[Pols-l] Ethan and Martha Allen

Fri Aug 2 16:40:32 CDT 2019

Ethan and Martha Allen Research Chair in American Politics and the annual KU Survey of American Politics and Politics

Political Science colleagues. In July 2019 the final estate donation commitment from Martha Allen’s estate was realized by the department. This was on top of the donation made last year. Ethan Allen was a former chair of the department and there are existing endowment accounts from the family to support undergraduates.

Martha Allen was Ethan’s daughter and was such a hard core Jayhawk that she had the Rock Chalk chant played at the end of her funeral.

The endowed fund has language directing the money towards faculty and students conducting research in American politics and can be used for salary, research, travel, etc. As you may recall we are conducted a national survey this summer using money from this fund.

Here is a full description of the fund: “This fund shall be used to support a student, graduate teaching assistant or faculty member in the Political Science Department in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Kansas. Support can be for, but is not limited to, tuition support, salary support, travel costs, research costs, books, training and other costs associated with advancement of the American Political Process. Expenditures from the fund shall be made upon the recommendation of the Chair of the Political Science Department with the approval of KU Endowment.”

Since we currently have significant funds to support undergraduate and graduate student research in all sub-fields I am doing two things annually going forward.

1. Establishing a revolving Ethan and Martha Allen Research Chair in American Politics position. This will be a title bestowed for one year for a faculty member conducting research in American politics. It will have an $8-$10,000 stipend for the faculty member that can be allocated based on the awardees’ wishes, including summer salary, hourly RA, travel, other research funds, etc. There could be variation in the amount of spendable funds generated by the fund each year.

            Because all of our American Politics folks are research active, which is a requirement for the Chair position, we’ll initially allocate this chair position is by reverse seniority to ensure that junior faculty are most often the beneficiaries. Going forward it will be awarded allocated to the most junior American politics faculty member that has not received the award in the past 5 years. This will mean that all of the research active faculty in American politics will eventually receive the award. Any new hires in American politics would likely receive the award their first year in the department. Exceptions could occur with this pattern, for example, if funds were need to assist with an outside offer.

For the 2019-20 academic year the inaugural Chair position will be awarded to Kevin Mullinix.

2. The annual KU Survey of American Politics and Politics. The first survey is being conducted summer 2019. This survey will be using an online panel respondents in the manner of Qualtrics surveys and be representative of the U.S. adult population. However, this is not a random probability sample survey (those are simply too expensive and provide similar results). Typically these will be 20-25 minute surveys. The average cost will be $4500-$6000.

            The annual survey will take question and experiment contributions from all of the POLS faculty and faculty selected graduate students, but preference would go towards including questions that directly relate to “the advancement of the American Political Process.” The American politics faculty will serve on a committee that designs the questionnaire each year and gains IRB approval.

            Individual faculty will decide whether or not other faculty would be allowed to collaborate with them on projects using the data from originally proposed questions, but we will all have access to the general question data. Ideally any attempts to publish research from the data would be in collaboration with graduate student co-authors, but need not be restricted to that. After a 2 year embargo, the all of the data could be used by anyone affiliated with the department.

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Don Haider-Markel
Professor and Chair
Department of Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane
University of Kansas
Lawrence, KS 66045
785.864.9034

Access to many of my publications
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Donald_Haider-Markel
or
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=iBzl8DgAAAAJ&hl=en

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