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Comment by tigerlily | Hacker News Reader

Anyone think of any good joke job titles?

Here's mine: Executive Professor

Contextually the word Professor means different things in the US to almost anywhere else. In the UK and Australia it means a senior academic who can be head of department, occupies a "chair" which may be personal or functional, and who has moved beyond the pedestrian state of teaching to a more exalted level we call "many fine dinners"

In America, it appears to mean "is paid to teach"

"Dean" might work. Dean of cleaning. Dean of Catering.

That seems like an oversimplification of American usage. It certainly doesn’t refer to a K12 teacher, and many people distinguish between adjuncts/instructors and tenure-track professors.

Technically though, one is not a professor until reaching the rank of “full professor”, which typically happens no younger than 40, after being promoted from “assistant professor” to “associate professor” (and then coming up for full several years later).

Assistant professors will say “I am a professor” when asked what they do for a living. But when being introduced at academic conferences they would normally be referred to as “an assistant/associate professor at university X”.

Some of this is inside baseball among academics, but the first paragraph applies pretty widely.

You didn't use the words Lecturer or Senior Lecturer there at all. They're terms used in the UK, Australia and New Zealand. There's another fine British/Imperial academic title: Reader. I never quite worked out what it meant. Most of the professors told me it meant "not to be trusted" but they would say that.

Emeritus and Adjunct are a bit like "executive producer" in "State and Maine" grace-titles handed out to keep people happy. Emeritus get use of a room and access to the coffee machine.

I'm not sure Senior Lecturer exists much in the US. Lecturer is like adjunct/instructor, in my experience.

Is emeritus and adjunct the same thing in those countries? In the US, the former is a semi-retired (tenured) professor, and the latter is not on the tenure track at all.

Yes. Emeritus is ex tenure. hence the room. Adjunct is given out as grace-and-favour to corporate types who are helpful. Hmm. Nobody offered it to me. Well, maybe I'm less helpful than I think.

Adjunct in the US is usually given to non-tenure track phds, who teach on a temp (usually per credit) basis. They're basically lecturers but worse off, since lecturers are often full time (and sometimes need not have phds!)

> There's another fine British/Imperial academic title: Reader. I never quite worked out what it meant.

Well, you see, words "lecturer" and "reader" both have the same meaning, but the former is a fancy French/Latin word and the latter is a boorish English one, so I'd imagine the difference between the academic titles would be about of the same level.

>It certainly doesn’t refer to a K12 teacher

I think it depends. We used professor when I was in high school (3.5 years ago).

Wow, really? Where, and public or private school?

This wouldn't just be the US. In Spanish-speaking countries (though technically America as in North/Central/South America), "profesor" can refer to either a high school educator or a university professor: https://www.spanishdict.com/translate/profesor

However, there are nuances. The term "catedrático" is used for senior profesors/profesores at a university: https://spanish.stackexchange.com/questions/21816/what-is-th...

I would be glad to hear more from native Spanish speakers or other foreign language speakers who use similar terms (e.g. French speakers, who also use the word "professeur" with a similar usage).

Adressing high school teachers as "professor" is common in Austria and Czechia.

Same in Polish. But, in the higher education context, "professor" is the highest job title there is (it's even given by the country's president during an official ceremony, although there's also "university professor" title, which doesn't involve the president), requiring usually at least 15-year academic career.

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