[HN Gopher] Academic Ranks Explained or What on Earth Is an Adju...
___________________________________________________________________
Academic Ranks Explained or What on Earth Is an Adjunct?
Author : barry-cotter
Score : 139 points
Date : 2023-04-29 04:59 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (acoup.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (acoup.blog)
| rr808 wrote:
| My kids are almost university age. I'm an immigrant so dont
| really understand the vast intricacies of the American system.
| One thing that is frustrating is how to choose which college to
| go to? Most people really look at rankings and try to get the
| highest one they can which seems superficial. OTOH details like
| who does the actual teaching is really difficult to find. How do
| you choose?
| nn3 wrote:
| Another thought: it would be interesting to know if it's a
| fundamental problem (full tenure track for every
| researcher/teacher needed cannot be financed at all in the
| current system), or if the number would work out if the funding
| for all the administrative bloat was shifted to
| teaching/research.
|
| I suspect the fundamental truth of PhD production far exceeding
| job market in the academia won't go away though.
| tkgally wrote:
| About a side point that the author makes:
|
| "We're not going to talk much about staff, but briefly we can
| divide them quickly into four big groups: leadership
| (chancellors, deans, and assistant deans of various kinds; of old
| these used to be professors pulled into leadership temporarily
| but these days these are professional managers)...."
|
| I retired a month ago from a tenured faculty position at a public
| university in Japan, and I was often struck by the difference
| between how that university is run and the above characteristic
| of leadership at North American universities. At my university,
| and I believe at most Japanese universities, nearly everyone from
| the assistant deans all the way up to the university president is
| a professor with decades of experience in the classroom and doing
| research. All of the important posts, including department
| chairs, deans, and the university president, are elected by and
| from among the tenured faculty--"professors pulled into
| leadership," as the author says.
|
| I became aware of that difference in leadership structure when I
| met people at American universities to discuss education
| programs. While all of the important decisions about our
| education programs were made by faculty, the Americans I met who
| were serving in similar roles were usually professional
| administrators. They were probably more competent as
| administrators than I and my colleagues were ("amateur professors
| who'd rather not have been asked," as the author says in a
| footnote), but I think our experience as teachers and researchers
| gave us an advantage when planning and running education
| programs.
| vessenes wrote:
| It also protects from the sort of operational capture we are
| seeing at wealthy American Universities (more 'professional
| managers' than students at, e.g. Yale and Stanford). The
| American system is undergoing radical upheaval in the last ten
| years.
| meetingthrower wrote:
| 100% this! My son is touring colleges now in US and UK. It is
| totally clear that the US academic faculty have totally lost
| the war to the administrative class!
|
| In the Oxbridge system, for example, academic faculty are
| responsible for admissions within their major. This means
| that majors are non-fungible - you apply to a major and are
| stuck to it for the duration of your degree. But this also
| means the professors can protect their turf, e.g., they are
| not subject the vagaries of "market demand" for majors by the
| students. They have a certain number of seats to fill, and
| they conduct the work to get the best class for this. This is
| why Oxford still graduates 100 classics majors a year (more
| than the entire ivy league combined.) And they get to staff
| their department accordingly.
|
| In the US system, we have the insane "holistic admissions"
| process run by a giant admissions bureaucracy. This
| bureaucracy is doing everything in its power to eliminate any
| trackable metrics so they can preserve their secret sauce and
| source of power (see 80% of universities are now test
| optional admissions.) The admissions bureaucracy is also in
| cahoots with other major bureaucracies - sports, diversity,
| development ($$), etc. The fencing coach has WAY more power
| to drive admissions decisions than does the professor of
| classics.
|
| US academics were lulled into complacency by the dulcet tones
| of managers saying "let me take this boring administrative
| task off your plate." But in doing so, they have become the
| working class of the university system.
| stanford_labrat wrote:
| I have mixed feelings about the whole stuck with your major
| from day 1 scenario. It is simultaneously appealing and
| frightening to have to make such a major decision that
| early in your life (which will have a strong impact on the
| other 70 or so years to come).
|
| I didn't find my major (chemistry) until about a year in,
| and then I didn't even add my second major (biochemistry)
| until I was in my third year. Who knows what I would've
| picked if I were forced to choose from the get go. I was a
| "pre-engineering" major before I had to pick one. Whatever
| that means...
