s/^Academic/American &/
Not that other economies tertiary education isn't similar. Some better, some worse for the ratio of tenured to non tenured.
Not that other economies tertiary education isn't similar. Some better, some worse for the ratio of tenured to non tenured.
If this was about Roman era educational norms he'd have done a French metric tonne more work.
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.
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.
Extends to anything really.
Hard to know better when you never left your country. (Majority of Americans don't hold a Passport)
It’s true anywhere.
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
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”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.