First Person

We Can't Handle the Truth

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines First Person The Rejection Letter I Wish I Could Send If we had to make up a story for why you might be interested in our position, then interviewing you was too risky. Peer Review Hirings and Firings The new law school at the University of California at Irvine gets some high-profile hires ... and other appointment news. Ms. Mentor Does This Make Me Look Old? Advice on how best to dress, and act, when you look as young as your students. Career News Gone, and Being Forgotten Why are some of the greatest thinkers being expelled from their disciplines? Resource Salaries: Faculty | Administrative Presidential pay: Private | Public Financial resources: Salary and cost-of-living calculators Career resources: Academic | Nonacademic Library: Previous articles by topic | by date | by column Career Talk, Ms. Mentor, and more... Landing your first job On the tenure track Mid-career and on Administrative careers Nonacademic careers for Ph.D.'s Talk about your career Blogs

By Maria Myers

Writing grant applications can be a bit like sales. You must show need and urgency in your proposals, all the while accentuating the positive and glossing over the negative. Like any salesman, the grant writer can be touting a quality product or hawking snake oil.

As a grant writer at a small liberal-arts university, I increasingly feel like I'm doing the latter. Is stretching the truth for education any better than selling moonshine as medicine? Am I trying to induce honest philanthropists to divert their money to a mediocre cause?

Don't misunderstand me. I wholeheartedly believe in the value of education. That's why I took this job in the first place. As the classic "trailing spouse" in a two-Ph.D. household, I have had jobs ranging from visiting instructorships to sales. When the grant-writing position came up, I thought I had found the perfect merging of my interests. I could return to work in a college setting, contribute to academe, and interact with students and facult members. At any rate, I've always felt that I am much more convincing on paper than in person.

The difficulty in which I find myself now arises from knowing too much about my institution, Private U., with its slightly prestigious reputation. While the locals think Private U is uppity and wealthy, its professors complain of stagnant, below-average wages and little incentive for professional development.

Financial mismanagement has tainted the top administration. Senior officials seem to rise through the ranks via an old-boy/old-girl network rather than on the basis of their actual qualifications. Fund raising is haphazard at best, with the current capital campaign consisting of a miscellaneous list of wants and no set dollar figure.

Students, mostly from within the state, are herded in to pay the bills. Nearly all evacuate the campus on weekends. As is the case at most colleges, certain majors and certain professors are known for their easy grading and their steady curriculum of movies and self-graded assignments.

Of course, there are good things here, too. Many students engage in community service, take inspiring classes, have great internships, enjoy the small class sizes, and graduate satisfied with their experience. We have some good programs and opportunities, too, but nothing so outstanding that foundation representatives immediately whip out their checkbooks in response to our cold-call proposals.

All of that would be fine -- well, maybe not exactly fine, but it wouldn't affect my personal sense of ethics -- if I didn't have to write glowing grant proposals about Private U. In a letter of inquiry to a foundation, I can't very well say, "Your generous scholarship gift of $100,000 will be held hostage in our financial-aid department for an average of nine months until staff members randomly assign scholarships to lackluster students who may, or may not, fit the established scholarship criteria. These students will continue to hold your prestigious, named scholarship until they graduate, regardless of their academic performance, because actually monitoring grade-point averages is too much to ask of us. We will send your fine foundation gushy reports, but won't commit to publicizing your gift, as our public-relations department finds that too difficult. Thank you for helping relieve our budget shortfalls."

Capital projects are also touchy territory. Although the administration has commissioned drawings of several proposed buildings, no one dares (or is able to) estimate budgets and timelines, or even commit to producing pamphlets describing the need for such facilities.

For several futile months last year, my colleagues and I tried to pitch those capital projects to foundations. We offered naming opportunities for rooms we knew might not be built in the next decade or even several decades.

Secretly, we were relieved when the rejection letters came back. If we had gotten the grants, Private U. wouldn't have known what to do with the money. A successful grant would have meant years of reporting on why the project had not moved forward, why the project had changed drastically, or why we hoped to divert the money to other uses (all of which we have had to do in other cases, and which I do not recommend as a good fund-raising technique).

To dance around our limitations, we pad our proposals with vacuous phrases that would make persuasive-writing instructors cringe: state-of-the-art facilities, outstanding students, our best and brightest, values-rich education.

All of those phrases might contain some grain of truth, but I feel twinges of dishonesty mentioning them. I also wonder if any clear-headed foundation representative is going to be tricked by superlatives and flowery language, even when we do try to back them up with anecdotes and the occasional financial figure.

Lately, the administrator who reviews our proposals has uncharacteristically begun to question their veracity. "Is this true?" he will occasionally scribble next to phrases about our best and brightest. No. Of course not. Few scholarships go to our best and brightest. A lot of them go to unmotivated students with 2.2 grade-point averages, but who wants to give that pool of students a $100,000 grant?

The truth? We can't handle the truth. But here goes: We have little compelling to sell, and if we really want to find new corporate and foundation donors, we have to slowly build relationships and clean up our act. But it's hard to do either of those, given the combination of blind faith and fund-raising desperation that afflicts Private U.'s upper administration.

I have no doubt that our administrators mean well. They truly see Private U. as a distinctive, top-notch place, yet very few have worked at other universities and have little to compare it with. Many received their degrees from Private U.

Those true believers suspect that we grant writers are just lazy when we balk at sending unsolicited proposals to foundations set up by wealthy celebrities. After all, everybody knows such donors are just looking to give away wads of cash. Why wouldn't they want to give some to us? Who cares if they have no connection to our state, let alone our university?

Such desperate maneuvers, largely unaccompanied by basic development tactics -- such as meeting with influential people, having a plan, and keeping to a consistent message -- are akin to shots in the dark. They also take time away from developing proposals we actually may have a shot at getting money for, and make me question my complicity in this fund-raising folly.

Lately, I have concentrated on faculty- and student-driven projects that have a real chance at success. However, the pressure to write unrealistic proposals continues, and I feel that I'm merely biding my time until I can find another job without seeming like a serial job switcher.

I can see myself staying in grant writing and possibly working at another college. I am passionate about making higher education more affordable and more rewarding for all students, even the average ones, and I realize that every institution will have its blemishes.

But I can only deal with those blemishes if I can have something inspiring to grab on to -- well-designed programs, proactive colleagues, a supportive administration, or even just solid financial record keeping. Is that too much to ask?