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, I adjusted my major--and arguably could have/should
| have changed it even more--in university. I'm not sure
| that forcing a high school senior to pick a major is a
| great practice.
| jldugger wrote:
| > I became aware of that difference in leadership structure
| when I met people at American universities to discuss education
| programs. While all of the important decisions about our
| education programs were made by faculty, the Americans I met
| who were serving in similar roles were usually professional
| administrators.
|
| Leadership is still often pulled from tenured faculty but they
| staff their offices with cheaper professional staff. The dirty
| little secret is that some of this professional staffing is
| funded by "spousal appointment", which I can most charitably
| describe as a jobs program for universities settled in low
| economic intensity zones. When you hire a professor, you also
| hire her husband into IT or something, because if you don't
| dual earning households will look at more urban campuses.
| etempleton wrote:
| In my experience, someone with some teaching experience in a
| field should run operations for academic department--an NTT
| that teaches a course or two a semester, for example. And a
| tenure track chair should be the decision maker on the
| department's direction.
|
| However, I also find that academics make poor administrators
| and leaders more often than not. I think this comes down to
| experience. Academics often go from no or minimum leadership
| and management responsibilities to many and some are just not
| equipped to handle it. Being a chair is poor experience to
| becoming an academic Dean and even poorer experience to
| becoming a non-academic leader. Additionally, many have to
| learn the hard way that most challenges within a large
| organization require a ton of coordination and alignment and
| that there are very few instances where there is a silver
| bullet to solve business challenges.
| blululu wrote:
| There is a common refrain that anyone who wants to be in
| elected office should not be elected. There is a profound truth
| that people who want power should be kept in check. Having a
| bunch of people who really want to teach be shackled with
| community service is probably better than having people who
| want to be in charge independent of what they are in charge of.
| namdnay wrote:
| That is also the case in France for public universities - the
| "VPs" and above are all elected by the teaching staff.
|
| To give a disadvantage, it makes it very hard to push through
| any big changes. Neither the leaders nor the electorate have
| ever worked in large private orgs, meaning you end up with
| bizarre situations like an entire university that does not use
| the Calendar feature in Outlook ("so microsoft knows what i'm
| doing? that sounds like big brother!"), instead relying on
| online event-organising tools to ask people to give
| availability _for every single meeting_ , or a block refusal of
| opening paid professional courses or opening to foreign
| students (due to a very hard "teaching must always be free"
| stance from their voters) , which could bring in much-needed
| cash to subsidise the "real" students
| watwut wrote:
| Why should the university be forced to use Microsoft
| calendar? And yes, I worked in private companies for decades
| now.
|
| And second, just because I have free time on my calendar does
| not mean that you are free to schedule meeting for me there.
| You need to ask about my availability anyway, becuase I have
| stuff to do that is not meetings.
| namdnay wrote:
| I say MSFT because they already use teams and outlook. Just
| not the calendar feature.
|
| It's be the same objection with any solution I think
|
| And meetings aren't autoaccepted , they're marked tentative
| until you manually confirm
| etempleton wrote:
| Because it saves everyone time. If you have things to do
| that are not meetings you can block off your calendar. It
| is a tool to solve scheduling challenges. Not using it is a
| choice, but it creates operational inefficiency.
| blululu wrote:
| It can save time but not always. An overzealous pm can
| really burn a lot of people's time by over scheduling.
| The extra cost of setting up a meeting discourages
| pointless checkins and recurring meetings. I personally
| like being able to quickly coordinate with a calendar,
| but it's important to not abuse that power.
| namdnay wrote:
| Just don't accept the meetings. Or even better talk to
| the offender and explain why you won't be going. A bit of
| communication is a small price to pay for the upsides of
| easy scheduling
| sokoloff wrote:
| There are many things that I have to do that I would
| shift around fluidly to accommodate an important meeting
| but not for a random, time-wasting meeting.
|
| If I have a 1-4 window open and you have a time-wasting
| but unavoidable meeting, I'm going to try hard to get it
| into a 30 minute slot on some other day, or to put right
| at 1 instead of smack in the middle.
| namdnay wrote:
| In most calendar systems (including MSFT and Google) ,
| meetings aren't autoaccepted even if you're available.
| You choose to accept each one
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| OK, then just assume that I used the system and didn't
| accept any meeting.
| bjourne wrote:
| It's not about a particular product, it's about that
| certain tasks become easier for everyone if standards are
| followed. For example, at my uni a professor forwarded all
| his e-mail to his Gmail account where he had setup
| elaborate filtering rules for all his courses.
| Unfortunately, he didn't understand how Gmail's filtering
| worked well enough which resulted in all my e-mails to him
| being dropped.
| tough wrote:
| You could tell them to use cal.com for their calendar needs,
| open core/ source
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| cal.com looks interesting, but doesn't it mean that it will
| have access to all the information in ALL my calenders? So
| not only does microsoft know about my embarrassing
| condition doctors appointment, but so does cal.com?
| tough wrote:
| You can self-host it. I worked there briefly.
|
| Their market is big enterprises and govt that won't fly a
| hosted solution, they offer both a SaaS and self-hosted
| licenses
|
| Then it's up to you how you sync with calendars, if a
| self-host caldav instance is enough no microsoft there
| blululu wrote:
| These objections all seem to be objections to the community
| having the ability to make autonomous decisions that you
| don't personally agree with. Democratic organizations are
| messy but the opposite has its own downsides.
| namdnay wrote:
| It's kind of an athenian democracy. The only ones who can
| vote are tenured professors. Admin staff can't vote,
| students can't vote, non-tenured staff can't vote.
