Academic careers have always involved a degree of uncertainty. But for many faculty, the current environment feels especially difficult to navigate. Funding landscapes shift. Leadership changes. Expectations expand. Priorities move quickly. As a result, many faculty are asking a practical question: how do you maintain research productivity and steady progress in an academic environment that … Read more
Balancing teaching and research during the semester is one of the most persistent challenges faculty face. Many begin the term with clear research goals, only to find their schedules quickly filled with course preparation, grading, meetings, and student support. As teaching responsibilities expand, research time often becomes harder to protect. Without intentional planning, writing and … Read more
Authors: Jocelyn Olcott & Lori Flores One of the principal challenges that we face when deciding whether to take a new position at an academic institution is how to negotiate the best possible terms of employment. Whether senior or entry-level, in an academic or non-academic position, tenure-track or not, most job offers come with an … Read more
Author: NCFDD Faculty research funding support has become one of the most urgent and misunderstood challenges facing higher education today. As expectations around external funding increase, many institutions respond by asking faculty to do more: write more proposals, pursue more opportunities, and adapt faster to shifting funder priorities. Yet this approach often overlooks a central … Read more
Strong research ideas are not in short supply. Across disciplines, faculty are asking rigorous questions, developing sophisticated methods, and pursuing work with real intellectual and societal value. Yet many of these ideas never become competitive research proposals, even when faculty invest significant time and effort. This gap is not a reflection of weak scholarship or … Read more
Author: Lisa Hanasono, Ph.D. The overwhelm is real! For many academics, it seems like there always will be more work to do than can possibly be done in a day, month, year, or career. From floods of emails and requests to jam-packed calendars and ever-expanding task lists, academics are managing a growing number of responsibilities, … Read more
Questions about academic integrity in the age of AI are now central to conversations about teaching and learning. As AI tools become more visible in the classroom, many faculty are unsure how to uphold standards while responding to new forms of student work. Concerns about AI and academic integrity often surface as anxiety about misuse, … Read more
Across disciplines, faculty often assume that strong ideas speak for themselves. If the question is rigorous, the methods are sound, and the scholarship is credible, the value should be obvious to reviewers. Increasingly, that assumption no longer holds. Today’s funding landscape places growing weight not only on what faculty study, but on how clearly they … Read more
For many faculty, research funding uncertainty feels fundamentally different than it did even a decade ago. The rules are less clear. The competition feels sharper. Expectations seem to shift midstream. And the emotional toll of repeated rejection often carries more weight than it once did. If funding feels harder, more unpredictable, or more opaque than … Read more
Author: Lisa Hanasono, Ph.D. In the NCFDD’s Faculty Success Program (FSP), we invite academics to think of their lives as a book with many chapters. Each chapter represents a specific time period in a person’s life such as their graduate school years, a post doc period, life as an early career scholar, becoming parents of … Read more