Thread by @DavidSteensma

Not a day goes by when someone doesn’t tweet about an academic promotion they’ve just received. I’m happy for y’all – but there's also been good discussion of late about #careerism too, and at times it all feels like a big - trivial - game. A brief thread about academic ranks:/1

Since Universities arose from monasteries (image is the monastic-looking Merton Mob Quad @UniofOxford) the leadership structure was originally simple and reflected monastic life: a Master corresponding to the abbot, perhaps another leader akin to a prior, and then the scholars./2

The current complexities took centuries to evolve, and ranks and titles - which overlap, but should not be conflated - really proliferated with the transition to the modern University in the late 19th/early 20th century. The modern university starts to feel like the Nobility!/3

We’re primates, so inherently attracted to hierarchies. In militaries/police, hierarchies & ranks are critical so you know who is in charge & orders can be given efficiently. Companies obsess over their organizational charts, aided by management consultants. So also academia./4

And @USNews has sold millions of copies of books and magazines by ranking essentially un-rankable things like graduate schools and hospitals. I once had a student ask whether it was better to go to an 8th ranked medical school vs a #14 that was better for his family… 🙄🤦‍♂️/5

There are a *lot* of academics out there. According to @EdNCES there were 4,298 degree-granting post-secondary institutions just in the US as of the 2017-2018 academic year, & 1.5 million faculty (53% full-time.) Tens of thousands of new faculty/academics are minted every year./6

In US universities/colleges there are 3 standard tiers. Traditionally here Assistant Professor is the entry-level rank for "tenure track" faculty eligible for promotion/benefits, although this is institution/field-dependent. "Professor" is from Latin for declaring or avowing)/7

Associate Professor (the least happy group) is next; ~25% (nationally) make it to Professor (aka "Full Professor"). Promotion is based on research & to a lesser extent teaching/service. Some universities have specific time limits to move up, many don't./8
chronicle.com/article/Why-Ar…

Many US institutions also have an “Instructor” or “Lecturer” as the 1st rank. At my own there are multiple Instructor categories (eg Instructor I, II, III, IV) depending on how the a person is funded, what type of appointment they have, future expectations, etc. /9

Then there are Lecturers, Readers (both terms more common in the UK but also seen in the US), Adjuncts (=cheaper for the university), and, at academic medical centers & hospitals, Clinical ranks and titles, often for folks either with less stability or more loosely affiliated./10

Some institutions have special titles beyond Professor: “University Professor” or a named professor/named chair/endowed chair: the Bernard Madoff Professorship in Accounting, Richard Milhouse Nixon Chair of Political Ethics, Benedict Arnold Professor of Loyalty Studies, etc./11

The named professor gig is actually pretty old – the Regius Professors, Gresham professors, Lucasian Professor (like Hawking was) date back to 16th century.
In Medicine one can have a *clinical* rank that differs from medical school rank. Journals get quite confused by this./12

There are literally hundreds of academic titles and ranks in the wild. Michael I. Shamos @CarnegieMellon created a massive catalogue of them some years ago. As he said, “There is much confusion in practice". Amen. /13 euro.ecom.cmu.edu/titles/titlebo…

Shamos found an in incredibly array of titles, including oddities like Senior Laboratory Lecturer, apparently unique to @BrynMawrCollege and @GoucherCollege, and Senior Manuscript Specialist, unique to @mizzou. Libraries are especially good at creating their own rank systems./14

One thing I could never wrap my mind around when I was at amazing/wonderful yet kind of poncy @UNiofOxford was which of the 39 constituent colleges were led by "Wardens" (New, All Souls, Keble etc), which had a "Dean" (Christ Church), "Provost" (Oriel, Keble)...

..."President" (Magdalen, Trinity, Wolfson, etc), "Principal" (Brasenose, Jesus, Hertford etc). And Exeter and Lincoln have a "Rector". And that's just the boss, not the rank & fuile scholars/fellows/readers etc. 🤪 (Image: rector's lodging at Lincoln)/16

Criteria for moving through ranks varies considerably by institution. @harvardmed (which is where we @Danafarber have academic appointments) is notorious for slow promotions, lengthy periods at low ranks; only ~11% are full Professor. My own insignificant case illustrates:/17

Back in 2008 I received initial committee approval for promotion from Associate to Professor at a different institution, but moved before finalized. That was 12 years, 300 published papers and oodles of funding ago. I’m still Associate& have been told likely retire at that🤷‍♂️./18

But spare a thought for John Enders (1897-1985), a “father of vaccines” who co-developed polio and measles and other vaccines and was a @TIME person of the year in 1960. In 1954 he won the @NobelPrize... as an Associate Professor after having been denied promotion./19

In 1956, Enders (who joined in 1930 as an Instructor) finally advanced to Professor @harvardmed; rumor has it the committee vote was not unanimous! He must have really ticked someone off along the way... Anyway today he has a big building @BostonChildrens named after him./20

Incidentally, these differences are why all of the “Full by 40” chat is so silly The pace of an academic’s advancement completely depends not only of field of study and institutional promotion criteria, but also on 1) luck (lots of it!) and 2) life choices and circumstances./21

Having family or being a caregiver or having an illness can be a “setback” for academic advancement & there also continues to be discrimination. So while its great to be proud of moving forward and the hard work involved, the work itself is far more important than rank game./22

Disproportionately, higher academic ranks have fewer women and underrepresented minorities because of that long unfairness. This is changing, but too slowly, which is why advocacy work of @jenheemstra and many others is so critical. And that's all for today!.... ✈️ boarding/23End

I should’ve ended that thread w/ Burns:
“Our toils obscure an' a' that,
The rank is but the guinea stamp,
The Man's the gowd for a' that.
What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hodden grey, an' a that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine;
A Man's a Man for a' that.”