Julia Fox was in a rut. After 17 years at Indiana University at Bloomington — including 10 years as a tenured associate professor in the Media School — her scholarship had stalled. She felt overwhelmed by service obligations and family responsibilities and guilty about neglecting her research.
So when a unit director there approached her last fall to suggest she enroll in an intensive mentoring program offered by a private consultancy, Fox was “a little leery” about making yet another commitment. But colleagues told her the course had helped them restart their own research, so she decided to give it a try.
Job consultants, a misfire on gauging productivity, how to handle career milestones, and our Great Colleges to Work For report.
The 12-week “faculty success program” was offered by the National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity, which provides training and mentoring to grad students, postdocs, and faculty members. The program did take time — it required participants to take part in a 75-minute group call once a week, a five- to 10-minute check-in daily, and an hourlong homework video. But Fox says she “drank the Kool-Aid” from the start, soaking up the tips on time-management and planning. She began scheduling her days and weeks in greater detail, and devoting at least 30 minutes a day to her writing.
Now, when she thinks about her scholarship, it’s in “an excited, motivated way, not a depressed, guilty way.”
“It sounds so obvious: Make a plan, write every day,” she says. “But this makes you commit to doing it.”
Fox’s experience is an increasingly common one. Faced with a tight job market and growing demands on their time, more academics are turning to outsiders for career advice and support. Their stress is fueling a cottage industry of consultants and coaches who help grad students with their dissertations and job searches, faculty members with their promotions, and administrators and trustees with their executive searches — and sometimes their crises.
In online testimonials, satisfied clients credit their coaches with helping them land a job, find balance in their work lives, and hone their leadership skills.
But the rise of the academic consultant has not come without controversy. Critics accuse consultants who work with Ph.D. candidates of preying on desperate grad students, charging them for services their colleges should be providing free of change. Some search-committee members say they are suspicious of candidates who work with coaches, and wonder just how much their portfolios have been polished.
Several consultants who spoke with The Chronicle for this article insist that it isn’t a lucrative business. Some are laid-off academics trying to make ends meet in the alt-ac job market, as the labor pool for academics who work outside academe is known; others are former faculty members who want to share knowledge they gained the hard way or to stay involved in higher education after retirement.
One thing the coaches agree on is this: They are filling a need that isn’t being met by colleges.
“If tenured faculty advisers were doing their job correctly, there would be no need for us,” says Karen Kelsky, who helps grad students get jobs.
Consultants generally fall into one of four categories: writing support, job search, faculty advancement, or leadership coaching. Here are case studies of each of them.
Writing Support
Sally Jensen quit her job directing doctoral research at Alliant International University, based in California, back in 1997 to become the “dissertation doctor.” Her former colleagues weren’t sure what to make of the move.
“I was sort of a pioneer,” she recalls. When approaching colleges about her services, “the door would be slammed in my face.” Some faculty members argued that students were already paying tuition and fees for advising, and shouldn’t have to pay more for outside instruction. Others conflated her work with the underground ghostwriting industry. It didn’t help that a shady business in Pakistan had stolen her company’s name; she had to go through an international tribunal to get it back, she says.
Still, her timing was fortunate. In 1997 the life-coaching and executive-coaching fields were taking off, and online Ph.D. programs were proliferating, enabled by the internet. Her business, which catered to online learners, thrived.
“Writing a dissertation is an incredibly isolating experience, and people are often left on their own,” she says. “There are good advisers, and there are those that are too busy to give students the guidance they need.”
When her original clients became junior faculty members and, later, full professors, she evolved with them, supporting them as they moved through their academic careers. In 2010 she rebranded her business as Academic Coaching & Writing.
Faced with a tight job market and growing demands on their time, more academics are turning to outsiders for career support.
These days, Jensen provides coaching across the academic life span, helping clients from Ph.D. students to tenured faculty members hone their writing and strike a balance between teaching and research. In weekly hourlong sessions, Jensen and her team of a half-dozen consultants (many of them former academics) show clients how to conduct research, structure an article or dissertation, and pitch to journals — skills that their graduate programs should have taught them but often didn’t. Clients get access to a webinar series and a virtual writing room where they can organize weekly tasks and track their progress.
Jensen, who has a doctorate in educational psychology, also provides moral and emotional support, helping clients overcome anxiety and providing a confidence boost.
That support doesn’t come cheap. A 12-week program ranges from $2,550 for coaching to $3,600 for writing support. Faculty often tap research dollars or start-up funds to cover the costs, while graduate students pay for themselves.
But 20 years into her consulting career, Jensen says she gets fewer questions about her work than she once did. Graduate programs send students to her, she says, “because they know they can’t provide the level of support we provide.” And the onetime pioneer now has lots of competition.
Jensen attributes the growth of her profession to a “shift in attitudes about coaching in general and academic coaching specifically.”
“It’s the new normal to seek professional help,” she says.
Job Search
Students who successfully defend their dissertations face a daunting new challenge: finding a job.
Enter Karen Kelsky, a former tenured professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She promises to improve their odds by reviewing their résumés and cover letters and preparing them for job interviews.
Kelsky, who has been called “a sort of macabre ‘Ms. Mentor’ for the 21st century,” bills herself as a demystifier of academe, a truth-teller who will show clients what’s wrong with their applications and reveal what search committees really want to hear. She writes regularly for The Chronicle.
Her services are so sought after by aspiring academics — she says she serves 1,000 clients a year — that some speak of “the Kelsification of the job search,” in tones both admiring and wary.
In testimonials on her website, clients praise Kelsky’s “brutal honesty.” One thanks her for being “an ally in a process where there sadly aren’t any.”
