Funding Freezes

Rather than fueling fear, I aim to provide practical strategies for overcoming these challenges. I encourage you to stay connected to your purpose and mission in academia, even if it means adapting to new ways of doing your work.

Are you ready to regain control of your academic career and navigate these tumultuous times with confidence? Tune in for valuable insights and actionable advice.

The Relationship Between Higher Ed and the U.S. Government

For decades, federal funding has been a cornerstone of academic research, fueling innovation, projects, and scholarships. This relationship is vital to scholarship, but recent cuts to programs like NIH and NSF have forced universities to abolish programs, grants, and initiatives.

What Academics Are Doing to Mitigate the Effects of Funding Freezes 

Some academics are taking proactive steps to mitigate the immediate effects of funding freezes. Department chairs, program directors, and faculty members are stepping up to support their teams, finding alternative funding sources, and reimagining how they can keep research and professional development alive despite financial constraints. However, it is not your responsibility to save everyone.

Reshaping Your Career Amid Cuts

I give you a series of questions to help guide you in reshaping your career in light of funding cuts and the uncertainty ahead. It’s more important than ever to think about what you truly want from your career and how to take control of the situation—especially when the broader landscape feels out of your hands. I give actionable advice to empower you in navigating the current academic environment with clarity, purpose, and confidence.

“You cannot save everyone’s job by yourself. You can’t take on all of the responsibility that is actually upper admins’ responsibility. You can work with upper admin. If you have suffered funding freezes, or if you are in a leadership position and are trying to mitigate the effects of funding freezes, I just want you to know that even though you are doing amazing trying to help, it is unfair for you to take on the burden of saving everyone from funding freezes.”

“As usual, universities will save themselves. The institution of the university will survive. They will adapt, they will mold, they will bend. They will bend over backwards to survive. If they need to cut you to survive, they will. If they need to stop defending you to survive, they will. They do not have your back.”

We’ve opened the waitlist for our next cohort of Navigate: Your Writing Roadmap®. Check out the program details and get on the waitlist here.

CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION:

1. Our 12-week Navigate: Your Writing Roadmap® program helps tenure-track womxn and nonbinary professors to publish their backlog of papers so that their voice can have the impact they know is possible. Get on the waitlist here!
2. Cathy’s book, Making Time to Write: How to Resist the Patriarchy and Take Control of Your Academic Career Through Writing is available in print! Learn how to build your career around your writing practice while shattering the myths of writing every day, accountability, and motivation, doing mindset work that’s going to reshape your writing,and changing academic culture one womxn and nonbinary professor at a time. Get your print copy today or order it for a friend here!
3. If you would like to hear more from Cathy for free, please subscribe to the weekly newsletter, In the Pipeline, at scholarsvoice.org. It’s a newsletter that she personally writes that goes out once a week with writing and publication tips, strategies, inspiration, book reviews and more.

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