« The Man Who Loved China | Main | Department of Uh-Oh »
What are the benefits of being full professor?
Dan Drezner, who just won the title (congratulations!), gives a list. Oddly he leaves off the most important (only?) benefit, namely that no one can tell you any more that you won't make full professor. I know that sounds silly but in essence you choke off the ability of your university to send you one very particular negative status signal. Nor can they hold that threat over your head.
Sometimes I think this is also a benefit of being married. Let's say you and your significant other are not married. In that case proposing, and having that proposal turned down, often causes couples to split up. By marrying you remove this scenario as the source of a possible split.
There are advantages to sitting at the very top and very bottom of status distributions; it is often the in-between spots that are problematic.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on May 9, 2008 at 03:23 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
Except that becoming married requires a proposal. If you propose, and your proposal is accepted, then the state of marriage doesn't protect you from any potential rejection, because you weren't rejected. The only case where it would is if you proposed at one point, got married, and then later your spouse doesn't really want to be with you, and would reject a proposal offered at that point. All you've gained is getting to stay married to someone who doesn't want to marry you (unless their dislike is great enough to cause a divorce, in which case you split up _and_ potentially have major legal bills).
Posted by: Ian Ferrel at May 9, 2008 3:46:25 PM
Whereas it is possible for either party to require a divorce in a marriage, if one is a full professor, only one party is free to break a "relationship" - a professor. A university is stuck with a tenured professor until he/she either resigns or is dead.
Posted by: anonymous at May 9, 2008 5:14:59 PM
Note that getting married also protects one from the chance of splitting up when a proposal isn't made in a timely fashion.
@Ian: You make a point, but Tyler's argument could be rephrased as 'getting married protects you from the fear/worry of splitting up over a rejected proposal.' Since the outcome is uncertain until the proposal is made, this is a real fear until you know which side of things you'll end up on. And in light of my comment above about couples splitting up over non-proposals, it seems like getting married is a good idea as soon as you're sure you want to be married to your partner.
Posted by: LP at May 9, 2008 5:25:56 PM
"A university is stuck with a tenured professor until he/she either resigns or is dead."
They'll be stuck with you for even longer if you don't tell them you're dead.
Posted by: Alistair Wall at May 9, 2008 5:49:17 PM
I used to pester people about the silliness of giving professors tenure and not promoting them to full professor. It creates a set of second-class citizens, tells the world about it so that nobody else wants to hire them, and guarantees that they will be disgruntled. It also makes for a lot of extra work for promotion committees, because you not only have to do a tenure review, you have to come back in a couple of years and do the same sort of thing again. Sometimes, if the person keeps trying, you get to do it a third time. And for what benefit?
I understand that Harvard makes full professors of everyone who gets tenure. I'd ask people at my schools if they really thought we had higher standards than Harvard. I never got a single defense of our practices. But nothing ever changed. Academia is sort of like the Cub Scouts--you award people meaningless badges, apparently to encourage them.
Posted by: Alan Gunn at May 9, 2008 6:00:45 PM
just like exchange rate regimes.
Posted by: Rose at May 9, 2008 6:25:28 PM
The best part about being full professor is having 100% job security and being able to incite the conservative masses against teachers unions...because they want job security which destroys incentives for performance!
Posted by: MostlyAPragmatist at May 9, 2008 8:34:58 PM
"Dan Drezner, who just won the title. . . "
"won the title", "won"? Strange choice of words isn't it?
Isn't "earned" a better choice instead of "won"?
So instead of "congratulations" I'd like to say to Dan:
Keep up the good work Professor Drezner!
Posted by: indiana jim at May 9, 2008 8:37:26 PM
Wait a minute, aren't the advantages of being at the top of a status distribution incomparably greater, by definition, than the advantages of being at the bottom of one? Since your example comes from the top, it's hard to guess what you are thinking of as an advantage of being, say, an untouchable.
Posted by: nick at May 9, 2008 9:23:25 PM
"There are advantages to sitting at the very top and very bottom of status distributions; it is often the in-between spots that are problematic."
Top:
- Tenured professor
- Married with children
Bottom:
- Student
- Single
Middle-Top:
- Tenured associate professor
- Married without children
Middle-Bottom:
- Untenured assistant professor
- Divorced
Posted by: P_Rank at May 9, 2008 10:03:15 PM
Why do you think "married with children" > "married without children"?
Posted by: Jacqueline at May 10, 2008 3:10:18 AM
"Academia is sort of like the Cub Scouts--you award people meaningless badges, apparently to encourage them."
Pretty common in organizations that have stood the test of time and don't have anything else to reward people with. Wouldn't it be funny if someone got through their tenure evaluation, passed, and then they said, "just kidding, this whole thing has just been a joke." Everyone laughs, hahahahaha!
Tenure must exist because at a certain level, there's noone left to evaluate you and at a certain age, only complete idiots would put themselves through further initiation/hazing rituals.
I mean, it kind of is a sham, but as long as everyone believes in it, it keeps going.
It certainly feels like it must be worse to be in the middle ranks. Or, put another way, I'll be really ticked off if it's not a whole lot better at the top. Isn't one of the perks of being at the top making those in the middle miserable? I don't think you want to mess with those at the bottom, they will just quit.
