Academic Ranks Explained or What on Earth Is an Adjunct?
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.