At a time when graduate student funding is described by
professors with terms such as “crisis” and
“nightmare,” faculty and graduate students are
increasingly having to focus on funding rather than academics.
A conference on funding for graduate students aimed at faculty,
staff and graduate students Friday focused on the increasing role
of academics in fund-raising to teach strategies that have worked
for different departments.
Graduate student support, or funding for graduate students from
their department for tuition and other expenses, has been
increasingly difficult to secure as a result of recent budget cuts
across the board.
“Graduate student funding is something that is talked
about as if it were traffic on the 405 ““ it’s bad, but
there’s nothing you can do about it,” said Bill
McDonald, chairman of the UCLA Graduate Council and a professor of
film and television.
But McDonald said there are several things being done about
funding at the state, university and local level.
The graduate division and the Academic Senate have been raising
funds at the university and the local level, and examining
different departments’ efforts, because no single
fund-raising approach will work for all departments, he said.
Joe Hotz, a professor of economics and former chairman of the
department, explained that departments need to develop
relationships with potential donors, involve them and learn about
their concerns.
“This is not what we’re trained to do,” he
said. Donors are often concerned about presentation aspects, such
as branding ““ recognition of a school name, the department
Web site and other aspects Hotz described as “things you
didn’t think were important.”
Departments’ strategies include establishing a board of
alumni and potential donors and keeping them regularly informed
through meetings about department news, sending scholarly journals
about a department to a large mailing list, building relationships
with former donors to maintain their commitment and even asking
faculty of the department itself for donations.
Hotz said donors are often interested in supporting
undergraduates because some of the donors’ university
experience is limited to the undergraduate level. But his
department does not need support for undergraduates, and donors
need to be told a key part of the undergraduate program is to have
good graduate students as teaching assistants.
Large-scale cooperation within a department to raise funds is
necessary, Hotz said, adding that up to a third of the economics
department has been involved in fund-raising in some form.
Marilyn Kourilsky, a professor of education in the Graduate
School of Education and Information Studies and chairwoman of the
school’s faculty campaign, said her department has looked to
its own faculty members for financial support to leverage potential
donors.
Potential investors in a company might ask its founders if any
of their own money is in it. Similarly, potential donors might be
attracted when a department’s own faculty’s money is in
it, she explained.
“(It’s) almost a venture capital strategy, which
sounds a little strange coming from the school of education,”
she said.
Professors’ salaries are decreasing because inflation and
merit increases are awarded less frequently, so it might seem
unlikely professors would be willing to give up even more money to
give back to the department, Kourilsky said.
“And guess what ““ we get the money,” she
said.
Kourilsky said it is still too soon to tell whether asking
faculty for donations is effective in leveraging donations from
outside sources. But she said she believed it was worth the time
and effort.
Brent Vine, a professor of classics and former chairman of
Indo-European studies, said his department faced a specific
difficulty in its ability to fund qualified graduate students, many
of whom were international students.
Indo-European studies, a department that focuses on historical
linguistics and the reconstruction of languages and cultures, often
needs to look overseas to find graduate students with the language
levels required in the department.
Vine said as his department’s status improved, the more it
attracted foreign graduate students, who “were precisely the
students we could not afford to admit.”