But Kelsky, who has a staff of six, has also heard from search-committee members who “worry that my approach is so effective that it can make candidates look better than they are.”
The bigger objection to her work, however, is philosophical. Jonathan Kramnick, a tenured professor who has led job-placement efforts for three English departments over almost 20 years, calls her “a war profiteer of the collapsing job market.”
“Her client base is anxious and captive,” says Kramnick, who now teaches English at Yale. “No one can offer all-purpose advice across all disciplines.”
Kelsky charges $150 to $250 an hour for most services, with discounts for three or more hours, but also offers a lot of free material on her website. She attributes objections like Kramnick’s to the “persistent myth that academia is this esoteric realm above the paltry concerns of money.”
“If you’re monetizing portions of core academic work, that is the ultimate betrayal,” she says. “That’s considered anathema, and people despise it.” But, she argues, “the people who despise it are ignoring the reality of a catastrophically contracting job market.”
That reality has fueled the growth of a cadre of consultants specializing in alt-ac careers. Chief among them are Jennifer Polk and Maren Wood, the pair of Ph.D.s behind the popular “Beyond the Professoriate” conference and membership group.
Wood got into career coaching after struggling to find an academic job of her own; Polk dabbled in contract work before starting a coaching business. They created the conference and the group because they wanted to offer less-expensive services for graduate students.
For $6 a month, doctoral candidates and graduates can get access to career panels with successful alt-ac Ph.D.s, and to seminars on topics like managing stress. They can chat in forums, network with mentors, and attend live events. For $9 more, they can rent on-demand videos, and for $20, they can take part in a group counseling session.
Colleges often steer students toward academic careers, Wood says, “because that’s what they’re good at” and what they know.
The anonymity of online courses, she notes, lets students explore other options without the risk of being taken less seriously as scholars.
Faculty Advancement
Some former academics get into consulting out of frustration with the status quo. That was the case for Kerry Ann Rockquemore, who left a tenured position at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2010 to become a faculty coach.
Rockquemore says she struggled on the tenure track, unsure of how to navigate campus politics or manage her time. She saw coaching as a way to make the “secret knowledge” she gained available to everyone.
Today her business, the National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity, has a staff of 10 and 97,000 members at 450 colleges. Colleges pay $20,000 a year to provide access to forums, webinars, and other content to their faculty members, postdocs, and graduate students, plus $3,950 per faculty member for the 12-week “faculty success” course. Individual annual memberships range from $240 for grad students to $480 for faculty members. Kelsky calls Rockquemore “the kingpin” of academic consulting.
Rockquemore believes many colleges do a fine job supporting their white male faculty members but don’t always provide the types of support that women and minority scholars need. She recalls asking her tall, barrel-chested, bearded mentor years ago how she, an African-American woman who is 4-foot-10 and looks young, could establish authority in the classroom. His advice: “Just walk in the room and start talking.”
“Mentors are trained to give advice, to speak from their own experience,” she says. They’re not expected to “ask the big questions, to get at what’s holding you back.”
Rockquemore views the faculty-success program in which Julia Fox, the Indiana scholar, took part as “an enhancement to the faculty-development center,” offering an outsider’s perspective and a community beyond the campus. That broader network can be especially helpful to underrepresented faculty members, she says.
Her program allows faculty members to seek advice from outsiders who aren’t in a position to evaluate them, she says. There are some conversations that people feel they can’t have with colleagues, she explains. They worry that if they ask for help, “it’s going to be interpreted as a weakness.”
Eight years after she quit academe, Rockquemore says, she has no regrets. “Everyone thought I was crazy leaving my tenured position, but I felt this needed to exist. It’s been healing to give other people what I wanted and desperately needed.”
Leadership Coaching
One of the oldest uses of consultants in academe is in executive searches. Here, too, there has been tremendous growth.
When Jan Greenwood, a former college president, got involved in the business in 1992, fewer than 10 firms specialized in education searches. Fifteen years later there are dozens, she says.
Their purview has expanded, too — from presidents to provosts, deans, even faculty members in high-demand fields. Today executive-search firms not only find and vet candidates but also prepare them for their new roles and even counsel them through leadership crises.
Greenwood attributes this growth to two factors: College administrators are busier than they used to be, and they’re less willing to take risks.
During the course of a typical three-to-four-month presidential search for a regional public, Greenwood says, she’ll call 350 to 400 sources and candidates; in the hunt for a dean of nursing (a field with staffing shortages) she might make 1,000 calls. Most college leaders don’t have time to do that.
At the same time, more colleges are turning to deans to fill posts left vacant by presidential retirements. Hiring a consultant to help a dean make the transition to president is “like a life-insurance policy for a university,” Greenwood says.
M.J. Jiaras, an executive coach for 20 years, says both companies and colleges have become more proactive about preparing leaders for the challenges of the presidency before problems occur.
“It used to be, if there was a problem, you’d throw a coach at it,” he says. “Now they see it as an investment in potential.”
When presidents trip up despite the preparation, colleges sometimes bring in consultants to do crisis management. A few years back, the University of Illinois system hired Jiaras to coach Michael J. Hogan, who later resigned as president in the wake of widespread faculty criticism. The Board of Trustees later brought Jiaras back to provide guidance for hiring the next president.
Prices for leadership coaching vary, but the standard for an executive search is a third of the hire’s first-year income, Greenwood says. Asked if she’s ever calculated her hourly wage, she quickly responds, “No, that would be too depressing.”
“People who do executive search in higher ed are people who want to continue their relationships with higher ed,” she says. “It’s really a labor of love.”