|
| Except it's an Athenian democracy where none have any skin
| in the game. The professors aren't going to lose pay if the
| university attracts mediocre students, they aren't going to
| lose pay if the infrastructures crumble around them -
| they're civil servants, their job and pay are fixed and
| guaranteed . So they have no incentive to take decisions
| that are difficult for them but better for the students
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| That calendar system sounds _ideal_ for the way I work. I 'd
| probably write some tooling to make it a little easier, but
| sending around little iCal files and reviewing my schedule
| often means I have a good intuition for what I'm doing, and
| when.
|
| When I start to get annoyed by the amount of stuff I've got
| scheduled, and the consequential overhead of managing it, it
| means I'm trying to do too much, and I need to reduce it.
| Outlook considers every moment not spent in a meeting as
| "free time", unless you specifically block off "reserved
| time", and that's just not how I work.
| esafak wrote:
| You can mark yourself as busy, with a recurring event,
| outside the windows of time you wish to accept meeting
| requests.
| namdnay wrote:
| As with the travel business, the main complexity is
| rescheduling. A sudden big sales opportunity at the same
| time as an important internal meeting you're hosting with
| 10 people? What could be done in a few clicks with outlook
| or equivalent is going to take you half a day of panic
| hgsgm wrote:
| The formal name for the _school_ part of Harvard, where
| students learn, is the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
|
| https://www.fas.harvard.edu/ Traditionally, professors ran
| universities, merely overseen by a small board of overseers,
| until a quiet coup in the 20th Century created the
| administrative state.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I wonder whether this is actually limited to academia. When I
| was at business school it was mentioned that US firms are more
| likely to have special managers (MBAs) whereas somewhere like
| Europe tended to promote technical staff like engineers.
|
| Someone out there must know whether this is generally true.
| ghaff wrote:
| Not really. A lot of MBAs go into things like management
| consulting, finance, certain types of marketing roles, but
| even things like product management/program management. I'm
| not sure it's really that common to hop straight from an MBA
| to a management role (unless it's a case of someone already
| in management or being groomed for management who goes back
| to school to get a degree). It's also the case that, at the
| better business schools, most of the students have at least
| some experience in any case.
|
| What is true is that generally speaking (though not in all
| cases) once someone goes into management--and certainly
| executive management--they tend to not go back into
| individual contributor roles although it does happen. And, in
| general, MBA degrees are probably more common in the US than
| in Europe.
| fullsend wrote:
| This reminds of how the politburo of China is often made up of
| engineers, chemists, and people with similar backgrounds.
| Whereas American politicians are all lawyers.
| dxdm wrote:
| I'm assuming people become members of the politburo after a
| substantial career in the political party apparatus, maybe
| even longer than it takes to become a member of congress. Of
| course, there will be differences between coming up in the
| one system or the other, but essentially I'd say they are
| career politicians just the same.
|
| Presumably, there's also a very strong selection process to
| make it into the top ranks of this political system, that
| will have a very strong effect on who gets there and how they
| get shaped on the way - not mentioning the forces within,
| once you're in place.
|
| So while it would be wrong to say the initial background
| makes no difference, I wonder how much influence it still
| holds once you make it into the politburo.
| fatneckbeard wrote:
| this reminds me of how the politburo of china is 99.9% male,
| the sons of the party elite get favorable positions, and you
| keep your position by telling the dictator what they want to
| hear instead of what is actually going on.
| tyoma wrote:
| This used to be true only in the most technical sense, partly
| because sciences/engineering degrees were still permitted
| during the cultural revolution --- it was the only option.
|
| The newer generation of leaders is mostly lawyers and
| economics degrees.
|
| Source: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/04/chinas-
| overrated-techno...
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| That used to be true, but the cultural revolution put a dent
| in that. While it is still likely they'll have a degree in
| engineering, the leadership is now a lot like Xi Jinping in
| being career politicians (he has a 2 year correspondence
| chemical engineering degree from qinghua, but never worked as
| an engineer).
| nn3 wrote:
| Is it fair to say that the adjuncts are on a pipeline to get
| administrative jobs if they want to stay in academia?
| compiler-guy wrote:
| No. The job is absolutely dead end as far as academia goes.
| wolf550e wrote:
| I don't think so. There is no pipeline for them. Nobody can
| make a career of working temp jobs for long hours and make 15K
| a year. These people need to switch careers. Professional
| managements don't hire from among the PhDs who were
| unsuccessful in their academic career.
| F00Fbug wrote:
| While the author bemoans the increasing use of adjunct faculty,
| there is an issue (that I may have not spotted as I was speed-
| reading!): Where I teach, only a certain percentage of sections
| can be taught by adjuncts; routinely exceeding this number would
| cause us to loose program accreditation from our accrediting
| institution. The scrutiny was not trivial! So for at least some
| institutions deploying adjuncts has a limit.
|
| I started as an NTT instructor, then program coordinator, and was
| interim department chair. With each step came more course
| releases and more administrative work; I was pretty unhappy by
| the end. Now I'm an adjunct and teach one class per semester. As
| the author mentioned, it doesn't pay but it funds my hobbies and
| I really enjoy the teaching part!
