explicit from the offer letter forward.

We handle faculty recruitment in-house for the programs we build, drawing on academic contacts nationwide. That saves our clients the headhunter fees that typically run into six figures, but the more valuable part is what comes with it: interview support, and a retention plan designed before the first hire rather than after the first resignation.