Academic Ranks Explained or What on Earth Is an Adjunct? | Hacker News Reader

Academic Ranks Explained or What on Earth Is an Adjunct?

acoup.blog

159 pointsbarry-cotter126 comments

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.

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

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.

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

That is kind of not how academia works. Prestige is everything. If you don’t attract the best students, you get less citations. Infrastructure crumbling? That means less grants, and therefore less citations.

The worst part is that tenured professors don’t really feel the brunt of being in a shrinking department, because they are never personally at risk. They do lose prestige, but the last few are at the stage of their careers that it doesn’t matter enough.

Honestly it feels a lot more like the fall of (Western) Rome to me. A lot of people who don’t remember what we did to get this great system, and are slowly chipping it away for their own benefit until it finally collapses. Ridiculous amounts of infighting while the humanities are burning down. Both the woke crowd and the Trumpers united on how resolutely they stand against academic freedom.

Fall of the Western Roman Empire vibes everywhere in the west these days, outside maybe of tech. But even that depends on the infrastructure, human and physical, that the rest of the system provides so it’s just a matter of time.

I console myself by saying we’re just in the low part of Peter Turchin’s secular cycle - but I hope that’s true.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

In most calendar systems (including MSFT and Google) , meetings aren’t autoaccepted even if you’re available. You choose to accept each one

OK, then just assume that I used the system and didn't accept any meeting.

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.

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

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.

You can mark yourself as busy, with a recurring event, outside the windows of time you wish to accept meeting requests.

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

You could tell them to use cal.com for their calendar needs, open core/ source

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?

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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 "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.

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."

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

Can you elaborate on what the cost is? Because there are a lot of cases that I can see where reevaluating your dreams might be a much better bet than pursuing them. I don't think it's a given that your dreams have any inherent value to them, nor that achieving them would make you happy.

I know someone who can't imagine pursuing a different career than being an Astronomy professor. He's still an undergrad at a middle-tier university and is consistently a C-grade student with a particular weakness in math, which is a major problem for what is essentially a Physics degree. Even if he succeeds at getting into a decent graduate school and getting a PhD (not a guarantee given how hard his undergrad has been for him), he'll be competing for a very small number of professorships that are available in Astronomy, and he'll be up against people who did much better in their undergrad and got into much better grad schools. And if he does beat all the odds and manage to land this professorship, will he just end up hating his career as much as he's hated school up until this point?

Is it still important for him to pursue his dream? Or is it time for him to cut his losses and find something else that interests him and is within reach?

The cost of not making at attempt is regret which can be expensive. The objections to “follow your dream” that people have mentioned are real. The basic “follow your dreams” advice should be tempered with realism and a sense of when to shift gears and call it. Don’t destroy yourself over something. But also, making an earnest attempt to accomplish goals is important. Setting and achieving goals is a key part of living a happy and fulfilling life and it is important to at least try.

From the sound of it, your friend has put in an honest effort and it is just not working out. I have nothing but respect for the effort, but tapping out is probably the best choice. That’s a hard lesson but one that you need to learn at some point in life.

> 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.

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).

I know quite a few who've been adjunct for 8+ years. Math PhDs and non-engineering majors.

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.

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.

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...

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?

Typically not a stake that I know of but a school like MIT makes a lot of money from technology licensing.

Is this where “tech transfer” comes in and the University gets a piece of the departing business or a perpetual licensing agreement?

Universities often benefit from it financially. There almost always is an agreement between the professor and the university.

Everyone makes money?

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.

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.

Only because prestige equals money, the real #1 in academia.

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.

>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.

My bad for being unclear, I was referring to the institutions, not the faculty. Tons of money in administration roles though.

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.

I was referring to the institutions, not the faculty.

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.

> 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).

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.

You can measure the real world success of the students, but this would only be useful several decades later.

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.

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.

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

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.

Did you read it in an RSS reader? Using NNW swallows the titles on this blog in the render mode.

+1, although I didn’t read it. Close tab.

Oh no! Your poor fingers and eyes needing to scroll a little.

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?

Oh I agree it is nice and helpful, the previous comment was just being an overdramatic ass, so I sunk to their level...

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?

Universities 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.

Thanks 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.

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!

Dr. Angela Collier: the adjunct problem

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AvfOhtmCZY

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.

s/^Academic/American &/

Not that other economies tertiary education isn't similar. Some better, some worse for the ratio of tenured to non tenured.

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.

The scope of the article is in the first sentence.

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”?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That makes sense to me.

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.

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)

Majority of Europeans haven’t left Europe.

It’s true anywhere.

> 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

I wonder what America would be like if it had 24 working languages like the EU. Lol.

Then its states probably would be a bit like countries.

India's states do have different languages, yet I've heard "our states are equivalent to Europe's countries" from Americans repeatedly, while I can't remember ever hearing the Indian equivalent (despite having many Indian colleagues and friends over the years)

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.

> 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”

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.

"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.

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.

>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.

> 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.

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.

In the French system, you go into CR (Chargé de Recherche) then DR (Directeur de Recherche).

You're not more likely to be promoted to DR from MdC (Maître de Conférence) or even PU (Professeur des Universités), that's simply a different track, though of course you could switch over.

Research-only positions tend to be more specialized worldwide, usually attached to a specific institute for a given problem domain, rather than teaching-and-research which would be at a generalist university. That makes perfect sense since the primary purpose of a university remains teaching, even if clearly that's rarely a priority for the staff.

Of course some countries do have national generalist research-only institutes, France is actually an example of this.

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).

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.

That's just naming. As I said, the names are all over the place.

Assistant Professor in the US is a temp teaching-and-research.

Reader in the UK is a junior teaching-and-research. The US equivalent would be Associate Professor.

Either can run their own courses, that's completely irrelevant. What distinguishes a temp and a junior is that the latter is a permanent position.

I am presenting an abstract model, of course each little system has its own little details, which in the bigger picture, don't mean much.

You'll see for example than in the traditional UK system, you effectively promote from mostly-teaching to less teaching based on your research accomplishments. That's consistent with the model I presented.

I was hoping to finally learn what a provost was

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.

Seems it's just the 2nd in command: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provost_(education)

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.

R1 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.

Is it fair to say that the adjuncts are on a pipeline to get administrative jobs if they want to stay in academia?

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.

No. The job is absolutely dead end as far as academia goes.

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.

> 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!

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.

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.

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.

It is indeed nitpicking when the very first sentence makes it clear that the article is about American universities.

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.

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