Your Institution Has Money. Here's How to Get it.
AND! Announcing pay-what-you-want October master classes!
First, I have some amazing news. I took a walk yesterday, and wore a hoodie. Leaves fell from a tree, and gently hit the ground. Fall is here, and I love it!
Anyway, this is a post about how to extract resources from your institution so you can write all of the things you’re meant to write. Which we’ll get to after a few exciting announcements.
Announcements!
October: NEW! Thinking Like An Editor Master Class! I’m really excited to be offering a pay-what-you-want, four-part master class on thinking like an editor, where I’ll share tips on how to begin, write, revise, and publish a major writing project. These sessions will be every Wednesday in October from 12-130 pm eastern, and a recording will be made available afterwards. Info is here, and you can register here, and I’ll send you a Zoom link and info about how to access the recording. Please share these with colleagues!
November: AcWriMo! We’re only 44 days away from November 1, which means AcWriMo is coming quick. I’ll have more details about the free AcWriMo writing group soon, but you can register here if you want to commit to writing together for a month, and use the master classes to set you up for success.
January: Writing retreat! The fabulous Mirya Holman of MHAWS and I are hosting another MEE Centered Writing Retreat, and it’s filling up quickly! Don’t wait to apply—You can come write with us January 2-6, 2024 in the Texas Hill Country, one of my favorite places in all the world. All the goal setting. All the writing sessions. All the snacks. All the firepits and stargazing. It’ll be warm enough to take walks outside.
The details are all here and the application is here, and I’m happy to answer any questions (and hopefully this newsletter helps you brainstorm ways your university will pay for this!) The retreat is starting to fill, so now is a good time to get your application in!Spring semester: Spring writing circles and editing! Our fall writers’ circles are even more amazing than I imagined they would be. I’ll be officially announcing the spring sessions soon, but you can find more information here, and you can use the application form here to apply. The price is discounted if you register before Nov 1! Also, this is a great time to set up a time for us to work together in the spring—let me know if you’d like to get on my editing calendar for mid-January and beyond. Bring me great stuff to read! Let’s get it published!
Now, a little story about how not to support faculty….
A lot of people ask me about the moment I knew I was going to leave academia. I’ll tell you the whole story one day over drinks, but here are the broad details. We hired a new president, and one of his first administrative decisions was to circulate a memo that read, in effect: “The use of faculty development money for the following is prohibited: kennel care; childcare…” This was January or so of 2020, and I was pregnant with my third baby.
I was on Faculty Council—the only untenured member, and certainly the only pregnant member—and I was naive enough to think I could change things, so we invited him and the provost to meet with us (Mirya shared a lot of wisdom on that topic last week). Long story long, he said that because football coaches don’t expect to bring their families to games, neither should academics, told me to stay in my lane, none of the tenured faculty at the table stood up for me (or made eye contact with me), he made sure his point was clear and then left the room. And I knew in that moment I was going to be right the fuck behind him—it just took me a little while to get there.
Money isn’t fair
I share this story because issues of faculty development and the funding we need to do our jobs is personal to me. This is the place where inequities between institutions really show up. Whether we have access to funding, and how much of it, has a profound impact on our ability to balance work and life, to live where we want, to publish what we need to in order to get tenure—and we the world simply looks different from one institution to the next. Contingent faculty, folks at community college, state schools that are being starved for funding, I hear you.
But at the same time, universities asking us to believe in the scarcity model is a way to further neoliberalize the institution and ask us to personally finance our own success. What other profession doesn’t fully cover travel to professional events that are vital to the mission of the university? How many conferences did have you paid for out of your own pocket because $1000 isn’t getting you a plane ride and a hotel for three days in San Francisco, let alone conference registration and a drink at the hotel bar…
Designing your support structure
The fact is, we need resources to do our jobs well, and your institutions have more of those than they pretend to, and I have some ideas for how you can get it. I’ll preface this by saying I’m not sure how much of this applies to scholars outside of the United States who may have access to more/different/fewer resources.
