Learning to Love the Politics: How to Develop Institutional Support for Advancement

Politics is a reality of institutional life. Advancement professionals who accept and embrace this fact are likely to improve their chances for career success. This book by Larry Lauer offers practical, seasoned advice on how to incorporate politics as another skill in your professional toolkit and how to use political tools to promote advancement on campus. Learning to Love the Politics is not a how-to manual about raising money or launching new alumni initiatives or using the newest technology or designing an integrated marketing program. Rather, it is about how to make all those efforts work in an academic institution while building internal support for doing the job right. Lauer shows how a savvy professional can manage an advancement career and deal with the institutional and academic politics that goes with the job. His insights and advice, based on his 40 years of experience in all areas of academia, cover these topics and more: The unique nature of colleges and universities as a work environment, The faculty life cycle, The dynamics of academic institutions, Leadership styles and how to deal with them, What organizations can to do people and What political tools are available and how to master them. Advancement is moving front and center to help institutions cope with dramatic changes from student recruitment to fundraising in the higher education marketplace. Meeting these challenges requires political savvy, but political success requires educating the people you must count on about what it is that you do, writes Lauer. You d better learn to love the politics, because it will always be a major part of your job.