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Academic Ranks Explained or What on Earth Is an Adjunct?
- hackandthink 3y agoDr. Angela Collier: the adjunct problem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AvfOhtmCZY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AvfOhtmCZY
- ggm 3y agos/^Academic/American &/ Not that other economies tertiary education isn't similar. Some better, some worse for the ratio of tenured to non tenured.
- skissane 3y agoIndeed, 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 3y agoThe scope of the article is in the first sentence.
- ggm 3y agoThe 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 3y agoAgain, 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 3y agoNobody 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 3y agoThat makes sense to me.
- skissane 3y agoEven 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 3y agoThe 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 3y agoThe 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 3y agoThe 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 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americentrism 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 3y agoMajority of Europeans haven’t left Europe. It’s true anywhere.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- skissane 3y ago> 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 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42586638
- panda888888 3y agoOther 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 3y ago> 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 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”
- mgaunard 3y agoIn 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.
- kryptiskt 3y ago"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 3y agoHumanities 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.
- CrampusDestrus 3y agoIf 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
- pttrn 3y ago+1, although I didn’t read it. Close tab.
- BananaPuncakes 3y agoOh no! Your poor fingers and eyes needing to scroll a little.
- com 3y agoStructuring 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 3y agoOh I agree it is nice and helpful, the previous comment was just being an overdramatic ass, so I sunk to their level...
- btrettel 3y agoPerhaps 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.
- hnbear 3y agoDid you read it in an RSS reader? Using NNW swallows the titles on this blog in the render mode.
- tkgally 3y agoAbout 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.
- namdnay 3y agoThat 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
- 3y ago
- fullsend 3y agoThe 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.
- tomatodevice 3y agoI'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...
- tough 3y agoEveryone makes money?
- mrobins 3y agoIs this where “tech transfer” comes in and the University gets a piece of the departing business or a perpetual licensing agreement?
- pca006132 3y agoIt 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 3y agoTypically not a stake that I know of but a school like MIT makes a lot of money from technology licensing.
- BeetleB 3y agoUniversities often benefit from it financially. There almost always is an agreement between the professor and the university.
- fatneckbeard 3y agofinally 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 3y ago> 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 3y agoa 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.
- Cynddl 3y agoAdding 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 3y agoIt 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 3y agoIt is indeed nitpicking when the very first sentence makes it clear that the article is about American universities.
- lolinder 3y agoEverything 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.
- Metacelsus 3y ago[flagged]
- bell-cot 3y agoIt's well known that "success" in submitting to HN has a fairly large random component.
- parpfish 3y agoI was hoping to finally learn what a provost was
- wolf550e 3y agoSeems it's just the 2nd in command: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provost_(education) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provost_(education)
- ebiester 3y agohttps://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/02/14/poorly-defined-roles-provosts-and-deans-can-lead-problems-major-universities 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.
- drewmassey 3y agoAs 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 "exposés" 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.
- blululu 3y agoThere 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.
- BeetleB 3y ago> 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.
- nn3 3y agoIs it fair to say that the adjuncts are on a pipeline to get administrative jobs if they want to stay in academia?
- wolf550e 3y agoI 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.
- compiler-guy 3y agoNo. The job is absolutely dead end as far as academia goes.
- nn3 3y agoAnother 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.
- hsikka 3y agoEnlightening. 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.
- ec109685 3y agoThe most frustrating point in the article is the footnote: https://acoup.blog/2023/04/28/collections-academic-ranks-explained-or-what-on-earth-is-an-adjunct/#easy-footnote-bottom-8-18391 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.
- seanc 3y agoHonestly 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 3y ago> 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).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- F00Fbug 3y agoWhile 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!
- rr808 3y agoMy 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?
- kj4211cash 3y agoUniversities will often let admitted students visit, sometimes overnighting with a host who is a current student, before they enroll. You can also take your kids to visit, take a tour, etc. Visits are especially helpful if your kids' choice set includes liberal arts colleges, which can have pretty unique cultures and be hard to rank (e.g., Reed College used to publicly spar with US News and was always under-ranked, St John's College is a totally unique educational model, etc.). And there a plethora of books with short blurbs explaining the character of different universities. The truth is most college bound kids in the US go to the best state school that they get into. Maybe, for example, they choose Virginia Tech over Virginia if they are interested in engineering. But there's often not a ton of thought put into it. I'm glad you're thinking deeper about this though.
- rr808 3y agoThanks for your thoughts. Best state school is easy in the state I live in. :) Going out of state you might as well go private. > plethora of books with short blurbs _very_ short blurbs. So little weight is given to the different things I'd like to know it seems they're a waste.
- gumby 3y agoR1 universities (at least) have another category of non-faculty staff, which is research scientists (and lab techs and the like as well). Research scientists aren’t faculty, don’t have to teach, but, you know, do research, write grants, etc.