When you are setting goals for a project—whether it’s a new project or finishing an old one—it’s important to think about the barriers that stand between you and accomplishing that goal, and the resources you need in order to overcome those barriers in a way that goes beyond accountability. This is how you create what Tara Mohr talks about as a success architecture—the scaffolding of resources and routines and supports that you need in place to get things done.
These don’t look the same for everyone. You might need to work with a surveying company, or hire a student who’s a stats wiz, or work with a partner fluent in local languages during field work. You might need a week of focused time with a collaborator at the beginning and end of a project to get the writing done. If you’re writing a book, you might need a developmental editor at the beginning and an indexer at the end. You might need support to travel to conferences or hold book workshops or to recruit participants. You might need to buy yourself out of a course or fund one more trip to an archive. You might need a super fancy microscope.
It’s also worth thinking through what tradeoffs make sense for you. Which will move your project forward more: a conference or a writing retreat? Which will help you more, a developmental editor once you’re finished with a draft of the book or weekly coaching sessions to support you as you draft the book? There aren’t right answers to these, but thinking through the kind of support you need on each project can help you strategically ask for resources.
Okay…But Where Is The Money?
My operating theory is that there is always more money than we think, and we should decide that we deserve it and make the ask as much as possible. Here are examples of places you can start. I know these don’t exist everywhere, but they represent a wide variety of institutions in the hopes that something resonates.
Start up packages: If you’re offered a tenure-track job, negotiate. This brilliant article shows you the art of the possible in the realm of compensation and personal support, general support, research support, teaching support, and service and professional development. Ask for resources, and then use them. You may even be able to negotiate your grad school or postdoc offer—it can’t hurt to try, especially because grad students are expected to publish like tenured professors these days.
Professional development money: Most institutions give their faculty members some amount of money each year to support professional development. It’s useful to find out a) the exact language describing what the money can be used for, b) what people who do interesting stuff have used it for, and c) who approves these requests. Often times travel funds can be used for other things instead, as long as you make the case for it (see below). Also—importantly—find out if these rollover or if they expire at the end of the fiscal year. If they expire, you can always use the funds to secure future editing services or consulting sessions.
Faculty development funds: Most colleges and universities have some kind of faculty development committee that is in charge of supporting research. Sometimes the funds are dispersed on a rolling basis, and sometimes a quarterly or yearly basis. Find out what the deadlines and requirements are, and apply for them. Here are some examples. Often times these are structured as small grants—$500 might not get you to a conference, but it could get you some editing or coaching support that could be really helpful. Other times they’re written as travel grants, which doesn’t just need to be conferences—more on that below.
Colleges and universities that are worried about retention may also have money earmarked for junior faculty.
PTL/contingent faculty awards: One of the reasons that adjuncting sucks is that contingent faculty are often denied access to institutional funds that would allow them to do the work they need to compete for full-time jobs. However, some institutions now have money earmarked just for part-time faculty (even if these aren’t well publicized) thanks to the power of union bargaining. Apply for these—get your money!
Centers and special funds: Campuses have a surprising number of small pots of money that are often hard to find out about, but that provide financial support for initiatives related to what they’re doing. Do you have a Center for European Politics or Asian Studies? Race and Ethnicity? Science Communication? They might very well have small grants you can apply for. (This might involve networking, relationship building and collaboration, obviously). These are also often open to grad students and postdocs, which is particularly great.
Department- or Campus-wide initiatives: The path of least resistance to accomplishing your goals might be to keep things in-house, like organizing a writing retreat for faculty members at your institution. You can also bring in experts who do professional development work during the semester: your institution, or your professional organization, might also give you money to bring in scholars from other schools for a mini-conference or workshop (happy to chat about this!). This involves more organizing on your part, but could be a way to accomplish your goals. Have a speaker series? Bring in your collaborator, and have them stay a few extra days to work on your project. There are creative ways to accomplish the goals of the institution and your own goals.
