Day: April 23, 2014

David D. Perlmutter. “Don’t Fear Fundraising, Part 1.” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 11, 2014, pp. A38-39.   The ins and outs of asking ‘friends’ for money Linda Helton for the Chronicle Enlarge Image By David D. Perlmutter Before I became a department chair, I had no experience with fund raising and held all the usual stereotypes and fears that faculty members tend to have about "asking people for money." But my field is political communication, so I did know something about the fund-raising enterprise. One of its fundamental dilemmas is encapsulated in this campaign tale: The aides of a first-time politician ask him to solicit donations from a list of his well-to-do friends. He is flummoxed: "I can’t call these people. They are my friends; how can I ask friends for money?" The next day the aides give him a second list, this time of wealthy potential donors he doesn’t know. Again he balks: "I can’t call these people. They are strangers; how can I ask...

David D. Perlmutter. “Why I Don't Negotiate ... That Much.” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 14, 2014. April 14, 2014 Oh, we've got more on negotiation. Try these: Negotiation 101: The Vitae Roundtable | The Professor Is In: Negotiating Salary When first offered a tenure-track position, I was a doctoral student with no experience in contract negotiations. Fast forward two decades, and now I am the other partner in the dyad: the dean who extends and negotiates hiring contracts. So I could empathize with both parties in the recent, virally-famous “W vs. Nazareth” controversy—although as with many academic-hiring incidents in which people have taken strong stances, we know very few facts. We just have two emails—“W’s” requests for start-up aid and the “never mind” response from Nazareth—and also some subsequent comments from W. The thousands weighing in have expressed opinions ranging from “She was being peremptory and unrealistic and demonstrated she wasn’t the right fit for a small liberal arts college” to “Nazareth was too quick to pull the...

David D. Perlmutter. “Your College Needs a Brand. Help Create It.” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 21, 2014, pp. A32-A33.   Enlarge Image By David D. Perlmutter The art, science, and profession of discovering what people think about you and trying to persuade them to have a different view, or reinforcing the one they already have, is called branding. Sounds simple, but maybe that’s the problem. A branding consultant told me that when his firm was hired to do research and then apply a branding campaign to a particular college, its marketing people warned him that he should not use the words "brand" or "branding" on campus but rather talk about the college’s "image." The caution was not unwarranted: Over the years, I have cataloged critiques by faculty members of college branding campaigns and have expressed them myself: The campaigns hawk dignified universities like commercial products. They reduce a complicated institution into simplistic pictures and slogans. They make unrealistic or outlandish claims. They are a product of higher administration and...