So I’ve got a buddy from college who has a PhD and who’s made a career in academia. He used to just be a Lecturer and concentrated on the teaching aspects of his job not the research ones, but he recently switched schools and is now an “Instructional Assistant Professor”.
I’m a bit confused- he’s some sort of Assistant Professor, but he’s not tenure-track, but can be promoted? That seems very confusing. Is there some sort of non-research, non-tenure professorial track, with the same basic job titles? So like he can be a full Instructional Professor, without being tenured?
Part of me wants to shake my fist and say “Back in my day, there were the 3 types of Professors, and then there were the non-tenure track people. None of this confusing “Instructional” nonsense.” But I suppose that maybe universities want to hire more cheaper instructional faculty to teach, and limit the number of actual tenured research professors, hence the parallel track.
AIUI from sites like this one, “Instructional xxx Professor” is meant to be more or less parallel status with “Research xxx Professor”, except that the former does more teaching and the latter does more research. It typically designates a PhD holder, which the title “Lecturer” may not.
But as Thudlow_Boink notes, different institutions can have a lot of different versions of job titles. I don’t think there is any standards body in the US that regulates them.
Seems perfectly fine to me. There are also clinical xxx professors as well.
It’s not just about hiring cheaper folks- some of the clinical faculty I hire make 2-3x a humanities tenure track faculty member, but their expertise is different and come from a less traditional academic background.
There is an important difference between the thread title and question.
An associate professor is the same rank as reader and is typically a tenured position. One tier below full professor. Assistant professor is typically not tenured or often not even tenure track and is a slave labour teaching position.
? Wait, what? Are you referring specifically to the category “Instructional Assistant Professor”, which I’m not familiar with except in the context of the OP and the descriptions I linked to?
Because in US academia, the job title “Assistant Professor” typically refers to a tenure-track position, in the sixth year of which one is evaluated for tenure and promotion to “Associate Professor”.
There may well be certain types of academic jobs labeled some variety of “Assistant Professor” that are just “slave labor teaching positions”, but most “Assistant Professor” hires at most US institutions, AFAICT, are expected to balance research, teaching and service in preparation for tenure consideration.
Based on the fact that you use the spelling “labour” while the OP refers to “a buddy from college”, I’m going to tentatively guess that the OP is talking about US academia and you are not.
True. I’m probably not as familiar with the US as I should be. I was mostly just noting the difference between associate and assistant. That is a huge gap.
That’s not consistently true at all. Over the last 25 years I’ve taught at three institutions in the US and each had a non tenure track line that included assistant, associate, and fill professor. Those lines had no qualifiers like clinical or instructional etc. You’d never know from the title who was TT or non-TT.
Can’t make those kinds of generalizations.
True. I’m probably not as familiar with the US as I should be. I was mostly just noting the difference between associate and assistant. That is a huge gap.
It make be a gap in rank but it’s not necessarily in type of position.
In my limited experience, “associate professor” and “assistant professor” are two different levels on the tenure track (and I can never remember which one is higher). An “adjunct professor”, however, is not. And not all schools use the same terminology for their non-tenured faculty; the same job might be called “adjunct professor”, just “adjunct”, “instructor”, etc., at different schools.
I think the adjective “instructional” modifies the “associate professor”; it’s not as if “associate” modifies “instructional professor”. So I’d guess an “instructional associate professor” is, in terms of tenure and rank in the academic hierarchy, equivalent to an “associate professor”, and the “instructional” qualifier means he’s supposed to focus on teaching and not (or to a lesser extent) on research or supervision of theses. So it may be similar to the “clinical associate professor” used by some universities.
That is, however, only an attempt on my part to make rhyme and reason out of that wording. Job titles can be notoriously (and, some would say, intentionally) difficult to decode.
Yep, terminology for non-tenure-track faculty is not at all standardized, so this university may have simply decided to give its full-time, non-TT folks a fancier title than the other one. But another very real possibility, these days, is that this university really does have a system of teaching faculty that isn’t “officially” tenure-track but nonetheless mirrors the tenure-track system, with Instructional Assistant Professors eventually eligible for promotion to Instructional Associate Professor and then just plain Instructional Professor.