Posted by: Andrew at May 10, 2008 4:08:15 AM
people, you generally get a raise when promoted to full. at my shop it's 7%. Full is a carrot held out to mitigate any incentive tenured folks might feel to abuse the system and stop being productive. It puts another reward out there post tenure to help keep tenured faculty incentive-ized.
Posted by: angus at May 10, 2008 9:02:38 AM
angus is correct: "It puts another reward out there post tenure to help keep tenured faculty incentive-ized."
And an incentive beyond "professor" that has not been yet mentioned is "distinguished professor" or "XYZ Chair of Economics". These designations, are generally available only to those who have become "professor". Although if you have a really bizarre upper administration, such as the one I work under, a "distinguished professorship" could go to even an assistant professor who is untenured and who has relatively few publications. But ignoring the occassional fatuousness of university administrations, these post-"professor" designations can be quite useful for incentivizing "professors." One type that I think is promising is the "rolling" distinguished professorship. This type awards the designation (for particularly high productivity) and attendant salary differential and class reduction for a period of 3 to 5 years. After that, the designation can "roll" to another professor if he/she has had a particularly productive 3 to 5 year period that would merit a transfer of the designation from the original designee.
Posted by: indiana jim at May 10, 2008 9:27:13 AM
There are advantages to sitting at the very top and very bottom of status distributions; it is often the in-between spots that are problematic.
Are you seriously suggesting that those on the bottom of the status heap have more 'advantages' than those in the middle? That is not an easy assertion to defend.
Posted by: Jason Malloy at May 10, 2008 2:56:15 PM
anonymous,
The awarding of tenure generally coincides with promotion to Associate Professor, not to Full Professor.
The system really is parallel to the old guild system of Europe with three tiers, apprentice (=Assistant Prof),
journeyman, (=Associate Prof), which was the level at which one became a member of the guild, and Master
(=Professor).
BTW, there is a level above Professor, although it is not available in all departments or even at all
colleges or universities, Chaired Professor.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at May 10, 2008 3:32:17 PM
When you take into account the rest of the world, being a full professor does not necessarily place a person at one end of a status distribution.
Posted by: Bob Meade at May 10, 2008 6:45:09 PM
Another benefit of reaching full status is you cannot be arrested for crimes committed while enroute to or during the exercise of your official duties whether it be men's restrooms, classrooms, hallways, streets and byways. If this were not so, Bill Ayers would be in prison, global warming would be taught at universities much the same as professional baseketball, and treason would account for the removal of 67.667% all fulls.
Posted by: Jim at May 10, 2008 8:31:30 PM
I should note that chaired professorships are not strictly ordinal in the scheme. Thus, I have known of cases where
Associate Professors have held chaired professorships, although this is rare. However, I have never heard of an untenured
Assistant Professor holding one.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at May 10, 2008 8:45:37 PM
Barkley,
A great many things occur in the deconstructionist ivory tower that raise an eyebrow.
Posted by: indiana jim at May 10, 2008 9:08:10 PM
MIT has named assistant professorship, they call them "Career Development." As in the "Rudi Dornbusch Career Development Assistant Professor"
Posted by: PLW at May 11, 2008 5:41:37 PM
"There are advantages to sitting at the very top and very bottom of status distributions; it is often the in-between spots that are problematic."
I suspect the author has identified the great engine of bitter self-consciousness among Americans in general, who while interestingly enough consider themselves most of the time to be 'middle class', drool, worry and consume such that they can consider or hope to consider themselves on the next rung up the ladder.
It would certainly make sense for the great middle class profession of being an educator, as these posts illustrate. The rapacious status insecurity of college educators is legend.
Posted by: Zounds at May 12, 2008 11:08:27 AM
PLW,
Thanks for the info.
I probably should not have brought up the whole chaired professor thing.
It is really a different scale, although most are fulls, and mostly viewed
as more prestigious (and better paid) than most fulls. So, there is a considerable
range among the chairs. Some, like these MIT Dornbusch ones, are non-renewable and
only somewhat prestigious. Others are renewable, more prestigious, with more
money. Others are very prestigious, with lots of money, held for all of onw's
career or even for life, sometimes including extra for setting up conferences and
so forth.
Clearly, this has to do with how
much money was given to set the darned thing up in the first place, plus the
circumstances of the institution and department the chair is located in (thus
determining how comfortable it is to sit in), and in terms of internal prestige,
how many other chairs there are and how comfortable/prestigious/well-paid each
one is to sit in.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at May 12, 2008 12:50:58 PM
Ah, but if you work for the incomparable University of California, you can contemplate not just promotion to "Full Professor, Step I", but the joys of attaining steps II, III, IV, and V. And then, if you've really played the game well, you get a whole other promotion review before you get Professor VI. After this come Professor VII and VIII, before the really good carrot: Professor Above Scale! (There was a move to create Professors X, XI, and XII, but it collapsed under its own silliness).
All of you poor peons who have to make do with only a single rank of Professor can marvel at such a wonderful system!
Having just made full myself, I can also report that I seem more willing to provide short answers to certain questions from my colleagues or from administrators. Guess that status-consciousness stuff really does work wonders on our brain chemistry.
Posted by: PQuincy at May 13, 2008 6:25:06 PM
