Some Recruitments Start With a Personal Spark

In the arena of intellectual property, Siva Vaidhyanathan is a star. He helped pioneer the field of digital copyright, wrote several books and testified as an expert before the U.S. Copyright Office on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

He even appeared on "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart."

Vaidhyanathan, 41, began teaching at New York University in 1999 as an associate professor in the Department of Media Culture and Communication. His wife, Melissa Henriksen, a molecular biologist, was working at Fordham University. They thought they would be New Yorkers their entire lives.

But things changed.

Two years ago, the couple had a daughter. They were living in a one-bedroom faculty apartment and struggling with the financial pressures of raising a family in New York City. Vaidhyanathan said he asked NYU for a two-bedroom faculty apartment. His doorman told him that a number of empty apartments were available, but he could never get the housing office to help. He began to feel, he said, that the university was not interested in developing his career.

"I might have been high-profile, but I wasn't high-dollar," he said, meaning that he did not bring in major research grants.

During the 2004-05 school year, he attended a conference at the University of Minnesota, where he met one of his academic heroes, Edward L. Ayers, then a dean at the University of Virginia.

The two liked each other immediately, and the subject of a move to Virginia came up. The dean said he wanted to expand media studies at U-Va. into a full department and make it a top-notch one. U-Va. also expressed interest in Henriksen, a woman in a largely male field.

Other schools began looking at the couple, but the two kept their eyes on Charlottesville. Last year, they turned down an offer from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and headed to U-Va., which Vaidhyanathan said was far more interested in helping develop young academics than NYU.

"It was a rare occasion where one single couple filled two needs of the university," he said. "We are really grateful."

John Beckman, vice president for public affairs at NYU, said that he could not discuss details of Vaidhyanathan's departure and that it was wrong to extrapolate about an entire school based on one professor's complaints.

"While NYU will no doubt feel the absence of his many animated contributions to our community, we're pleased to know he's happy in Virginia, and, all in all, that outcome seems to have worked out best for all sides."