This is fairly common, for example, at universities with massive freshman writing programs but no PhD program in English to create a correspondingly massive supply of writing instructors. The university can’t afford to hire a bunch of tenure-track people with an actual specialty in rhetoric and composition, who will all want to do research in the field and teach grad students, when what they really need is people who will dedicate themselves, full-time, to teaching freshman comp and not fuss too much about it. And even in English, there are a limited number of qualified people willing to teach at $3,000 per course with no job security, and some obvious disadvantages to having a perpetual revolving door of adjuncts with no prior experience with your student population and no incentive to stick around. So at some schools, the solution is to create a whole second tier of full-time faculty with a salary and benefits, and often some unofficial job security after a certain number of years, but no research responsibilities and no official status within the tenure system. (I expect similar situations exist in other academic fields, it’s just that English is the one I’m intimately familiar with.)
I got it backward then. He’s the one below full Professor - Associate. But Instructional Associate.
That’s what I recall too… Assistant/Associate/full Professor were all tenure track/tenured positions, and Adjunct Professor, Lecturer and Instructor were all basically teaching positions, with IIRC at my grad school, some being hourly and others being salaried.
Hence the confusion about the “Instructional” track.
And FWIW, he’s a Mechanical Engineering guy at a large state university with a huge engineering school.
That’s not an assumption that can be made. At my previous institutions those titles can be for TT or non-TT. What they have in common is they are ongoing positions (not adjunct) and nearly all the same rights and responsibilities. Where I am now, the evaluation process is virtually identical, all can serve on all committees etc.
While the distinction is true at many colleges and universities, it is far from universal and if you make assumptions on the kind of faculty line someone has based on that title you run the risk of being quite wrong.
Clinical, adjunct, instructional, research, lecturer etc modifiers give you more info. But at my school, looking at two faculty each with the title “associate professor of X”, you’d never know which was TT and which was not. Now it is true that you’d likely never see a TT faculty member with one of those other titles, but the inverse isn’t necessarily true.
Looking at UVA’s chemistry faculty, I see some labeled as “General Faculty”, distinguishing them as teaching-only. One is listed as Associate Professor but I don’t know if she’s tenured.
The odds of me ending up in academia are slim these days, so I’m not too worried about it.
I was just a bit confused when he sent a pic of his office name plate, and I said “Tenure track!” and he said no, because in my undergrad and grad days, there were TT professors - the Assistant/Associate/Full positions, and then there were the non-TT positions- lecturer, instructor and adjuncts. There weren’t parallel instructional/research tracks, for example.
There are AAUP standards on titles and tenure. Which a lot of places don’t subscribe to.
While the standard is: assistant is not tenured and associate/full are tenured, that’s not always the case. I was once a non-tenured associate prof myself. (It was not fun.)
I’ve never seen a title like instructional associate professor or some such. But I grokked it right away. I can see a reason a university would set up such a title. It makes it clear that research is not a prerequisite for promotion, etc., while a “regular” associate prof would be expected to be doing research.
What I’ve seen for teaching only positions are titles like “lecturer”. I’ve known people who had that title for over 20 years. Of course, nowadays, there’s the dreaded “adjunct professor” title. Pay very little for poorly qualified part timers to teach so that the admins can get bigger salaries.
Conversely there were titles like “research associate” for research-only folk. A lot of them are grant funded with the job “security” standard of “If the grants go away, you go away.” So they have to keep working on getting the next grant.
This was me- as a department chair. I was tenure track and achieved tenure, but as a chair not having tenure was a challenging road at times. I just opted to not care, and do what I needed to do.
At my grad school, there was only one tenure track, and you could advance along it via achievement in either research or teaching. The vast majority of tenure-track professors advanced via research, but there was at least one in our department who advanced via teaching.
We had those, and they were tenure-track, too, and achieved status the same way as the regular employees did, but their pay was totally separate from their status. And not only did they have to get the grants to pay their own salary, they had to pay a significant chunk of each grant to the university to cover things like their use of office space, their access to the institutional journal subscriptions, etc. Several of them also had some sort of official status (but not pay) at institutions like NASA, or private industry. Still, if you were good at what you do, you could end up netting much more take-home pay than a university employee.