| fatneckbeard wrote:
| finally prospective college students have a way to judge a
| university that is objective.
|
| ask them what percentage of adjuncts they have, lower is
| obviously better.
|
| then plot versus tuition cost, then you can figure out the
| optimal ratio of adjunct/tuition for your budget.
| paulcole wrote:
| > ask them what percentage of adjuncts they have, lower is
| obviously better.
|
| As a 17-year old high school senior what would your process be
| to "ask them"? And does it matter what the university's
| percentage is vs. the percentage in the program the prospective
| student is interested in? And wouldn't students turning down
| schools because of too many adjuncts just lead to more adjuncts
| as there's less tuition money coming in?
|
| This has all the hallmarks of "Walk into the office, shake the
| manager's hand and hand them your resume."
|
| Sounds good and it has probably worked for somebody!
| leetcrew wrote:
| a lot of this blog post is about how universities come up with
| a long list of titles to avoid calling adjuncts "adjuncts". so
| you could ask this question, and the admissions officer would
| (somewhat) honestly answer that they don't have any adjuncts.
| then you would go and have most of your classes taught by
| people who are adjuncts in every way except their title. a
| better question might be "what percentage of faculty are tenure
| track?" or "what percentage of courses are taught by tenure
| track faculty?".
|
| that said, I don't see much evidence that the "teacher-scholar"
| model brings a lot of value to undergraduate education in the
| first place. even in a fast-moving field like CS, the vast
| majority of the BS curriculum is stuff that was figured out
| decades ago. by far the best "professor" I had in my CS degree
| was actually an MS student TA who really liked operating
| systems. technically, he wasn't even allowed to teach that
| class, but I guess the department looked the other way because
| he got great reviews and they didn't have to pay him much.
| ggm wrote:
| s/^Academic/American &/
|
| Not that other economies tertiary education isn't similar. Some
| better, some worse for the ratio of tenured to non tenured.
| mgaunard wrote:
| In my experience they're all pretty much the same.
|
| There is teaching-only/research-only and teaching-and-research.
| teaching-and-research is the standard, research-only the elite,
| and teaching-only is usually seen as "not real professors".
|
| Then for each of those the levels are student, temp, junior,
| senior.
|
| They all have different names for some reason instead of
| straightforward ones, because egos.
|
| Some of the combinations don't exist, in particular for
| teaching-only.
|
| In general due to limited junior/senior positions, there is a
| massive amount of people at temp level, sometimes indefinitely.
|
| The article above mostly rants about how the majority of the
| teaching is done by the teaching-only staff (as you would
| expect), and how they should be given more consideration. The
| truth is that the worth of a professor is measured by his
| research, not his teaching.
| sn41 wrote:
| > research-only the elite
|
| Not really. This is true only for faculty in research
| institutes like IHES in France, or IAS in USA.
|
| In normal universities, both research-only faculty and
| teaching-only faculty are considered below the "teaching-and-
| research" faculty. They correspond to what in the old
| parlance was called "ordinary professors" in Europe. The
| "extraordinary professors", despite what they sound like,
| were considered inferior to them - extra as in outside, so
| more corresponding to adjunct faculty of today.
| dede4metal wrote:
| Indeed, I came here to say exactly this. In very
| conservative settings like FR and IT "ordinary" professors
| are the only one that are receiving the full credit and
| considered to fully teaching or fully research positions.
| OJFord wrote:
| No they're not. A Reader in the UK is I believe 'Assistant
| Professor' in the US. Which, unless the whole setup is
| different to the extent I'm not really sure how we can talk
| about equivalences anyway, strikes me as a bit odd - in my
| experience (as a student) they did no assisting, they ran
| their own courses (perhaps with a PhD candidate TA assisting
| _them_ ).
| jltsiren wrote:
| The traditional system in the UK had four ranks: lecturer,
| senior lecturer, reader, and professor. Depending on who
| you ask, a reader was either equivalent to US full
| processor or between associate and full professor. For
| example, when Cambridge switched to the assistant /
| associate / full ranks a couple of years ago, readers
| became professors.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| _" The article above mostly rants about how the majority of
| the teaching is done by the teaching-only staff (as you would
| expect), and how they should be given more consideration."_
|
| It's a rant about being slotted into a system where it's next
| to impossible to get into the "good" track, from the "bad"
| position.
|
| _" The truth is that the worth of a professor is measured by
| his research, not his teaching."_
|
| Which means it is pretty fucked up that two-thirds of the
| academic faculty is never given the opportunity to prove
| their worth. It's of course even worse than that, because
| there is only a minority of minted PhDs that can even secure
| such a position.
|
| All in all, it looks even worse than STEM, where there at
| least is temporary research roles for junior faculty.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Humanities departments at universities in the US have been
| getting smaller, and more professorship slots are moving
| towards STEM, in general. However, this has come at the end
| of a _tremendous_ growth cycle in the humanities if you
| zoom out to the last 50-100 years. It also seems like more
| "traditional" fields like History and English are being
| replaced by Psychology, Sociology, and [x] Studies, which
| seem to have a very different focus.
