As I often write at the beginning of advice blogging: today’s words
are not specific to George Mason University. Rather they are “rules
of thumb” for how life scientists in academia might plan their
professional lives. Today we deal with the topic of negotiating a raise.
First the obvious: there are two singular moments in your history
with a given academic employer when it is easiest to ask for more
money: before you sign on the dotted line to come and when you have a
viable offer on paper to leave. Outside of those transitory periods
of negotiating strength, the goal of bringing home a big raise
requires a bit more finesse.
The other point that needs to be made is that academic decision
makers typically are constrained by equity considerations in ways
that might be somewhat counter-intuitive and certainly counter to
pure meritocratic considerations. By equity considerations, I mean
not only those that might be in the purview of an EEO office, but
also the notion of equity with respect to other faculty salaries:
deans and chairs catch hot water for salaries that are too many
standard deviations outside the mean.
One powerful tool for negotiating a raise is building a case for why
it would be win-win. Raises can be win-win when a faculty member’s
sponsored research program is bringing in a significant part of the
salary and the raise effectively pulls that faculty member off the
job market. Sometimes this situation is called “golden handcuffs”. If
you think about it, the golden handcuffs can work both ways: the
academic employer can’t afford to lose the grants and contracts and
the employee becomes potentially too expensive relative to the market.
Another way to negotiate for a raise is….not to negotiate. Or
rather, to negotiate by means of engaging in what might be a job
search, but also might not. A hot faculty member who suddenly starts
taking a lot of trips to Cambridge or New Haven (or wherever) gets
noticed. Sometimes it makes sense for a nervous academic employer to
pre-emptively award a raise just to feel better about their ability
to retain particular talent.
But a sine qua non for all of this is to be valued by your academic
employer. And that above all (at least in the life sciences) means
developing a health extramurally-funded research program. So your
surest ticket to consistent raises is to be send in many grant
applications and to be reasonably successful at getting awards.
When you overtly ask for a raise, it’s a good idea to frame your
argument in such a way that it emphasizes the win-win, partnership
aspects and minimizes the notion that somehow you are being dealt
with unfairly. Because of their need to make decisions within the
context of equity, academic decision makers are often very threatened
by…equity arguments. For where an equity argument goes–to their
mind–a lawsuit can’t be very far behind.
Finally, realize that with tenure, incremental regular raises of
say…c. 5% quickly build up over the years.
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 