<p>Hi,</p>
<p>Can someone explain to me assistant prof/associate prof/prof in residence, etc. </p>
<p>Do these have different meanings at different universities? What are the differences? pension, pay, responsibilities?</p>
<p>The basic ranks (in the US) are:</p>
<p>instructor - usually with a PhD (though sometimes with an MA) non-tenure track
assistant professor - PhD, often tenure track, working feverishly to meet publication, teaching and service requirements for tenure.
associate professor - PhD, has tenure or is about to, has published his thesis as a book, has quite a few articles out, and is working on his second book
professor - PhD, well published, tenured, has cut back on service and teaching in favor of research.</p>
<p>There are all sorts of additional titles that are usually descriptive, e.g. a Visiting Assistant Professor is typically a new PhD with a 1 or 2 year appointment that is designed to let him gain teaching experience while still having time to get that thesis into book form and publish a couple additional articles. You'll see the term "adjunct" too. Some places this is just another name for instructor. Other places its more complicated - for example, here at Penn, there are PhDs with full time museum appointments who also have "adjunct" appointents in other departments.</p>
<p>Pay ranges from a couple thousand per course for an instructor to starting salaries from the low $30K range for a new asst. prof. to well over $100K for full professors with years of experience. Pensions and benefits are all over the map.</p>
<p>Pay also tends to vary wildly from department to department. By far, the best pay can be found in the professional schools, i.e. law, medicine, and business. For example, assistant profs in accounting/finance at Harvard Business School or the Stanford Graduate School of Business will start at around $225k or so (and yes, that's for assistant profs) for a 9-month contract. Full profs at HBS in accounting can make well over $300k. Nor are they the highest paying schools around, as certain other business schools, especially foreign schools, that are lower ranked but who are aggressively trying to move up the rankings will announce that they will beat any offer. For example, the Rotman School of Management of the University of Toronto has enacted a policy that states that if they decide that they want you, they will beat any other offer you have, and hence will probably pay around $240-250k (US dollars) to start. </p>
<p>Now of course that's accounting/finance. Other business subspecialties do pay less, but the pay is still quite high, relatively speaking to academia. For example, I know for a fact that the Wharton School of UPenn pays new operations management assistant profs $160k to start for a 9-month contract. </p>
<p>But of course if you're a business school prof, then, frankly, salary probably doesn't really matter all that much to you anyway because the real money is made in the side-consulting and side-work. For example, I know that Philip Morris (now Altria) paid HBS Professor John Kotter a net of $70,000 for just one day's worth of fees to speak at one of their corporate events. That's net - meaning that they paid all of his expenses to get him over there, and still paid him $70k on top of that. Not bad for one day's work. Not bad at all. </p>
<p>Of course, that's John Kotter. Obviously not everybody can be John Kotter. But profs at the top B-schools can routinely nab corporate consulting gigs for $5-10k a day. </p>
<p>But forget about top schools like Harvard or Stanford or even up-and-comers like Toronto. The truth of the matter is that B-schools in general pay far more than do their pure social-science counterparts - usually by about 2X. Furthermore, many business schools are eager to hire. Sure, obviously it's difficult to place at somewhere like HBS or Stanford, but if you're willing to place at a low-ranked B-school, I don't think it's really that hard. {For that reason, I often times wonder why do people slave away at a untenured, low-paid lectureship in a pure social science department when they could probably get a well-paid and tenure-track position at a business school? Sure, maybe that pure social-science department has more 'academic credibility', but you can't eat credibility and you can't use it to pay the rent.} </p>
<p>B-school world is looking to the larger academic world for help, hoping to convince a psychology professor, for example, to take a job as a marketing professor. Organizers said they believe the program will appeal to professors in the social sciences, who could easily double their salaries by moving into a faculty position at a business school. The average salary of a new assistant professor of psychology is about $50,406 and peaks at around $76,949, according to the College & University Professional Association for Human Resources. Contrast that with the average salary of a business-school marketing professor, which is $125,000, according to a 2006 AACSB salary survey.</p>
<p>Bridging</a> the Business Faculty Gap</p>
<p>Nor are business schools the only departments where you can find (relatively) high pay. For example, Harvard Law School pays its assistant profs about $130k to start, and full profs over $240k. Even low-ranked law schools will generally pay their assistant profs at least $75k a year. And, like I said, the real money is to be made in consulting, especially over corporate litigation. </p>
<p>Regarding the tenure process and responsibilities, what WilliamC described above seems to be true of the humanities. However, in the natural and social sciences (which includes business), book-writing is very rare for anybody untenured, as books are generally discounted in the tenure process. To get tenure, you need publications in top journals. In many schools, that's all that you really need, as I have heard that there are some public schools that, by law, state that getting tenure means getting X number of papers in certain journals. {These rules exist so that those schools can't be sued later on for potential bias in their tenure review process.} </p>
<p>Granted, there are exceptions. Rakesh Khurana, for example, was promoted to tenure at HBS last year despite having relatively few publications and writing mostly books. But he also freely admits that HBS is probably the only one of the top B-schools that would have valued his book-writing enough to grant him tenure, and he was still rather shocked that he got tenure (as he had already made preparations to move to another school). He highly doubts that his work would have won tenure at, say, the MIT Sloan School of Management, which is where he initially started his academic career, because he doesn't have enough journal articles. </p>
<p>Regarding what professors do after they get tenure, well, I can tell you that in a business setting, they generally don't do any research at all. Rather sad, but true. Instead, they end up doing administrative work and - especially at the top B-schools - a lot of corporate consulting and exec-education, or writing books. For example, in the accounting department at HBS, the only tenured professor who is still really active in terms of still publishing journal papers is basically just one guy. I don't think I should name that guy, but it's basically just one guy. Similarly, in the HBS Technology & Operations Management department, there are probably only maybe 3 tenured faculty who are still actively publishing in journals. Now, to be fair, many of them are doing a lot of administrative work, i.e. serving as Associate Dean or whatnot. But the point is, a lot of these guys simply aren't really publishing anything. I'm not going to name names, but all you have to do is look at their CV's and pub lists and note that, for some of these tenured profs, it's been quite awhile since they actually published anything of serious scholarly weight (and no, publications in the Harvard Business Review or op-eds in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times do not exactly count as serious scholarly work.)</p>
<p>The tenure process in the sciences becomes even more complex. Not only is there a hierarchy branchpoint between clinical and research (clinical assistant prof etc vs research asst prof), with all the differences associated with that, there are also considerations of post graduate education, professional certifications, number of grad students graduated, grant awards, service commitments in professional groups etc. Ultimately, an asst prof attempting to get tenure must be in the correct career track, publishing feverishly and in well respected journals, and taking on the kinds of commitments that tenured profs are less interested in (committee service, teaching undergrad courses etc). It's a complex process and in some schools, tenure is only a remote possibility while other schools, it would be crazy to not get tenure after 7 years. Tenure now only refers to soft tenure anyway, where if you aren't able to keep getting grants, you lose your lab anyway.</p>