|
| Even in STEM, only about 10% of PhDs from top-tier
| universities go on to become professors. A small fraction
| of the rest end up adjuncting, but a much bigger fraction
| take the escape hatch into industry. A PhD in history
| basically only prepares you to be a history professor,
| though, so I imagine that the escape hatch is much more
| narrow in that field.
| ghaff wrote:
| >so I imagine that the escape hatch is much more narrow
| in that field
|
| Worst case, someone with a PhD in at least most technical
| fields is seen as at least as educationally qualified as
| someone with a Master's and there are lots of sciences
| like biology or chemistry where a PhD is seen as a pretty
| good degree for an employer outside of academia for a lot
| of purposes.
|
| A lot of the humanities, less so. If you have a PhD from
| a good school in English lit, that may suggest certain
| things (both good and bad) about your qualifications but
| isn't necessarily a recommendation beyond a good
| portfolio. Though the same thing could be said about a
| law degree which a lot of humanities undergrads I've
| known got and never really used except in very indirect
| ways.
| skissane wrote:
| Indeed, in the English-speaking world there are two main
| systems of academic ranks: the North American system (primarily
| US and Canada) and the traditional British system (most of the
| rest of it). This article is discussing the first system
| without acknowledging the second, or the differences between
| the two.
| jholman wrote:
| The scope of the article is _in the first sentence_.
| ggm wrote:
| The author is no stranger to reading and research about
| matters considerably more complex than the nature of
| tertiary educational organisation worldwide and has an
| extensive readership outside the USA.
|
| If this was about Roman era educational norms he'd have
| done a French metric tonne more work.
| jholman wrote:
| Again, who are you to determine what he chooses to write
| about? Your entire _framing of what is going on_ is
| simply off-base, so the point you attempt to make about
| Devereaux 's competence is beside the point.
|
| He is choosing to write about the American academic
| industry, incidentally speaking far more about the
| humanities than about other fields. The title of the
| article simplifies that, as all article titles do. That's
| just how titles work.
|
| He has researched his subject fairly extensively, as far
| as I can tell.
|
| If you want an article about non-American academy,
| perhaps including STEM fields, write the damn article
| yourself.
| ggm wrote:
| Nobody decides what he writes but himself. I read the
| blog frequently and they're well written and researched.
| I'm tired of Americentrism, and I think this piece would
| have been better for a wider sweep. I'm interested in how
| it differs from Japan, or Germany or the UK. I'd be
| interested in how an American academic understands this.
| jholman wrote:
| That makes sense to me.
| skissane wrote:
| Even if you are going to limit your scope, a brief
| expression of awareness of things beyond it is called for-
| something absent here. Furthermore, the scope seems
| arbitrarily limited - it isn't just the US system, the
| Canadian system is largely the same as far as ranks go - so
| why is the scope described as just "American", as opposed
| to "US and Canada"?
| labster wrote:
| The author is a Roman military history PhD talking about
| his personal experience in academia for the most part.
| It's not hard to see the current system is broken, after
| all, but only if you're in the middle of it. There are
| other sources if you want an in-depth view; the target
| audience is people who don't even know what an adjunct
| is.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| The author is also very much a teacher; his goal, I
| think, is to educate primarily his own students, firstly
| in how to do history, and secondly in how not to fail as
| a student. He's written more than one article along these
| lines.
|
| Perhaps the shortage of navigation is a problem if you're
| just dipping in, or skimming. I check out Devereaux's
| blog every Friday, and if the article is interesting, I
| plough through the whole thing, including the footnotes.
|
| If I wanted to do history at Uni, I'd like to have him as
| my teacher.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| The author says they only have worked in the American system.
| Having worked in the USA, Japan, and Europe in academia I
| find that American academics don't typically know the system
| in America isn't the same everywhere else.
| tough wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americentrism
|
| Extends to anything really.
|
| Hard to know better when you never left your country.
| (Majority of Americans don't hold a Passport)
| ljlolel wrote:
| Majority of Europeans haven't left Europe.
|
| It's true anywhere.
| [deleted]
| skissane wrote:
| > Majority of Europeans haven't left Europe.
|
| That's not an apples-to-apples comparison. The US is a
| country, and Europe is a continent containing almost 50
| separate countries. And before anyone says "US states are
| like countries"-the states of the US are no more "like
| countries" than the states of Germany are
|
| Only 40% of Americans own a passport, compared to 76% of
| people in the UK - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-
| canada-42586638
| panda888888 wrote:
| Other countries also use different systems. For instance,
| Israel traditionally only has two ranks: "Professor" which is
| someone who has tenure, and "Lecturer" which is anyone
| without tenure.
| skissane wrote:
| > Israel traditionally only has two ranks: "Professor"
| which is someone who has tenure, and "Lecturer" which is
| anyone without tenure.
