Kenneth Henson:
A scholar and master grant writer dances up the academic ladder
By Leanne Silverman

Kenneth Henson’s career reads like a textbook ascension of the academic ladder, from the assistant professor to college dean. Along the way, he has developed a winning ability to write grant proposals, strategies for being a productive scholar and a willingness to share his expertise.

Raised in Alabama, Henson earned his B.S. in secondary education from Auburn University in 1963. Then he married and moved out of his parents’ house. “All of a sudden I had expenses I never had before,” he said. “I went from feeling very wealthy (because I had no financial needs) to being very poor in a very short time. So I started writing grants.” A National Science Foundation grant paid for his M.Ed from the University of Florida. Shortly after receiving his Ed.D. in curriculum and research from the University ofAlabama (1969), another grant landed Henson one year in England as a Fulbright Scholar.

By writing successful grants, Henson has been able to both fund his education and achieve his professional goals. “When I moved to Indiana, I knew I’d need to write some grants and articles to get tenure,” he said. “I wrote a grant and it won a national award to develop a new program that they didn’t have. I thought, ‘This is my key, this is my ticket to anything that I want.’ So everywhere I’ve ever worked, whatever I wanted I just wrote a grant for it.” Henson has brought in over $2 million for projects on which he is the principal investigator; overall, he has raised more than $100 million.

Henson earned tenure at the University of Indiana in 1972 and was hired by Delta State University as a full professor in 1981. He has helped establish several new academic programs over the years. “I developed a performance-based program in Indiana and a new doctoral program in education at Delta State. When you’re trying to do a lot of new things,” he said, “being Dean just makes it easier.” So Henson took the Dean of Education job at Eastern KentuckyUniversity in 1988 and stayed for 11 years—the longest of any education dean in the state at that time. Henson is currently professor of education at The Citadel in South Carolina; he served as their Dean of Education from 2001-2004.

He has authored or co-authored more than 300 publications and 40 books, earning his reputation as a writer with valuable advice to share. Said Henson: “I was giving a workshop on writing for professional publication at the University of Alabama when the person in charge of continuing education said, ‘We want you to go on the road for us. We also want to give out a book on the topic.’” That conversation led, in 1991, to the first of five books Henson has penned about writing for publication, Writing for Successful Publication.

His other four books are: The Art of Writing for Publication, Writing for Professional Publication: Keys to Academic and Business Success, Writing for Publication: Road to Academic Advancement, and Writing for Professional Publications. He has also published Grant Writing in Higher Education and is finalizing a second book on grant writing for K-12 educational leaders.

At the same time, Henson began offering workshops on writing successful grant proposals. He currently presents two TAA-sponsored workshops, “Writing Grant Proposals” and “Writing for Publication.”

Drawing on his own long experience as an author and grant writer, Henson shared some key bits of advice.

On deciding whether to write a book or articles: “As a junior professor, I’d choose articles. They’re going to get you tenure and get you promoted faster than books will. You can write several articles in the time that it takes you to write a book and the article is the coin of the realm.”

On publishing books: “I make sure there’s a market before I write anything now,” he said. He does so by talking to publishers about his book ideas early on. “If there’s not market for it, there’s no use writing it. That’s sometimes hard for academics to grasp. Publishing is a commercial business with a dollar face to it. Regardless how valuable your book would be [from a scholarly perspective], publishers won’t publish it if they think they’re going to lose money.”

On selecting a publisher: “I want to be clear: For many years, I signed with anybody willing to publish my books. I felt like I hadsucceeded if I found anybody that wanted to publish me!” He goes about it differently now. “I’m very interested in what the publisher’s going to do once the book is published. I go with the one that I think is going to do the most marketing of my books.” He added, “Some of the smaller publishers will do a better job than the larger publishers will. We tend to think of the really big publishers as the best way to go if you get that opportunity, but it might not be.”

On writing itself: “A common mistake people make is writing to impress the editor. But you should write to serve the readers. If you have something of quality that readers want, the editor is going to be pleased.” Henson also said, “There’s no scholarship in being complex and using big, unfamiliar words. Try to speak as clearly and as simply as you can.”

On deadlines: “Professors are notorious for missing deadlines. My intention is always to finish a project with months to spare. I’m not writing to meet the deadlines, I’m writing to beat the deadlines by a hefty margin.”

On seeking funding: “Getting money is never a good reason to write a grant. It’s got to be about more than that. To be a successful grant writer, you have to cease thinking about your needs and start focusing on the funders’ needs. They have a job to be done, and they’ll fund you when you convince them that you’ll do a better job than anybody else will. I think of it as working together and helping people do whatever it is they’re doing.”

A busy workshop schedule often keeps Henson on the road, but he always makes time for himself. “I’ll work for you in the daytime, but when the sun goes down, the evening is my time.” And for more than 40 years, a good deal of Henson’s free time has been spent ballroom dancing with his wife. “We dance one or two nights a week whenever we can.”

Leanne Silverman hung her shingle as a freelance writer and editor in Denver, CO after leaving a 12-year career in academic publishing.