teaching undergraduates is hell
Life as a lecturer?
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How likely is one to transition to an AP position from a Lecturer position? Would teaching experience help with making the transition in addition to research?
A lecturer with great teaching experience and solid research would be competitive for teaching heavy TT positions. Where the job would be similar, with more pay and more job security.
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Being a lecturer is tough. The TT folks treat you like a sub-human and you have to smile through it. If you fail to smile enthusiastically enough, they will get rid of you. You are also constantly reminded of your sub-human status in both explicit and indirect ways. Example: (direct) you are told you must attend department meetings but can't vote or speak, (indirect) you can't buy a faculty parking permit or campus gym membership, only a staff parking permit and staff gym membership
You need to be good at teaching, but non-threatening to the TT folks who are heterogenous. So either you're worse than all of them and they want to fire you for being a bad teacher, or you are better than some of them and that bruises their delicate egos. Then just those few that are worse than you will want to fire you.
You need to do research to help with accreditation, but god forbid you publish someplace better than the worst TT person in the department. They will hate it and you if you so much as even submit to the same journals they do. The path to job security, loss of self dignity, and self loathing is to publish crap at Economics Bulletin.
It's terrible. You won't see it right away, but after a couple years the above will all ring true.
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Does anyone know of instances where someone has made a successful transition to TT from a Lecturer position? The secondary market dried up thanks to the pandemic and I'm stuck with a lecturer position. What are the things one should do to make such a transition possible, if possible at all?
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At our T1 business school the senior lecturers make 150-200k, and for a few of them this is very minor in comparison to what they also make in the private sector/consulting.
it is a mutually beneficial relationship: you get the business school affiliation which you can pimp in your consulting work, but also the business school gets someone who is privately successful outside of just esoteric pubs that they can put in front of MBA students etc. to impress
They also have full time TAs and the same support staff faculty do.
I can imagine in the econ dept it would be hell though
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Being a lecturer is tough. The TT folks treat you like a sub-human and you have to smile through it. If you fail to smile enthusiastically enough, they will get rid of you. You are also constantly reminded of your sub-human status in both explicit and indirect ways. Example: (direct) you are told you must attend department meetings but can't vote or speak, (indirect) you can't buy a faculty parking permit or campus gym membership, only a staff parking permit and staff gym membership
You need to be good at teaching, but non-threatening to the TT folks who are heterogenous. So either you're worse than all of them and they want to fire you for being a bad teacher, or you are better than some of them and that bruises their delicate egos. Then just those few that are worse than you will want to fire you.
You need to do research to help with accreditation, but god forbid you publish someplace better than the worst TT person in the department. They will hate it and you if you so much as even submit to the same journals they do. The path to job security, loss of self dignity, and self loathing is to publish crap at Economics Bulletin.
It's terrible. You won't see it right away, but after a couple years the above will all ring true.This is so accurate lol
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My guess is that you need to be single and very driven to make the transition even possible. Working around the clock 70 hrs m-f and intensely on the weekends to make it happen. Remember, you need to be better than good and the bar gets higher each year you become removed from graduation date. Time is not your friend. See if you can network and find APs at your level to build economies of scale with. Good luck.
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I'm in Europe. We actually have lecturers at our school separate from the tenure track. These lecturers will suffer occasional humiliations -- we once voted publicly on whether a lecturer should have any say whatsoever in the direction of the department, concluding that only tenure-track professors, graduates, and staff should have any say at all. On the other hand, I believe these lecturers basically make the same base pay as a TT, roughly double the teaching load, and have no research responsibility. If they also chair a program, or teach extra, i believe they can even make more than an incoming TT AP. Most of our teaching people are those who said "screw the publication process" after 3-4 years and switched to the teaching track. "Double the teaching, same salary, no publishing necessary" actually sounds like a good deal, at least initially. But if we struggle financially with Covid these guys will have zero bargaining power, and it isn't a ladder to anything.
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Funny, these things essentially don't exist in italy. There are some "contract teachers" who only teach some courses and are essentially external to the department, but that's a really minor thing. In Italy if you're in essentially you're in, and there is no thing such as a tenure clock, it may only take you too much to become an ordinario. Then again, academia in Italy generally sucks, but Econ is a strong example, other areas do better
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Nobody has brought up that many departments, especially in large universities have what they call “clinical professors” or something like that. These are permanent positions and you can be promoted to clinical associate or clinical professor. They attend all department meetings except promotion meetings for TT faculty.
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Being a lecturer is tough. The TT folks treat you like a sub-human and you have to smile through it. If you fail to smile enthusiastically enough, they will get rid of you. You are also constantly reminded of your sub-human status in both explicit and indirect ways. Example: (direct) you are told you must attend department meetings but can't vote or speak, (indirect) you can't buy a faculty parking permit or campus gym membership, only a staff parking permit and staff gym membership
You need to be good at teaching, but non-threatening to the TT folks who are heterogenous. So either you're worse than all of them and they want to fire you for being a bad teacher, or you are better than some of them and that bruises their delicate egos. Then just those few that are worse than you will want to fire you.
You need to do research to help with accreditation, but god forbid you publish someplace better than the worst TT person in the department. They will hate it and you if you so much as even submit to the same journals they do. The path to job security, loss of self dignity, and self loathing is to publish crap at Economics Bulletin.
It's terrible. You won't see it right away, but after a couple years the above will all ring true.This is absolutely 100% correct.
I want to add: departmental staffs and admins (normally) do not treat lecturers as "real" faculties. You may experience several administrative hurdles as a lecturer, which may make your job (teaching well) very difficult. Some examples are: (1)you may experience lowest priority in using copy machines and print shop, (2)you will be assigned the worst classrooms (say, projector/computer often broken) and most undesirable time-slots (such as, your class conflicts with the departmental seminars), (3)your legitimate requests (say, any reimbursement) will have lowest priority and delayed unnecessarily, etc. etc. You must need to be most friendly and most accommodating with the staffs to get anything done and survive in the department.
Some can handle these issues very nicely (thick skin) and even find ways to be friendly with the staffs (and if you are really good at teaching, one or two rare staffs might even respect you most because they also hate the arrogant deadwoods as well). But, in general, if you have thin skin (perhaps you have a strong CV) or ego (perhaps you have a few working papers in the pipeline which look promising and you start behaving with staffs like a TT-), your chance of getting fired increase exponentially. Staffs are very powerful (they know the dirty laundry of everyone) and chair will not take your side in any issue (think about dysfunctional classroom, and no help from chair).
We (top 10 HRM) had a TERRIFIC lecturer few years ago who was very popular with the students and, almost all faculties thought him an excellent hire. He left because of conflict with the staffs within a year. No tenured faculty supported him.
These are very difficult job.
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Nobody has brought up that many departments, especially in large universities have what they call “clinical professors” or something like that. These are permanent positions and you can be promoted to clinical associate or clinical professor. They attend all department meetings except promotion meetings for TT faculty.
No. These are glorified lecturer or similar like senior lecturer but with "professor" attached with the title. These are normally 3-5 year contract, but in these days, they are often annual or biannual contract. 01cb and my above points apply.