|
| That's not what Wikipedia says:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_ranks_in_Israel
|
| According to Wikipedia, Israel traditionally uses a hybrid
| of the British and German systems, including the British
| rank of "senior lecturer", albeit Technion has renamed that
| to the American "associate professor"
| CrampusDestrus wrote:
| If you are publishing an article where you explain different
| categories of something, please give it titled sections! I wanted
| to jump right to the adjuncts since I know all the other ranks,
| but I found myself lost in the text and basically had to read it
| all
| btrettel wrote:
| Perhaps the article changed since you wrote your comment as
| there is a section titled "Adjuncts".
|
| Or maybe you wanted a table of contents? I agree that would
| have been helpful for an article of this length.
| pttrn wrote:
| +1, although I didn't read it. Close tab.
| BananaPuncakes wrote:
| Oh no! Your poor fingers and eyes needing to scroll a little.
| com wrote:
| Structuring information is one of the ways that your work
| is read and understood by your readers.
|
| This should be a priority unless you're writing is just for
| social status, funding or compliance reasons, surely?
| BananaPuncakes wrote:
| Oh I agree it is nice and helpful, the previous comment
| was just being an overdramatic ass, so I sunk to their
| level...
| alexwasserman wrote:
| Did you read it in an RSS reader? Using NNW swallows the titles
| on this blog in the render mode.
| ec109685 wrote:
| The most frustrating point in the article is the footnote:
| https://acoup.blog/2023/04/28/collections-academic-ranks-exp...
|
| If you don't get into the right undergraduate program, you are
| likely doomed to never become a tenured professor since the whole
| system is stacked against you, no matter how good you are at
| teaching.
|
| He also makes a good point about tenure being the only way to
| influence a department and introduce new courses, etc., which
| just seems terribly unfair.
|
| A great teacher should be treated at the same level of prestige
| as a great researcher. Make influence merit based based on
| contribution to the university on its most important mission:
| teaching students. Don't reward mediocre assistant professors
| with lifetime appointments.
|
| The part about professional managers running institutions now
| resonated. Imagine if the tech leadership at companies was a
| bunch MBA's with no experience in the field.
| BeetleB wrote:
| He does qualify it with "humanities". In my experience, this is
| not true in engineering. I went to a low ranked undergrad and
| got into a top 3 ranked school for grad (with no research). As
| did many of my peers.
| seanc wrote:
| Honestly I think tech leadership is the exception, not the
| rule. I think in health care, education, manufacturing,
| retail... All those sectors, leadership has many MBA's who
| never got their hands dirty.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| _> A great teacher should be treated at the same level of
| prestige as a great researcher. Make influence merit based
| based on contribution to the university on its most important
| mission: teaching students._
|
| The problem is that while research quality can be measured to a
| certain extent (in a flawed way that brings problems, like all
| the publish-or-perish culture, but it can be done); measuring
| teaching quality, even crudely, is an unsolved problem.
|
| If you measure by academic grades or pass/fail rates, you are
| just incentivizing easy exams and easy courses, typically not
| the best for learning.
|
| If you ask students, they will also be biased by the difficulty
| of the course, apart from other possible biases (gender, etc.).
|
| If you measure student employability, your metrics will be more
| correlated to discipline than to actual teaching quality, and
| you can't rate individual teachers/courses that way anyway.
|
| If you count "achievements" like acknowledging teachers for
| taking training courses, etc., people will just do that to
| improve their metrics without necessarily improving teaching
| quality.
|
| There just doesn't seem to be a good solution.
|
| I am a professor in a metrics-obsessed academic system and to
| be honest, research metrics are gamed by some but at least if
| you're good you're going to be fine. Teaching metrics are pure
| noise, and I say this as someone who hasn't had any problem
| with them (in fact I've reached full professorship).
| ec109685 wrote:
| Obviously this author has their biases, but shouldn't a
| hiring / promotion committee be able to cut through this and
| find "the best teachers" for their students, and incorporate
| these factors you've outlined.
|
| Similarly in the corporate world some companies have much
| better developers than others even though there isn't a
| perfect way of evaluating a developer, especially at the more
| senior level.
| [deleted]
| drewmassey wrote:
| As a former music history professor who now works in tech, I
| think the adjunctification of American universities is one of the
| the worst "best-kept secrets" out there. The sheer number of blog
| "exposes" of adjunct teaching that I have read over the last 20
| years simply boggles the mind, each one breathlessly "revealing"
| the same secret. Of course, they are not wrong: I personally
| adjuncted for years and it does not pay (example: I earned $5,000
| total the year after I graduated from Harvard with a PhD).
|
| What really mystifies me, now that I have 8 years of perspective
| between me and the day I resigned from my tenure-track job, is
| why people who think of themselves as great thinkers (or, at
| least, good enough thinkers to teach college) cannot escape from
| something of a self-constructed prison of adjunct work. Based on
| my limited conversations with NTT academics who considered career
| changes during the pandemic, there is an odd quality of stockholm
| syndrome where PhDs (especially in the humanities) simply cannot
| fathom that any other life path might be worthwhile, and hence
| toil away.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Based on my limited conversations with NTT academics who
| considered career changes during the pandemic, there is an odd
| quality of stockholm syndrome where PhDs (especially in the
| humanities) simply cannot fathom that any other life path might
| be worthwhile, and hence toil away.
