Know Your Ranks

I was recently in a Twitter conversation about academic titles (as in ranks), and it occurred to me that a lot of people outside academia are not aware of what the different categories are, and why they matter (or don’t). I was also reminded of the different titles that have crept into publishing, and why, and that even many writers and editors are not aware of the distinctions. What follows is an attempt to make sense of all this, aimed at an American audience. Terms like “lecturer” have different meanings in the U.S and elsewhere: in the former, it usually denotes an adjunct position, in the latter it is more akin to what we would call an “assistant professor.”¹ Many thanks also to those who indulged my questions on Twitter: if I have not named you, it’s because I didn’t want to expose you to the pit of social media without your permission. I’m happy to use your names if you like.

If any of this is inaccurate (much has changed and continues to change in both academia and media), let me know and I will edit accordingly. Just try not to be very “Jane, you ignorant slut” about it.

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This is not an essay that teaches you how to distinguish between dukes, counts, kings, and viscounts: the monarchy in all its forms everywhere must be abolished, so let’s not bother with that nonsense. Does a duke have ducks? What is a duchy, ducky? Does a count count for anything? Why is a Norwegian crown prince called a prince when he’s 52 and just hanging around waiting for his father to die? These are not mysteries but signs that monarchy is nothing but a lot of meaningless titles.

The system of titles amongst royalty has slipped with untoward ease into the fields of academia and media, creating very similar hierarchies of power, so it makes sense to first examine how they work amongst royals. If you are, say, part of the mightily beleaguered Windsor royal family, you would be made aware from the time you slipped out of your mother’s womb that order in rank is everything. Thus, walking into a room full of these vampiric creatures feasting on the blood of empire can be unsettling, not just because of all the red fluid sloshing around everywhere and dripping from their jewellery and fangs, but because you have to memorise the order in which you must bow and curtsy (while making sure not to slip on the gore). Who can enter the room first, and who must leave it last? Who can remain defiantly unbowed to all (hint: the man wearing a crown)? Who can speak first? Who must never be touched?

There is a pointless granularity to all this, and the pointlessness is the point: none of it achieves any great efficiency but all of it makes sure that people know their places in an otherwise invisible hierarchy. Can you borrow the Queen’s favourite brooch, nestled in a safe in the basement of Windsor Castle? Only if you are of a certain rank. Will you be served first or last? It all depends on your birth order. Mere fame will not elevate you: Meghan Markle, a D-list celebrity with a website, found that out very quickly and retreated in a huff to make up her own royal-ness, even hiring people to announce her as Duchess when she enters a room in the United States, a country that technically overthrew its monarch over two centuries ago. In her case, the term “Duchess” is like a tiny fake crown, the sort one might put on a beloved cat’s collar.

Titles in academia signify pay scales and retirement options and have recently become more complicated just as the university as even a concept looks like it is about to slide into obscurity. The same is true of media outlets, many of which seem to be disappearing before our eyes and where the lights are kept on by crews of people clinging on with depleted healthcare packages, if they’re lucky enough to be “permanent,” at least until their billionaire owners get bored and leave their enterprises gasping for air.

It may seem odd to question the use of titles in either media or academia, but readers, students, and anyone concerned about the fate of either need to understand that the hierarchies signalled by titles indicate a lot about the health of both fields.

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A few lifetimes ago, when a group of us were organising adjuncts, we decided that it was important to inform students that adjuncts were (and are) not professors. We made a concerted effort to tell what adjunct titles like “Lecturer” really meant, and how much they made (then a pitiful amount, later raised after successive generations of agitating) in comparison to tenure-track faculty, and what “tenure” meant. One student, horrified, spoke up, “My mother makes more than you as a teacher in CPS! (Chicago Public Schools).” Which was heartening to hear, because teachers should be paid well.

There are, broadly, three kinds of academics: graduate students, tenure-track, and non tenure-track faculty.² If you are tenure-track, you are at the assistant professor level which means you are full-time, have benefits, but have not gained permanent status in the university. Instead, you have about seven years to produce your first book or a solid stream of articles as evidence of scholarship. Historically, departments like English have required at least one book with a reputed press and some (two to five) scholarly articles. But many now require more than one book and several articles and what is broadly referred to as “community engagement”: presenting work to non-academic audiences, podcasts, op-eds in the New York Times or, failing that, in local papers. Fields like Sociology have, traditionally, required articles more than books. A lot also depends on whether the institution or department in question emphasises teaching or research. If the latter, student evaluations and awards for pedagogy will matter more than published research. In the meantime, you are expected to contribute to the life of the department—which could mean anything from hosting inane and maddeningly boring official get-togethers for visiting scholars and luminaries at your home to doing the grunt work on committees like Curricular Development. Not sleeping with your students or the Dean’s spouse are also huge pluses (it is surprising how many people have to be reminded of this simple rule).

