A few days into my last job, as chief advancement officer for a small college, a faculty member greeted me with the comment, "Oh, you're that new PR type." With one backhanded quip, she simplified my numerous duties as "PR" and reduced me to a "type." Her words stung and I fought the urge to respond by calling her a "teacher type."
After thinking about it awhile, though, I realized she meant no harm, despite the pejorative overtones of her remark. Her comment reflected a common lack of understanding among faculty members about what advancement professionals actually do. That ignorance can lead to cynicism and strained relationships between professors and development officers.
Since then, I have moved on to a slightly larger institution, one with a deeper tradition of fund raising. Still, I take every opportunity to educate professors about my work and my role at their institution, and as a result, I've built some healthy, productive relationships. I thus offer counsel to both advancement professionals and faculty members, especially those new to their careers, on how to fashion such fruitful associations.
My first step toward bridging this divide was to recognize the reasons for faculty cynicism. Envy plays a part. Fund raisers, on balance, have higher salaries than many professors, especially in the latter stages of our respective careers. A recent EMN/Witt/Kieffer survey found that the average chief advancement officer at a Research II institution earns slightly less than $183,000 a year. (The average salary of a full professor at a doctoral-level institution was $89,848 in academic 2000-1, according to the annual salary survey of the American Association of University Professors.) We have better offices. We have fancy titles. We dress well, even during the summer. We hobnob with the (usually) rich and (sometimes) famous, escorting them around campus like visiting royalty. And we have ready access to decision-makers, including trustees and the president.
All of these advantages accrue, in most instances, despite less education. A minority of fund raisers hold terminal degrees; a few vice presidents I've known achieved that rank with only a bachelor's degree. A master's degree is common among development staff members, while M.B.A.'s and J.D.'s are cropping up with increasing frequency, owing to the growing complexity of our tasks. But we are not scholars and shouldn't pretend to be. We're professionals serving a community of educators.
What's more, faculty members, especially tenured ones, consider themselves collectively to be the bedrock of the institution, and rightly so. They're a constant among a sea of change. By comparison, turnover among fund raisers is high, especially among those occupying the lower rungs of the development ladder. In a university where I worked for some time, the average stay for fund raisers totaled less than three years. Each fall, faculty members encounter new faces promising to help them transform their programs and the institution, only to see the revolving door soon circulate yet another face before them. It's difficult to build trust and confidence between the development office and the professoriate with such frequent turnover. Further, many new fund raisers are young and inexperienced; some are fresh out of college or a master's program and, in all honesty, do not inspire confidence among professors.
In some instances, faculty members have become discouraged by a lack of attention afforded them by development staff. As fund raisers, we cannot possibly assist every professor with finding support for his or her research and programs. We must focus on academic priorities as identified by the administration and often publicized through capital campaigns. That means professors' pet projects and more marginal activities receive less, if any, energy. Many times I've gently fended off zealous professors asking me to write grant proposals or find donors for programs not high on anyone's list but their own. Such inattention and dissuasion can sour professors and lead them to view fund raisers as roadblocks instead of facilitators.
Perhaps the main reason for cynicism cuts to the very core of what fund raisers do. We ask for money. To many professors, that's dirty business. Some seem to view us as one step removed from peddling used cars or panhandling with a tin cup on a street corner. At best, it's smarmy; at worst, it taints the academic enterprise and compromises its integrity. So say our harshest critics. Yet we are not, as I have heard from time to time, sophists, spinmeisters, brown-nosers, suck-ups, beggars, or, worse, failed academics.
With these observations in mind, I offer a few thoughts to all faculty members, especially those harboring ill feelings toward advancement officers on their campus. I encourage you to reconsider those relationships and take full advantage of what we offer. Don't think of fund raisers as a "sales force" bent on oversimplifying your activities in an effort to peddle programs to prospects. Be patient with new staff members as they learn about your college, your department, and your own research. Remember that they're not experts in your subject matter, but they do possess a body of knowledge valuable to you. Understand that it takes a certain talent to make the subtleties and nuances of academe comprehensible for the average donor. In that respect, they're your allies, partners in your effort to find money to bring ideas to life.
And here's some advice to fellow development professionals: Step back for a moment and view the world from the professor's perspective. Explain in detail to the faculty members at your institution what you do and what you offer. Defend and promote the advancement field while, at the same time, demystifying the fund-raising process. Admit you need their help in forming concepts to take to prospects. After all, we never want to give the impression -- to faculty members or donors -- that the development office drives the academic agenda. Work to inspire that confidence and trust so critical to our jobs.
Let me suggest one simple way for the advancement office to strengthen relations with the academic side of the house: Invite professors to join search committees to fill development positions. Recently a professor and I served together on such a committee charged with finding a senior fund raiser. When interviewing candidates, we probed for their thoughts on working with faculty members. We asked the candidates to describe how, and to what extent, they interacted with professors. We posed hypothetical situations involving a misunderstanding or conflict between a faculty member and a development officer, asking each candidate to think through a solution. Along the way we managed to establish a key priority for evaluating future candidates.
Just for kicks, I think I'll recommend that advancement staff should in turn serve on faculty search committees.
