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Comment by Upvoter33 | Hacker News Reader

Not pointed out in the article is the fact that Strickland is still an "associate" professor at Waterloo -- something sure to be rectified asap -- indicating that the department there wasn't super keen on promoting her to full professor, for some reason. Oops!

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Do you know whether she was super keen on being promoted or are you just assuming she was being pushed down “for some reason”? (I have no idea, myself.)

I have no idea either, but it's probably worth pointing out that, for better or worse, promotion to full will entail a certain degree of bean counting. Thus, there are a number of perfectly respectable ways to not meet those metrics. For example, someone who decides to tackle a very hard problem with very high risk of failure is likely to look less productive on paper.

Is the admin work for full professors that much more involved than for associate professors?

Not in my department, but I have no idea how representative it is.

I think it varies by department and university, but I know that one of the professors in my grad school department had to take on more committee work when she got promoted.

> someone who decides to tackle a very hard problem with very high risk of failure is likely to look less productive on paper.

This is the central problem with today's academic research environment.

Agreed.

In many top universities in Canada, promotion to Full Professor doesn't confer any particular benefits. No salary raises (unless your Faculty are unionized, and you are below the mandated "floor" salary for Full Professor ... which is very unlikely, because it's so low, by design). Same workload. If anything it's worse because you might be asked to serve on more departmental and faculty committees.

Sure but it still means something to the rest of the community, which is important. My parents are professors, and I can assure you that there is at the least a psychological difference.

Yes I agree

And she was elected as a fellow of the Optical Society of America in 2008. In CS and AI, such an election typically happens years after attaining full professionship. If her subfield is anything like CS, it is yet another anomaly.

Oh, lord. Please stop the assumptions and do a little digging before you post. She was on the radio today saying that she just never bothered to go through the paperwork.

But if it makes you feel better, I'm sure it was a huge conspiracy.

Academic evaluations are very imperfect and are biased toward "what have you done lately?" Major breakthroughs do not count for as much as sustained research output. For tenure and promotion, typically work done before joining the institution is not used in the evaluation, and the prize winning work was done during her PhD research. This is in the US, but I assume Canada is reasonably similar.

Also, see this article by Peter Higgs complaining about the need to "keep churning out papers": https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...

I don't know about Canada but "Full Professor" means something different in most Commonwealth countries than in the US. Typically a University dept will have a single professor who likely is head of dept, if there's an endowment there might be a second one

(and if you get a Nobel I suspect there's lee-way to confer one)

Please get the facts before spreading wrong ideas. She has said that she never applied. Also some people are commenting (I don't know if this is true) that a professor has more paperwork etc to do for the same salary so she may want to focus on pure research.

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