|
| Calling it Stockholm Syndrome seems correct to me, at least
| based on my anecdotes. So many smart friends who can't leave
| academia after more or less growing up inside it. Like the
| person who can't leave the small town they grew up in, so they
| just languish there forever.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| From my limited experience in small midwestern cities, I
| haven't seen too many people stay with pure adjuncting for
| long. I was an adjunct for one year and then got a one year
| contract that was up for annual renewal until the university
| got a new president and decided the university wouldn't have
| any 1 year contracts any more (now I'm full time at the
| community college which doesn't have tenure).
|
| While I have a PhD, most of the people who adjuncted only had
| MAs and so weren't eligible for a tenure track job. From my phd
| program at an R1 school, I'm not aware of anyone who is
| adjuncting as their main source of income. Only handful of them
| are at R1s. Many either left academia or are in potions similar
| to mine which aren't research focused.
|
| The reason people stay in adjuncting is because they hope for
| the full time contracts, the like teaching, and they like the
| flexibility of being able to pick which days they teach (I know
| this from experience because as a full time employee while I do
| have flexibility, there are times when no adjuncts will cover
| an 8am or night class and we have to do it and I have already
| been warned that in the Fall it looks like we won't have
| adjuncts to cover certain days because they don't want to work
| those days).
| BeetleB wrote:
| I know quite a few who've been adjunct for 8+ years. Math
| PhDs and non-engineering majors.
| blululu wrote:
| There is more to life than a paycheck. Historically professors
| made unimpressive salaries but enough to live at a quality
| middle class level. When you consider the prestige, respect and
| job security that was afforded to professors it makes sense
| that the non-remunerative aspects are sufficient to our weight
| the money. Of course these days the pay cut is perhaps too deep
| to justify these days, but not unambiguously so. An adjunct
| might have a chance to publish a big result and land a tenured
| position. The odds are slim but it's important to pursue your
| dreams even if it is a gamble. The cost of not doing so is
| higher than you might thing.
| drewmassey wrote:
| This is true; my father was - and my husband's parents are -
| all professors so I know that small town academic life (for
| tenured faculty) is one flavor of the American Dream.
|
| And pursuing your dreams is important. But I've also seen
| pretty talented people adjunct for decades at a stretch,
| because they believe that _some day_ they will get a TT job -
| and I 've also seen those same people seemingly only taking
| advice from their doctoral advisors, who (in my experience)
| consider anything besides a TT job as "failure".
|
| If people want to live that way, they should. But the
| ideology of "pursue your dreams," when it comes to employment
| as a tenured professor at an American University - is often
| used to just string along adjunct labor in the home that
| someday their ship will come in.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > The cost of not doing so is higher than you might thing.
|
| There are plenty of people on HN, including myself, who
| abandoned academia for industry. I think we are more aware of
| the cost than you probably are. Especially because we have
| friends who did stay and get tenure, and can compare our
| experiences with them.
|
| Hint: It's not a large cost.
|
| The trap many academics make is being singular in pursuing a
| dream. There are lots of great things they can strive for,
| and they're blind to them because they want that one thing.
|
| And talk to most older professors in the liberal arts and
| most will say "Money matters!" Heck, when I was a grad
| student I recall talking to an engineering professor in my
| alma mater and mentioned how great it is that he gets to pick
| what he researches on. His response was that "Yes, you can
| pick whatever you want. But while they can't fire you because
| of tenure, you will be on the bottom of the pay scale. That's
| fine if you have no family."
|
| While certainly some professors go that route, the reality
| is: Money matters!
|
| Especially if you're in a bigger city. I recall a little over
| a decade ago there was an interview with a full professor of
| history - she made $60K/year and lived in a big city. On top
| of that, the university was forcing her to teach really large
| classes to save money. She was looking for an exit.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| I'm reminded of a Peter Thiel quote that always makes me laugh,
| but then makes me sad:
|
| "I did well enough in law school to be hired by a big New York
| law firm, but it turned out to be a very strange place. From
| the outside, everybody wanted to get in, and from the inside,
| everybody wanted to get out.
|
| When I left the firm, after seven months and three days, my
| coworkers were surprised. One of them told me that he hadn't
| known it was possible to escape from Alcatraz. Now that might
| sound odd, because all you had to do to escape was walk through
| the front door and not come back. But people really did find it
| very hard to leave, because so much of their identity was
| wrapped up in having won the competitions to get there in the
| first place."
| Cynddl wrote:
| Adding to other voices in this thread that the title does not
| explain academic ranks, it explains North-american academic
| ranks. There are a variety of academic systems worldwide and in
| numbers of academics, production, and diversity, USA forms a
| minority.
|
| A better title would therefore be: "North-american Academic Ranks
| Explained or What on Earth Is an Adjunct?"
|
| This is not nitpicking. This is about stating clearing the
| cultural context to not invisibilise discussions that are not
| centred on US culture.