Invisible money: The ideas above are all for smaller asks and should be routine parts of how you get resources for projects. But if you have a big ask that the ideas above can’t or won’t cover, then it’s time to find the person/people on campus with the invisible pot of money most likely to support your goals. Provosts, deans, or chairs all have access to money that they can use for strategic initiatives. It’s worth finding that person and making the ask.
Professional organizations: Beyond awards to defray the cost of travel or attendance, professional organizations often have small awards to help members do research. Writing support is part of the research process! In particular, check out specialty groups. These tend to change with the prevailing financial help of the organization, but are always worth looking into.
Some professional organizations also offer book subvention awards, which can be used for editing, color images, indexing, etc. And if you’re lucky enough to win a section or a specialty group award, that money can also go toward writing goals.
External grants: When you’re applying for grants, talk to the program officer about what kind of budget items are allowable, and then write in travel to conferences, meetings with collaborators, and and editorial support.
It might be worth your while to look for awards that have un-earmarked funds. I was awarded what is now the Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders Award a few years ago, and it was fabulous to be given money to support research in whatever way I wanted (including child care!) Applications are due in December, so you should apply for this!
There are also really cool awards like this one, where Princeton University Press pairs underrepresented scholars with book coaches to work on their book proposal—this deadline is Sept 25, but they have quarterly cycles, so it’s a good thing to have on your radar!
The Community: If you’re an independent scholar or you do public-facing work, there are lots of opportunities for small grants or writing residencies.
Other ideas? Put them in the comments!
How Do I Make the Ask?
Step one: Convince yourself that you should ask: This is where imposter syndrome comes in for a lot of people. My project isn’t well-developed enough…there are bigger names on our campus…if I were a better writer I wouldn’t need this kind of help…you know the drill. And you also know the guy on campus who has been recycling the same proposal for the past ten years so the university pays for his summer holiday in Spain, so you need to get some of that money.
For minoritized folks this is particularly important. This remains one of my favorite tweets:
Step two: Craft the request. Convince whoever is the decider (the awards committee, the provost, your chair…) that this is a worthwhile return on their investment (it’s all capitalism).
For instance, consider these paragraph from an Inside Higher Ed column about the importance of writing retreats, and then use them in your proposal:
When proposing these intensive writing events to one’s institution, it is important to highlight the very good reasons for colleges and universities to support them. Writing retreats—by building the faculty’s scholarly profiles with increased publications, grant applications and research collaboration—have the potential to build institutional status. There can also be more concrete or measurable benefits to funding writing retreats. Australian scholars Penny Paliadelis, Vicki Parker, Glenda Parmenter and Myf Maple attribute an institutional investment of 18,000 Australian dollars ($12,000) in writing retreats with securing A$300,000 ($201,000) in grants as well as a 100 percent increase in papers submitted.
These numbers demonstrate quantitative value to resource-strapped institutions, but we should not ignore retreats’ vital yet harder-to-measure qualitative benefits. Decreasing morale, growing faculty dissatisfaction and the Great Resignation populate today’s headlines and are trending at campuses across the country. In our experience, gathering faculty members together at writing retreats increases community, morale and job satisfaction at a time when colleges and universities need that most. Those communal goals, combined with increased research productivity, make writing retreats an important investment for us all, and we encourage faculty members, academic affairs offices and institutions to organize, participate in and support such gatherings.
There are a lot of resources online about writing grant proposals; here is a pitch template for asking for support for research courses. The NCFDD has a great free training on “making the ask” to help faculty members ask their institutions to support their bootcamp (which, at over $5000 for twelve weeks, is not an inconsiderable investment). Their strategy is useful for a variety of asks, so it’s worth studying.
Step three: Be a pain in their ass
If people say no, keep asking. (Here is a 26-page list that I made of places that did support dependent care as part of faculty development that I provided to my provost.) If they keep saying no, find a place that will support your brilliance.
In a world where there was no precarity and academia was fully funded, this wouldn’t be a post I’d have to write. But we don’t live in that world, and you deserve all the things you need to share your brilliant ideas with the world. I hope this helps you find the money, ask for it, and then write amazing things.
If I’ve missed ideas or there’s a strategy that has worked for you, share it in the comments!