Once you get tenure, you are promoted to associate professor. This is an interesting place to be: you can, technically, remain here for the rest of your academic career, if you choose (and many do). But in general, most faculty begin to work towards becoming full professors: depending on your institution, you are expected to produce a few more books, a lot more articles, more departmental participation, and maintain a reputation for teaching well. Finally, if promoted to full professor, you are home free: you might be able to teach fewer classes, disengage yourself from the most crushingly boring committee work and not even show up to departmental meetings or gatherings. Or, you could, as some are apt to do, show up and promptly fall asleep, taking every meeting as an occasion for a nap. Some, not all, full professors go on to become emeritus faculty: this distinction has to be voted on by other faculty; it is not automatically bestowed.³ There were and are exceptions in all this: at universities like Yale, no one enters into an assistant professorship actually expecting to get tenure: you take the job to earn an attractive line on your CV, and you are never so foolish as to buy property in New Haven because you know you’ll be uprooting yourself in five years.

All these ranks signify different levels of pay and responsibility, but always mean full benefits. Graduate assistants and adjuncts (both are non-tenure-track), however, have had different responsibilities, pay, and benefits (if any). They usually teach more classes than faculty: as many as three a semester to faculty members’ one or two (or none at all, if they are on sabbatical). Factors like pay and teaching load vary based on the department: Graduate assistants in English departments usually teach classes on their own, with approved syllabi, and are the people deputed to teach courses like Freshman Composition with large numbers of students. In the sciences, they are more likely to work alongside professors in labs or assist in research projects. In exchange for their work, graduate students receive a stipend, tuition remission, and health insurance. The (entirely erroneous and exploitative) idea is they are merely apprentices, faculty in training, and so should be overworked and underpaid.⁴ In recent years, this has changed in many places as graduate students have unionised, often alongside their professors, and demanded better pay and benefits, but the situation is still, often, grim.⁵ Adjuncts have always had the worst of the situation: many are hired on a course-by-course basis, for as little as $500 per semester, requiring them to shuttle between institutions to make anything approaching a decent living, and there is rarely any healthcare offered. Some institutions have better pay than others and try to hire adjuncts on a contractual basis, guaranteeing them benefits and better pay for at least a year at a time and others will place adjuncts on what is effectively a track parallel to tenure, sometimes even with time off for research. But, by and large, adjuncts don’t do well.⁶

Over the last few years, universities have seen massive cuts to programs accompanied by a bloat in administrative positions. Yale, for instance, has fewer than five thousand undergraduates but 5,460 administrators, most of whom are paid much, much better than faculty and have more perks and expense accounts.⁷ As universities increasingly devolve into little more than hubs of administration bubbles that exist simply to keep themselves aloft, there is supposedly less money for paid tenured professors. According to this grim report from the American Association of University Professionals (AAUP), nearly “68 percent of faculty members in US colleges and universities held contingent appointments in fall 2023, compared with about 47 percent in fall 1987.”

Hence, titles. At some point, universities began to disburse fancier titles to their overworked, underpaid adjuncts. The idea was that while an adjunct might barely survive, quickly devouring hard-boiled eggs while shuttling on trains and buses, they could at least have titles that might look great on CVs. “Adjunct, 2000-present” seems less depressing than “Clinical Assistant Professor, 2000-present.”⁸ Or so the logic goes. Over the past many years, these titles have become more fanciful and often have the word “assistant” or “associate” embedded in them, to make them look more professorial even though, by now, everyone knows that a job applicant is an adjunct teaching, probably, three courses a semester. And, sadly, adjuncts often feel the need to portray themselves as not-adjuncts in their social media profiles, which is not really a good idea because, inevitably, the cat leaps screeching out of the bag and they just look silly, pompous, or some combination thereof. Someone who refers to themself as an “assistant professor” (tenure-track) may actually be an “applied assistant professor” (non-tenure-track). “Professor of the Practice” is a relatively new one, and as meaningless. (I have no idea what is applied to what, or what is being practiced.)

Students and non-academics, the people who will, hopefully, continue with higher education and ultimately vote support its funding need to understand that differences in ranks and titles are about unspoken hierarchies of power, and that titles actually signify very material differences. Why does B.N, that excellent “professor” who introduced you to the poetry of Yeats, no longer work at the university, when you had hoped that they would eventually direct your undergraduate thesis? Because B.N turns out to have been an adjunct, desperately trying to keep things together with three other jobs even as they met with you during office hours and generously read multiple drafts of all your work. You only find that out when you run into them on the el one day. Students benefit from having a cadre of well-paid professionals teach them consistently, over the course of their education, just as teachers benefit from knowing they won’t have to look for new gigs every semester. A recent Non-Tenure Faculty Coalition poster advertises itself with the words, “A multi-year contract means a prof who still works here when you need a rec letter.”⁹ Much of this is complicated by the fact that tenure itself is under threat like never before. Discussions about getting rid of it began in the 1990s, and presented the move as some kind of liberatory movement (mobility! freedom!). Most people in academia squinted at the notion, predicting that this was a portal to doom — tenure guarantees a degree of freedom of speech, so that academics may teach and research without being hounded for their views. Today, it’s not just tenure but universities and departments that are being slashed everywhere, subject to funding cuts or the heavy-handed excision of entire programs that threaten some vaguely held idea of Western Civilisation.

