Academic jobs in UK and elsewhere

[orl]

Let me talk a bit about the UK academic perspective. Below I appended an article by Stephen Court who discusses the history of UK academic tenure until up the present. Especially interesting is the section on "current trends in employment of academic staff" starting at page 7/9. It discusses the casualization of academic staff. For a large part of the 20th century academics of all levels had job security of tenure except for certain legal cases, but this certainty to be most likely employed until retirement is gone now for most academic staff. Before 1990 86% academics were employed on permanent contracts. In 1994 60% of the academic staff had permanent contracts. And this number is actually assumed to be even lower as Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) does not consider staff to be contracted on less than a quarter of a full-time contract. And for the first time there were more new appointments on fixed-term than permanent contracts (49.5 percent vs 48.3 per cent). If this development continues most of staff will be employed on fixed-term contract basis and the shift from job security to insecurity will have taken place. Will these fixed-term contracts make academia less attractive in the long run?

My experience from talking to UK academic staff is that they even can dismiss whole departments if it does not make enough money. And you are most likely not appointed as academic staff if you did not prove as post-doc to be able to secure grants in academia or funded private/government projects in industry. And even at the level of senior lecturer, reader or even professor you will run the risk of getting kicked out if you do not succeed in securing enough incoming grants. A good quantity of papers and placing papers at good conferences or journals is mostly not enough. Unless you are "exceptionally" accomplished at doing that. Another opportunity to be able to stay on is to get involved with politics, administration, teaching etc. You may teach a wide range of courses and many of them a term, become an (under-)graduate tutor, a departmental expert on computing issues as or use of grid infrastructure for computationally expensive techniques, tutor and supervise many students etc.

Of course there is also a cost of kicking out staff members for the department. It costs effort, time and money to recruit new staff though there might be plenty of people who are interested in that job. At my university teaching assistants below the lecturer level are allowed to contribute at most 10% to the students' final grade. But at other universities as the London School of Economics & Politics graduate students are asked to teach full courses due to lack of staff, e.g. a friend of mine got asked to teach a course on real analysis. But then preparing such a course requires a significant investment of time, especially if you are not "too fluent" in a certain course anymore you are asked to teach. And it may not coincide with your research area at all. And then again teaching in front of possibly 200+ students for the first time in your life can be quite a daunting experience. To be sufficiently assertive to deal with the students in this novel situation can be really challenging.

But this lack of loyalty may also turn out to be mutual that current staff members have less objections to move on to the next university upon arrival of a better offer. IBM experienced a similar fate. Most staff members were hired straight from university and mostly stayed on for a long time, often even until retirement. People knew they were welcome though at some point there skills may not meet the demands of the economy and they could get training to adopt to this new situation. But this also meant that many staff members were reluctant to easily move on to a different employer if a different company tried to headhunt you.

I am not sure about US but I heard a considerable number of professors are tenured starting at the assistant professor level. Even with the higher-ranked universities that may often start at the associate professor level though they know there often is a long queue of highly accomplished candidates. Maybe somebody from the US can shed more light on the situation there?

A related ML/AoPS thread discusses the Economic Downturn in Academia which makes it even harder to secure an academic position these days.

[gt59]

In the US, the first tenure-track job for most fresh PhDs is at the Assistant Professor level. You'll get about 6 or 7 years before you must apply for tenure and if you don't make it, you leave the institution. When tenure is awarded, this Assistant Professor is generally promoted to Associate Professor. A tenured Assistant Professor would be a rare bird in the US.

Experienced faculty members can be appointed at the Associate Professor or Full Professor levels - either with tenure or without. Generally, those hired without tenure are expected to apply for the permanent appointment within a few years.

The terms "Instructor" and "Lecturer" at US institutions are typically reserved for non-tenure track appointments - in many cases people without PhDs. Typically, they spend most of their time teaching and have minimal research responsibilities. The use of these titles is quite different in the US than in many other countries.

Some disciplines in the US expect tenured faculty to support themselves through grant funding. Certainly medical / health sciences faculty and some Engineers need to get grants or their jobs are in peril.

Tenured professors in the US can also lose their jobs if the institution has financial difficulties or if the prof works in a "low productivity" program (not enough students to be economically viable.) Many US colleges have instituted "post tenure review" processes within the past 5-10 years. A few tenured faculty members have lost their positions as a result of negative evaluations.

In most previous economic downturns, academic jobs in the US have held up a bit better than those in industry - mostly because many displaced workers return to university schooling. In this downturn, some state-funded institutions are already raising admission standards so that costs may be saved through reduced enrollments (which require fewer faculty.)

[orl]

Erik Ringmar has had an interesting blog entry on what PhD life is like. Here is the article. He is currently employed as professor by the Dept of General Education, National Chiao Tung University and got well-known for this dispute on the teaching quality of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) which led him to resign from his senior lecturer position at LSE. He describes the case in the The Times Higher Education Supplement but it is also independently discussed in the newspaper the Guardian.