This is awful for students, but also for faculty and staff. It’s unethical, IMO.
Knowing what I know about college finances, I would not want to attend or work at a school that was put on financial probation by its accreditor. Actually, I wouldn’t want to attend or work at a school that had any sort of strike against it financially. You can go to the accreditor’s website to search for actions against the school. You’ll be able to see any actions related to financial monitoring. While some schools can work their way back into stable financial status, I wouldn’t commit myself to a school that might shut down. There are just too many other schools out there - it’s just not worth the risk.
Not a choice for faculty who had been there for a while, the administrators had to know they would left unemployed for 14 months due to the way academic hiring works! It’s egregious.
Then add all the positions associated with the college where the hiring cycle might not be as fixed but where people end up laid off right before Summer!
More schools are going the associate professor route or course lecturer or anything that short-term. Anyone who had “long term” position at these colleges will unlikely find anything other than semester to semester or annual contracted work. So for many they take what they can get.
Associate professors aren’t short-term by definition, so I’m not sure what you mean by that. Most associate professors I know are tenured. A smaller proportion are on the non-tenure track, but if they’ve got the “associate” title, they’ve already been promoted once.
But yes, too many college faculty positions are precarious and poorly compensated. And if your program (or entire institution) is discontinued, tenure isn’t all that helpful.
Agree. Typical terminology for tenure-track positions is:
Assistant professor (on the tenure-track)
Associate professor (earned tenure)
Full professor (a step up in rank and often pay from Associate prof)
Perhaps you meant visiting assistant professor (VAP - usually 1-2 year contract for full time instructors, who then move on to other colleges/jobs afterward)?
There could be other terms for the same type of position, but this is the one I’ve heard.
I think visiting assistant professor can be different than adjunct. Adjuncts often teach part time and are not eligible to move to a tenure track. They are often paid a certain (often low) stipend per course. My daughter was a visiting assistant professor for several years at a liberal arts college. She received a salary and benefits. She was then offered a tenure-track assistant professorship and later received tenure.
Part of the confusion is that the same title can mean different things.
But in the US and systems based on US ranks, the usual terms are:
Adjunct Professor: Hired to teach by the course, zero job security even once courses have been assigned
Term Professor (sometimes Term Assistant Professor or Term Associate Professor): Hired to teach a specific course load (usually a heavy one) for a specific length of time, usually between one and three academic years per contract, with more job protections during that term than adjuncts
Visiting Professor (sometimes Visiting Assistant Professor or Visiting Associate Professor): This can be many different things, but is usually effectively identical to a Term Professor; historically (though not so much anymore) used mainly for faculty with permanent appointments at other institutions who are working at away from home for a specific amount of time, usually one year
Affiliate Professor (or any one of a number of different names): Generally used for someone who is based in a particular department or center at an institution, and also does regular teaching or research with another department or center at the same institution; the individual will have their actual title in their home department and be affiliate in the other
Lecturer: A position with some but limited job protections, usually equivalent to a Term Professor in that regard but at some institutions there are additional job protections for lecturer ranks (often but not always a presumption of continued employment as long as there are courses and funding streams available to continue the position); at some institutions there is a promotion path available from Lecturer to Senior Lecturer, which generally comes with a bump in pay but no additional job protections, and at a very few institutions there is the possibility of promotion from Lecturer to Assistant Professor, though even that unusual situation is becoming less and less common
Assistant Professor: The most junior tenure-track faculty rank, this is faculty who are hired for a probationary period, after which they are evaluated for tenure (the probationary period is usually six years, with review in the seventh year; there is usually also an intermediate retention review after two or three years) with stronger job protections than the ranks listed above, but if tenure is denied the position is terminated; reviews for tenure usually occur simultaneously with reviews for promotion to Associate Professor, and both are generally conferred at the same time, but some places awarding tenure without promotion is possible—so while it is rare, it is possible at some places to have tenured Assistant Professors
Associate Professor: A tenured rank, with commensurate job protections (see below)
Professor (sometimes “full professor” when disambiguation is needed, but that isn’t the actual name of the rank): Also a tenured rank, and the highest faculty rank possible at most institutions.
Distinguished Professor: Not used most places, and where it is this is usually simply a way to recognize a very limited number of Professor-rank faculty, but at a few places this is a rank above Professor; either way it usually only exists where donations have been made to recognize a Distinguished Professor in a particular field.
Professor Emerita or Professor Emeritus (depending on the gender of the individual): A recognition given to a limited number of faculty retirees (nearly all places require the individual to have held the rank of Professor before retirement for this)
Important: Holding tenure provides certain job protections, but it does not mean the individual can’t be fired. It is always possible to be fired for cause, for starters. In addition, faculty with tenure can be fired if their program/department is closed (though most institutions are contractually obligated to make a good faith effort to try to place a tenured faculty member affected in such a way in another program), and financial exigency—here we get, however obliquely, to the overall topic of this thread!—suspends tenure protections.
Also, one possible big source of confusion: In the UK system and those derived from it, Lecturer and Senior Lecturer are tenure-track ranks, with UK Lecturers effectively equivalent to US Assistant Professors and UK Senior Lecturers effectively equivalent to US Associate Professors and even Professors. (Going further up the scale, UK Readers are equivalent to US Professors and, where they exist, Distinguished Professors, and at those UK institutions that use the rank of Professor, that’s equivalent to US Distinguished Professors.)
Is there specific language that corresponds to financial probation? I poked around the Middle States website, and see the list of action for schools, including ones with language about “fiscal” issues and “resources” but the very few institutions of probation are all classified as “non-compliance probation”.
I know someone who was a lecturer at a school local to me for many years - and I never quite knew what that meant.
Her husband is a full professor at the same school and they met when she was a PhD in the department (which I would assume is a no no but apparently isn’t).
I have a good friend who did a phd at NYU in Arabic history; his dissertation topic was the UAE. He was an adjunct at NYU Dubai and at NYU in NYC. He spent two years applying for tenure track positions all over the country, to no avail. He now teaches at an extremely selective (and extremely large!) NYC high school. He has been on sabbatical this past year to turn his dissertation into a book. Lucky for his students, he’ll be back teaching high school in September.
If the last action prior to probation was a letter highlighting financial concerns, there would be steps outlined that the school has to take or goals that they need to meet. If they didn’t take the steps or meet the goals, they would then be in noncompliance. But there are other reasons a school might be in noncompliance that have nothing to do with their financial situation (e.g., the school might be in noncompliance for not having a system in place for faculty to have an adequate voice in governance, among other reasons).
Depends on the college—some have policies against that, others don’t. [@dfbdfb heroically avoids a rant here.]
By way of amusement: I was an assistant professor when my spouse (who was already my spouse, and had been for several years, we even already had kids together) started work on her PhD at the same institution I was teaching at—we would occasionally joke about our inappropriate grad student-professor relationship.
No! (Not even the same college within the university.) Though it was a big department, so as long as I wasn’t teaching her or on her dissertation committee it could have still worked out if it was.
