[imgabe]

> UK and Commonwealth professor was reserved for the most senior rung of academics, with associate professor for those part-way there.

This is the same in the US. Tenure-track starts with assistant professor. Associate professor is when you first get tenure. Finally after having tenure for 5-7 years you can become full professor.

[skissane]

> This is the same in the US. Tenure-track starts with assistant professor. Associate professor is when you first get tenure. Finally after having tenure for 5-7 years you can become full professor.

It is different in the US. In the US, someone who just finished their PhD and wants an academic career will look for an “assistant professor” entry level academic job. Whereas, in the UK/Commonwealth, the entry level academic job is a “lecturer”-which is equivalent to US “assistant professor”. In the UK system, the first promotion is not to “associate professor”, it is to “senior lecturer”. Then a senior lecturer looks to get promoted to “associate professor”-which is actually a more senior/exclusive title than US “associate professor”. So this is my point-the US calls junior academics “assistant/associate professor”, whereas traditionally in the UK/Commonwealth they aren’t a type of “professor”, they are a type of “lecturer”. An “associate professor” in the UK/Commonwealth is roughly equivalent to a full professor in the US, so a UK/Commonwealth full professorship is (in itself) more prestigious than a US one-a UK/Commonwealth full professor is more like a “distinguished professor” in the US

Furthermore, it’s not unheard of in UK/Commonwealth system for people to get stuck at the senior lecturer level and never get promoted to associate professor-a person who retires as a senior lecturer hasn’t reached the heights of academia, but they haven’t been a failure. By contrast, the US hands out senior academic titles much more easily, which makes the a failure to reach them look like much more of a career failure.

As always there are exceptions: a small number of UK/Commonwealth universities have been adopting US-style academic titles (such as “assistant professor”), and Canada has always been far more US-influenced than the rest of the Commonwealth

[imgabe]

The main distinction as far as I understand is tenure / not-tenure, everything else is just window dressing. Is Senior Lecturer when they're awarded tenure in the UK?

Generally it's failure to get tenure (or failure to get on the tenure track) that's considered a failed academic career. Many professors might stop at the associate level and not go on to full professor, but they don't care because they have tenure.

[skissane]

> The main distinction as far as I understand is tenure / not-tenure, everything else is just window dressing. Is Senior Lecturer when they're awarded tenure in the UK?

The UK abolished academic tenure in 1988. So nowadays nobody gets tenure in the UK.

In the 21st century, “tenure” is primarily a North American concept (US and Canada), the rest of the English-speaking world doesn’t have it

The main point of tenure in the US is once you’ve got it, you now can’t be fired without reasonable cause. In many other countries, that’s not a special perk for academics, it is a standard aspect of employment law for all non-temporary employees - making the whole idea of “tenure” rather meaningless