As for media: Categories are even more chaotic here, and readers need to understand that not all media professionals are equal, and that the inequality has an effect on the quality of what gets written and what they read. Glance at the New Yorker’s masthead and you might wonder, mouth agape, how they’re able to afford so many salaries (editor David Remnick’s 2005 salary was $1 million, and it has more than likely increased since then). But look closely and you’ll see that many of them are contributing writers, not staff writers. What, you might ask, distinguishes a “contributing” writer from the other kind?

A salary and health insurance.

“Contributor” here is code for “freelancing schmuck who keeps calling Remnick to pitch this new, new idea for the next issue, with a pleasepleaseplease.” The New Yorker is also notorious for having very few writers of colour, in any category: a recent gushy Netflix documentary, The New Yorker at 100, was ablaze in whiteness. Sure, Hilton Als, who is Black and a long-time staff writer, was featured, and you could see several many proofreaders and editors of colour in the background or speaking to the camera, but the Caucasian-ness was evident. Dhruv Khullar, who writes frequently on science and medicine, was also interviewed but he is a full-time and occasional contributor. In 2021, Erin Overbey published a long Twitter thread about race and gender representation at the magazine and also pointed out that while it seemed to feature a large number of people of colour and women as writers, they are mostly featured in the online version. Print rates for writers are substantially higher in the industry, for no good reason. (You can read more about the Overbey controversy here. It’s worth noting that she still clings to her title as New Yorker archivist, even though she was fired from the magazine: titles are everything.)

While the New Yorker has ample resources to pay for more staff writers (and more women and people of colour), most media outlets these days struggle to find funding or make do with much less money. Hence, again, titles, some of which, like “editor at large” (I am one at Current Affairs) or “contributing editor” are honorary, signifying a certain connection to the publication but not pay, except for individual works. Members of the “Editorial Board” at any publication are not paid either (again, unless they also write), which is why some number in the tens, giving the impression of a massive team of bright lights, all working on turning out material. Often, especially in the case of independent magazines, editors may also be working for free, so even a title like “Book Review Editor” means little in terms of pay. The only way to find out who is a paid member of the masthead at any place is to write and ask them directly.

Yes, all of this can be very confusing.

Titles are illusory.

Why should readers care? Because if a publication is made up entirely or largely of people who work for free or very little, hoisted by little more than prestige titles, it is much less sustainable in the long run and is likely to end up echoing the concerns of an elite. (Current Affairs is mostly paid staff.) “Elite” might mean different things in various contexts: at Vanity Fair, it might signify actual, moneyed elites but you can also produce and support elites at supposedly independent, leftist magazines: if no one is paid for writing at the latter, who but the financially well-off can actually afford to write for them? How does a publication continue to address the needs of the “working class” (a favourite topic at leftist magazines) if actual working class people cannot afford to take at least six weeks off to produce a groundbreaking investigative report or analysis?

The Washington Post did not gain its (now dwindling but not over) reputation on the backs of freelancers. Imagine if Bob Woodward had, sometime in 1972, called Carl Bernstein: “Listen, so there’s this guy who wants us to meet him in this garage in Rosslyn, says he has some explosive information for us he can’t share on the phone. And he needs to meet today, before he leaves for three months.” And if Bernstein had responded, “Shit, I can’t make it, I have to stay on my Uber route to make enough for this week.” Let us now imagine Woodward, crestfallen, “Ah, crap, and I need to file this piece for my other gig by midnight.” More and more, independent journalists, who also give themselves titles like “independent journalist,” are taking to Substack, but piecemeal, gig reporting cannot, over the long term, give us the kind of journalism that breaks real news and exposes the machinations of networks of power, at least not in a sustainable fashion. Traditional journalism outlets have expense accounts that help to cover food and hotels: try investigating a long drawn-out military controversy spread out over the country while couch-surfing and relying on GoFundMe to feed yourself.

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The goal for both academic institutions and publications, whether print or video, ought to be full-time staff with excellent salaries and benefits, secure in their employment (with tenure and unionisation) and as few non-tenure-track/freelance positions as possible. This takes money, and a shift in how we think of the value of education and media: universities are being taken over by administrators who see their institutions as nothing more than conduits of prestige for the rich and mines of research for profit-making corporations. Many readers feel they are entitled to an endless stream of hard reporting and information twenty-four hours a day, and then complain of too much of being all the same. In all the talk and pearl-clutching about how AI is a threat to life itself and publishing in particular, few have noted that writers have actually been operating like Chatbots for a while now, long before the current moment. Scan an average “news” site, and it’s not hard to see that all of the “articles” are essentially plagiarised versions of reported work done by actual journalists everywhere — these pieces are produced by actual writers whose job it is to scour the web and reproduce other people’s work as “content.” As a result, universities operate like Fordist factories, churning out degrees with little thought to what intellectual inquiry might really mean and publications are just slop mills, with or without AI tools.

As academia and media face cuts to their funding and their very existence, titles will become grander and, perhaps, who knows, more honest: “Indentured Professor of Penurious Inquiry.”¹⁰ Or “Starving Writer Who Could Not Really Afford to Write This for the Measly $50 She Got But Did Anyway in Hopes of a Better Gig Down the Road.” Titles might be illusory, but we can at least have some fun with them.

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