Sort of. Tenure track means that you are an assistant or associate without tenure, but you have an appointment that might well lead to tenure. However, at many places it is not as clear as “don’t perform really poorly” to be denied it. Most places have a limited number of tenure slots and if they are full, you might well not get it. Also they might fill from outside if they think they can do better. In fact at many places before you can grant tenure the promotion committee is required to make comparisons (and seek outside reference comparisons) to other possible candidates.
Interesting. I’ve always read that making Associate was equated with tenure.
Harvard indeed waits until full Professorship to award tenure. But you may be behind on Yale. I was curious about their policies and found this.
In keeping with practice at most other universities, the untenured rank of associate professor on term is no longer used at Yale, except for faculty who joined the University prior to 2016 under previous tenure policies.
I was unaware of the change and I think it applies only to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale, and not for example at the Law School, School of Management, and other dividsions, One reason I think that is that the statement
Mangan wrote that “it is extremely rare (indeed, unprecedented) for a tenure case, once approved by a divisional committee, to be overturned by either the JBPO or the Corporation.”
in the page you provided I know to be not true at at least one other part of Yale. I won’t say how I know, but it is indeed true.
In some unis, but not others. Not ours. “Associate” is just about getting paid more.
Someone who used to be one of my professors not only started teaching outside the state – he actually taught outside the country. He held professorships in New York State and in Canada, and had a helluva long commute between them. It’s not as if his joint appointment was relatively close by in Toronto.
Is it possible she teaches a semester course every year or two, remote or visit, and therefore is entitled to call herself an “adjunct professor”? It certainly lends a certain air of prestige. (although “Virginia farmer” has a long and grand part in the history in the USA too…)
I always thought this was more prophetic than outright knee slapping.
This definitely depends on the institution. I work for a large state research university. Here adjunct simply means “unpaid.” What most people use adjunct for here is what we call part time or limited term faculty. Adjuncts can teach online classes, on campus classes, or they can simply be adjunct to work on research projects with us and have an academic home. We currently have an adjunct faculty that does not teach but is on graduate student committees that is across the country. Adjuncts are required to have the same credentials as full time, tenured faculty.
We also have separate tracks for promotion and tenure. So someone can be promoted to Associate Professor without getting tenure. But even if they are promoted, if they don’t make tenure in a certain time frame they are shown the door.
It’s also not uncommon for a school to have high-status faculty, even full professors, whom they don’t pay. In fact, the professors often even pay the university. Their pay comes from grants (usually from the government). There’s a loss of stability from this (if your grant proposals stop going through, you lose your income), but for a prolific researcher, it can still be quite lucrative, and also gives you a lot of freedom (you don’t have to teach any classes unless you feel like it, you’re doing exactly the work you want to be doing, and it’s relatively easy to change institutions if you have some reason to).
I vaguely recall reading something about this (a commentary on some Ivy League univesrsity) that students would record lectures and play back later for note-taking, and when I saw the movie I assumed the script-writers had seen the same article.
The movie was exaggerated for comic effect, of course, but there’s a lot it got right about academic life.
In addition to my day job, I have a teaching position at the state university. The department website calls me “Lecturer” but my employment contract calls me “Adjunct Professor Level II”. I get paid for whatever class I teach. The department chair told me it was the same rate that the tenure and tenure track faculty get paid for teaching, although I’ve never checked. I get no benefits. While my university discourages remote teaching, it is a possible thing to do.
Do professors oppose remote classes? It seems like a dangerous slope for them. Sure, it’s nice when they can work from home rather than having to go to work and be physically present in a room with students. But let’s say ten different colleges all have a five hundred student class for some basic freshman subject like American History 101. The presidents of those colleges might decide that it would be just as good to combine these into one five thousand student class being taught by one professor working remotely to ten different colleges. Nine professors lose their job and the one who’s still working kept his by his willingness to take a thirty percent pay cut. The colleges all reduced their payroll for this class by 93%.
A related issue that has been discussed a lot is reusing recorded classes and who owns the copyright – the professor or the college.
That surprises me. In an academic field, I would have assumed an issue of copyrights would be important enough that it would have been explicitly addressed.
I suspect there is a lot of local variation in use of terms. I had an adjunct appointment for some time after I left academia, which mostly meant I could continue to supervise grad students. But once I stopped that, there wasn’t any real connection and the appointment wasn’t renewed. No big deal.
Senior people in industry that are cooperating on research may also get adjunct appointments. That helps everyone.
My father had a clinical appointment, he taught students in the medical school but wasn’t paid. The hospital where he worked was expected to cover this as part of their role in the medical school. Dad was quite proud of being listed in the university annual reports as having an academic appointment.
There are definite rules about patents – usually its some kind of sharing. There are definite rules about copyrights on published works. Usually the professor owns them (though they are mostly transferred to the publisher). What was new and therefore not covered in previous rules was a recording of a lecture.
At my workplace, the answer is “it depends”. Full-time employees are expected to live in the state unless they have special permission (I don’t know who grants this permission, but it is a board of regents policy). I expect that might be different for institutions that are right on the border with another state. From there, for things like teaching, it depends on the modality of their course. I’m not sure about adjuncts’ ability to teach from out of state at my institution.
I do have colleagues within the unit of the university I work for who have adjuncted for other schools remotely. We’re in Georgia, but I know people have taught for San Jose State, Syracuse, and Virginia Commonwealth.
Which, as I said, surprises me. It’s not like recording somebody talking is a new technology. And as you note, this is a field where people are aware of intellectual property rights. So I would have thought some time back around sixty years ago, somebody would have asked “Hey, if I tape my class, do I own the rights to the recording?” and a policy would have been arrived at which everyone is now aware of.
Recording someone talking is not new technology - but recording someone talking and reusing it to avoid paying someone to stand in front of a class and give a lecture live is a new use in academia . * There’s almost certainly an answer in terms of the law - my guess is that if the recording is of an actual class , it’s considered a “work for hire” and the university owns it . But institutions can have policies that give the instructor the copyright, and that’s what discussions are about. Because if the university owns the recording , they don’t even need to pay one person each semester in your example.
* I’ve seen it for years outside a university context - but those recorded trainings weren’t going to cause anyone to lose a job. Because training was maybe 1% of the recorded person’s job at most- probably less.