Job titles, and the names given to organisational roles, are important for the meaning that individuals derive from their work and their engagement with their work.
Yet within many UK universities, and especially the post-92s, the trend is towards new job titles with potentially negative connotations for the job holders in terms of the meaning of their work and their commitment to it and to their institution.
Such universities have been moving away from the conventional “lecturer” titles, adopting the US system of titles. US institutions typically designate their junior (un-tenured) academics as Assistant Professors, with an intermediate grade of Associate Professor and then a full Professor grade. Within the US system, most long serving and effective staff can expect to progress to full Professor by mid-career.
Yet, in this new UK system, only around 15-20 per cent of academics are (and likely ever to be) full Professors and many academics will spend their entire careers as Assistant Professors or Associate Professors, retiring with one of these diminutive job titles.
The previous, additive, job titles of Lecturer to Senior Lecturer and then to Principal Lecturer or Reader had meaning outside the university and, crucially, had meaning for the post-holders, giving a sense of achievement and pride as they progressed. Retiring as a Senior or Principal Lecturer was deemed more than acceptable.
Status and self-esteem
It is not hard to imagine the impact that the changes in job titles is having upon mid and late-career academics who may have little chance of gaining promotion to full professor, perhaps because quite simply they draw the line at working “just” 60 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. The impact on status and self-esteem is immense. Imagine explaining to your grandkids that you are, in essence, an assistant to a professor. As an Associate Professor, and particularly in a vocational discipline, one of the authors is often asked, “I can understand you wanting to work part-time for a university, but what’s your main job?” Associate, affiliate, adjunct – these names are pretty much the same thing to outsiders.
Managerially, though, the change from designating academics as Senior Lecturer to Assistant Professors and from Principal Lecturers to Associate Professors is genius. These diminutive job titles confer inferiority – but with the promise that if you keep your nose to the grindstone and keep up the 60+ hour weeks, 50 weeks a year, you might be in with a chance of a decent job title, as a professor. What a fantastic, and completely friction-free, way of turning the performative screw.
The UK university sector is not alone and other public sector organisations have similarly got into a meaning muddle from the naming of their jobs. For example, in the British civil service, a key middle management role is labelled “Grade B2+”, whereas a relatively junior operational role is designated a rather grand sounding “Executive Officer”. And just last autumn, the NHS acknowledged that names do matter, abandoning the designation of “junior” doctor which was used to encompass all medics that sit within the grades below what is known as “consultant”, and which their union described as “misleading and demeaning” – it’s been replaced with “resident” doctor.
Meaningful work
A name gives meaning to workers. It gives status, prestige, and identity. While those organisations such as universities who fail to realise the importance of job titles may be able to turn the screw in the short-term, extracting ever more work from their junior-sounding Assistant and Associate Professors, they will in the longer-term, for sure, have an ever more demoralised and demotivated workforce for whom the job has little meaning other than the pay.
And, since pay for university academics in the UK has been so badly eroded in recent decades, job title conventions are a self-inflicted injury – one that risks academics’ engagement and wellbeing and, ultimately, their institutions’ performance.
Excellent article, this is all true – you mention about the American system and part of the shift was to make roles more understandable to international applications. The most shameful aspect is you see jobs advertised as “Tenure track” which is frankly immoral and false advertising given tenure does not exist!
100% agree with this. The reason for shifting to American titles has never been clear to me at any of the institutions I have been at. At one we were told that students found lecturer, senior lecturer, and professor confusing. But as one student said to me, ‘what’s more confusing than having three different types of professor’ ….
Associate Professor is aligned to Senior Lecturer in my organisation. I much preferred being an Associate Professor, but that was my personal preference. Maybe people should be given the choice?
Very intriguing! Using more managerial terms of assistant/associate are aligned with the practical world of management- how do you take into account managerial education (business oriented) academics which are now aligned in title to their corporate/practitioner counterparts? How does the “being locked in the middle” compare statistically to the corporate world?
What about ‘baby Professor’ for tutors or underpaid (or unpaid) markers? At primary school here in Ireland my grandson is a ‘junior infant’ – they don’t come more diminutive than that! (except in my day they were known as ‘low babies’ – possibly further down the nomenclature scale?)
This is a really important but underappreciated point: thankyou for expressing it so eloquently! The title ‘Senior Lecturer’ grants a much-needed dignity and respect to those experienced academic staff who wish to continue doing the heavy lifting of actually teaching students. More so in my opinion than ‘Reader’, which lacks recognition outside the academy, where it may be taken to imply more of an ivory-tower perpetual-student situation. ‘Lecturer’ at least has the advantage of showing you earn an honest crust teaching students – even if students sometimes think it means you’re just the equivalent of their teachers at school or 6th form college rather than a proper intellectual who writes the books on their reading list. Whereas ‘Senior Lecturer’ hits the sweet spot, showing you still earn an honest crust, but with a nice sprinkling of added gravitas (they needn’t know that some universities use the term for relatively junior academics in their 30s). ‘Principal Lecturer’ seems rarer nowadays, but risks verging on the pretentious.
Something else adding to the importance of the Senior Lecturer title is that some of us who have been SLs for decades actively don’t want to be Professors, despite theoretically having the CVs for promotion. Following the ‘Peter Principle’, we have enough self-knowledge to know that our skill sets are much better suited to the teaching and research we came into this profession to do than the big grant funding and leadership & management bullshit bingo which is what is really valued higher up the food chain. (It would be more honest if they designated all Professors as ‘Assistant-Assistant-Assistant-Pro-Vice-Chancellors’!).
However I am not convinced that the newer titles are more in ‘especially the post-92s’, as I have only ever heard the American-style ‘Associate Professor’ being used in pre-92s, which are probably more likely to recruit staff internationally. All the post-92 universities I know still use Senior Lecturer, and long may that continue.
The titles that bug me even more are that of Chief Executive, or even worse President, adopted by VCs. They reinforce the managerial view of themselves and their power in our universities. Also a bug is when they refer to ‘my staff’. I am not theirs, don’t want to and never will be. Anyway, thanks to Russell and Kate as I totally agree and recall arguing against a clamour from some colleagues for the introduction of American titles many years ago in what was then a polytechnic.