How to Ask Your Department To Pay for Professor Is In Help

Your department or college may be able to pay for your participation in ANY Professor Is In work, including our formal programs, as well as editing of your professionalization/job search/tenure documents. What follows is context and scripts for asking your department to fund your participation in Unstuck: The Art of Productivity and The Art of the Academic Article, and/or The Professor Is In Pre-Tenure Coaching Group, but you can use it to ask for any kind of professional development or program improvement support.  Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at [email protected] for more help!

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Your department might pay for your enrollment in this course, and the only you will find out is to ask. Don’t be afraid. Department heads get requests for funding all of the time. There is nothing shameful about it. In fact, learning how to ask is great practice for the rest of your career.

The best way to loosen the departmental purse strings is to show the money is going to solve a problem the department head considers worth solving.

So what problem does the course solve?

• Maybe your department is worried about your pace of publication.
• Maybe your department is focused on raising its profile.
• Maybe your department has a stated desire to support underrepresented faculty.

You also have to show the stakes of not solving the problem.

• You may not progress to tenure
• The department’s output might lag.
• You and the department might miss out on involvement in high profile projects and collaborations.
• You may miss out on funding opportunities.

Stating the problem and stakes is not enough. You also have to show why this particular thing you are asking to be funded will solve the problem.

• Why this course?
• Why these people?

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Here is an example email that you can use to approach your dean, department head or PI to make the request that the course be funded. NOTE: IT IS RECOMMENDED THAT YOU DO NOT USE THESE EXAMPLES VERBATIM, AS WE HAVE THOUSANDS OF READERS AND CLIENTS, MANY IN THE SAME DEPARTMENTS. WE SUGGEST YOU SLIGHTLY REPHRASE THE MODELS BELOW IN YOUR OWN WORDS.

>Dear <administrator>

I have an opportunity to enroll in a coaching program designed for academics to

//produce a full draft of journal article in 10 weeks

//support my success on the tenure track

//help me complete my research and writing for tenure

>and I am requesting departmental support to cover the costs. The course is being offered by The Professor is In, a career services organizations with well-documented and unparalleled success since 2011 in assisting academics in all phases of their careers.

>The benefit of

// The Art of the Academic Article, over other programs, is not only the extensive experience of the two coaches offering guidance but also the ongoing access to the online material. I will be able to use the course material for not just this article, but all future ones as well.

//The Professor Is In Pre-Tenure Coaching Group is that it provides individualized, confidential small group coaching as I confront the challenges of mapping out a publication trajectory, establishing an effective writing schedule, managing a sustainable balance of research, teaching, and service, managing the demands of conferencing and networking, and grasping the elements of a successful tenure case (including the role of external reviewers) to support my success in that arduous process.

>As we have discussed,

//I have XX articles in progress that are necessary/would improve my third year review/tenure review/post doc production/chances of success on the job market. This course would assure that I produce xx articles in the next year. It also increases my chances of publication in the mostly highly ranked journals because it includes instruction on positioning both in terms of discipline and journal rank.

//I have an active research program underway, while also being dedicated to effective teaching and productive service to the department.  This coaching program will give me the support of Dr. Karen Kelsky- who has not only been a dedicated academic development coach since 2011, but is also a former R1 department head who in that role mentored 5 junior faculty to tenure – and a small group of peers who can together serve as a sounding board for decisions I need to make about publishing strategies, writing timelines, teaching dilemmas, and work-life balance – to name just a few topics the group covers. The program will assure that I avoid common pitfalls and focus my time and effort most effectively toward eventual tenure success in a way that is *individualized* for our specific field, department and campus expectations.

>The next session of the course starts on XXXX. Please let me know if you are willing to support this effort and I will purchase and submit the receipt for reimbursement/contact accounting to arrange payment.  

OR [another style of approach- adapt as you see fit!]

As we have discussed, one of the critical components of raising the profile of our department is to increase faculty publications and the quality of those publications. This course would assure that I produce xx articles in the next year. It also increases my chances of publication in the mostly highly ranked journals because it includes instruction on positioning both in terms of discipline and journal rank.

It is no secret that balancing research, service and teaching is a challenge for all junior faculty here at xx. With this course, I will have the resources to achieve the balance required for success. With your support, I will be able to avoid common problems like false starts, writer’s block, and perfectionism, while assuring I choose the best journals to target, and submit a draft to a strong journal in an efficient time frame.

The next session of the course starts on XXXX. Please let me know if you are willing to support this effort and I will purchase and submit the receipt for reimbursement/contact accounting to complete the registration/ xxx

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Trans on the Job Market: a Crowdsource Post

The post Trans on the Job Market: a Crowdsource Post appeared first on The Professor Is In.

It Takes Money to be Moral: Thoughts on Academic Ghosting

This week the Chronicle published a fascinating essay about academic ghosting. I am quoted in it. The author and I spoke at great length and had a great conversation.

 

 

What I find interesting, however, is what she did NOT use from our long talk: all the things I said about the ECONOMICS of ghosting specifically in the context of academic hiring.

 

 

https://www.chronicle.com/…/the-sad-humiliations-of…

 

 

Ie, that catastrophic systemic defunding means we no longer have sufficient administrative staff to send the emails to candidates when they are no longer under consideration.

 

 

Because it was the administrative staff who sent them back in the day! And now those staff are gone, or overwhelmed with other work.

 

 

I said this over and over.

 

 

But she wanted the problem to be about morals. Which it absolutely is! Faculty should behave better and ghosting is outrageous and immoral. And it occurs all over the place, as she describes, not just in hiring. And it’s bad.

 

 

But. Morals are also a by-product of economics.

 

 

Because accountable hiring systems require money, money in the form of administrative staff, and reasonable work demands. IS IT A COINCIDENCE that the Academic Jobs Wiki started the same year as the Great Recession??

 

 

Late capitalism wants to pretend otherwise but the collapse of actual human accountability is rampant across all sectors of our economy now because of budget cut after budget cut. Cuts have consequences. Yes it hurts more in academia because of our peculiar structures of intimacy, but in the end, like everything else, it comes down to adequate or inadequate funding.

 

 

To say otherwise is to keep participating in academic exceptionalism, that academia owes “more” to the world because it “should be” finer or better. That academics are special people who operate outside the demands of capitalism. Which is the same logic that fuels adjunctification and the imperative to work for free or for peanuts in pursuit of some myth of “higher calling.”

 

She ends the essay with this:  “But some scholars, especially those who are early career, women, and people of color, are trying to deal with these conditions. We are desperately trying to renovate — to make the whole place safer, more welcoming. We are trying to add rooms, to guide guests through the various mazes, to build a more stable foundation. We take on this labor because renovating is the professional thing to do; building an academy where structures encourage us to be accountable to one another, to set and communicate boundaries, and to show up as best we can — that’s the work.

 

We owe each other more.”

And what is this, but yet another call for “special” academics — the young, women, and people of color — to work for free?  To sacrifice themselves, without compensation, in the service of some higher moral imperative of academia?  More exploitation in the service of the myth.

Will this never change?  Has this myth not done enough damage? Do people never learn?  Learn that academia will never love you back?  That individual effort CANNOT alter structural failure?

 

That rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic is also its own form of unpaid labor, even as the ship sinks?

 

 So this essay as written is both brilliant and necessary, and completely wrong, at least about ghosting in hiring. It requires money to create and sustain the infrastructure for humane hiring practices. Let’s not gaslight about (the causes of) our gaslighting.

 

 

 

 

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