| watwut wrote:
| It is a blog of an American professor writing in his own
| language. He is talking about US, because Americans are as
| entitled to write about US as French are about France.
|
| And you will be shocked, but peoples from other nations would
| create exact same headline when they write in their own
| language.
| whakim wrote:
| It is indeed nitpicking when _the very first sentence_ makes it
| clear that the article is about _American_ universities.
| lolinder wrote:
| Everything is implicitly written from the author's cultural
| perspective.
|
| I've run into plenty of articles written in Canada or the UK or
| Australia where I only realize the information doesn't apply in
| the US after I read something unfamiliar and check the domain
| or org address. I don't get irritated at the article author, I
| just move on.
| parpfish wrote:
| I was hoping to finally learn what a provost was
| ebiester wrote:
| https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/02/14/poorly-defin...
|
| A provost is an executive position over the academics of a
| university. A university president is the entire university,
| which has more fundraising, athletic, and other
| responsibilities.
|
| In practice, because of the distributed nature of universities,
| it's a bit like a cat herder.
| wolf550e wrote:
| Seems it's just the 2nd in command:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provost_(education)
| hsikka wrote:
| Enlightening. Another far less covered topic is the role of Non
| Tenure Track "Research Faculty", often titled Research Scientist,
| Research Professor, etc.
|
| I occupy one of those positions, and their forward mobility and
| relation to traditional TT positions is strange, and I'd like to
| see it covered in more depth.
| Metacelsus wrote:
| [flagged]
| bell-cot wrote:
| It's well known that "success" in submitting to HN has a fairly
| large random component.
| fullsend wrote:
| The highest rank in my mind is the tenured professor who builds
| businesses from the safety of the university. Those few who poach
| the brightest students for their lab, leverage that into a
| startup (or more than one), and exit for millions while
| collecting university checks. This brings me awe, respect,
| jealousy, and distaste in equal measure.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Bear in mind how profoundly feudal academia's history and
| mindset are. A self-serving professor can bring a great deal of
| prestige to the university. And prestige is by far the #1
| priority for a modern university.
| inciampati wrote:
| And this is also true for many of the people who work in
| institutions. Look at how much more desirable positions in
| coastal United States universities are than those in the
| interior, particular private ones like the IVs and some of
| the larger and more famous ones in big public systems. The
| thing is, if you don't care about status and you believe that
| almost anyone can do good work, as long as they're motivated,
| you can go anywhere you want, and in many cases you'll find
| that you're welcomed with open arms. But this comes at a cost
| of status.
| gazby wrote:
| Only because prestige equals money, the real #1 in academia.
| fallingknife wrote:
| That's just not true, though. Nobody who is after money
| goes into academia in the first place. It's not where the
| money is.
| gazby wrote:
| My bad for being unclear, I was referring to the
| institutions, not the faculty. Tons of money in
| administration roles though.
| ghaff wrote:
| >It's not where the money is.
|
| No and certainly not on a risk-adjusted basis. (i.e. if
| you're reasonably competent, you're far more likely to do
| pretty well in private business than academia). On the
| other hand, while I've never had personal exposure to the
| downsides, a tenured position at an elite university in
| the US still seems pretty attractive with various caveats
| in both directions depending upon the location.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| You may mean "funding for research projects". I would
| agree. Over the very long haul a successful research
| program can also result in a relatively high "academic"
| income (ca. $200,000 in biomedical research), but that no
| comparison with mid and top levels of programmers at FAANG
| et al.
| gazby wrote:
| I was referring to the institutions, not the faculty.
| inciampati wrote:
| Reading this made me check my personal privilege. I realized
| that that's exactly why I'm pursuing that kind of arrangement.
| It is absolutely at the top of the pile in terms of technical
| and artistic creative endeavors, which you can pursue, which
| also can make money. If played right, you really do get the
| best of every world. Tenure allows you to be exactly this
| crazy. The position gives you credibility to investors and the
| community at large. You'll have access to smart people all
| around you, who support what you do and are happy to
| collaborate.
| [deleted]
| tomatodevice wrote:
| I've seen it a few times and I still don't understand how we
| can allow such blatant conflict of interests at the management
| level...
| BeetleB wrote:
| Universities often benefit from it financially. There almost
| always is an agreement between the professor and the
| university.
| tough wrote:
| Everyone makes money?
| mrobins wrote:
| Is this where "tech transfer" comes in and the University
| gets a piece of the departing business or a perpetual
| licensing agreement?
| pca006132 wrote:
| It seems to me that from the university's standpoint, a
| company is considered a plus instead of corruption, i.e. have
| "real-world" impact, and perhaps the university will have a
| stake in the company as well (not sure about this). If so, it
| is a win-win situation for both the university management and
| the professor, only the student lose, and who cares about
| that little grad student?
| ghaff wrote:
| Typically not a stake that I know of but a school like MIT
| makes a _lot_ of money from technology licensing.
| hackandthink wrote:
| Dr. Angela Collier: the adjunct problem
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AvfOhtmCZY
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