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Comment by mgaunard | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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.

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