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At a time when graduate student funding is described by professors with terms such as “crisis” and “nightmare,” faculty and graduate students are increasingly having to focus on funding rather than academics.

A conference on funding for graduate students aimed at faculty, staff and graduate students Friday focused on the increasing role of academics in fund-raising to teach strategies that have worked for different departments.

Graduate student support, or funding for graduate students from their department for tuition and other expenses, has been increasingly difficult to secure as a result of recent budget cuts across the board.

“Graduate student funding is something that is talked about as if it were traffic on the 405 – it’s bad, but there’s nothing you can do about it,” said Bill McDonald, chairman of the UCLA Graduate Council and a professor of film and television.

But McDonald said there are several things being done about funding at the state, university and local level.

The graduate division and the Academic Senate have been raising funds at the university and the local level, and examining different departments’ efforts, because no single fund-raising approach will work for all departments, he said.

Joe Hotz, a professor of economics and former chairman of the department, explained that departments need to develop relationships with potential donors, involve them and learn about their concerns.

“This is not what we’re trained to do,” he said. Donors are often concerned about presentation aspects, such as branding – recognition of a school name, the department Web site and other aspects Hotz described as “things you didn’t think were important.”

Departments’ strategies include establishing a board of alumni and potential donors and keeping them regularly informed through meetings about department news, sending scholarly journals about a department to a large mailing list, building relationships with former donors to maintain their commitment and even asking faculty of the department itself for donations.

Hotz said donors are often interested in supporting undergraduates because some of the donors’ university experience is limited to the undergraduate level. But his department does not need support for undergraduates, and donors need to be told a key part of the undergraduate program is to have good graduate students as teaching assistants.

Large-scale cooperation within a department to raise funds is necessary, Hotz said, adding that up to a third of the economics department has been involved in fund-raising in some form.

Marilyn Kourilsky, a professor of education in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and chairwoman of the school’s faculty campaign, said her department has looked to its own faculty members for financial support to leverage potential donors.

Potential investors in a company might ask its founders if any of their own money is in it. Similarly, potential donors might be attracted when a department’s own faculty’s money is in it, she explained.

“(It’s) almost a venture capital strategy, which sounds a little strange coming from the school of education,” she said.

Professors’ salaries are decreasing because inflation and merit increases are awarded less frequently, so it might seem unlikely professors would be willing to give up even more money to give back to the department, Kourilsky said.

“And guess what – we get the money,” she said.

Kourilsky said it is still too soon to tell whether asking faculty for donations is effective in leveraging donations from outside sources. But she said she believed it was worth the time and effort.

Brent Vine, a professor of classics and former chairman of Indo-European studies, said his department faced a specific difficulty in its ability to fund qualified graduate students, many of whom were international students.

Indo-European studies, a department that focuses on historical linguistics and the reconstruction of languages and cultures, often needs to look overseas to find graduate students with the language levels required in the department.

Vine said as his department’s status improved, the more it attracted foreign graduate students, who “were precisely the students we could not afford to admit.”