T faculty have job titles that include professor. Because they are the traditional power-holders, those titles garner more respect and have more clout than other titles within academia.

When I was hired at UVA, I was hired with a lecturer title and was treated less well by people in academia who didn’t know me well than later when the policies changed and I was re-titled with a professor title.

T faculty have three titles: Assistant Professor for their first 6 years, then Associate Professor, then Professor. Each promotion is associated with an increase in pay and rights and a recognized change of status: Assistant Professors are trying to get started and prove themselves, Associate Professors are proven and productive, and full Professors are established leaders and authorities in their own right.

This 3-tier system is so ingrained in academia that having 3 tiers is important to convey status and rights in the university. Having 3 matters more than the names: the relatively-common non-professor ranks of Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, and Distinguished Lecturer have similar meaning to academics.

T faculty are Assistant Professors for 6 years. They get a major review during year 3 or 4 with feedback on what to work on prior to promotion and a year-long review for promotion during year 6, then are Associate at the end of year 6 before year 7 starts.

That timing is so ingrained that deviations from it for S faculty are seen as negative. If S faculty are promoted on an earlier schedule it is taken as a sign that S faculty ranks are too easy and not real ranks. If S faculty are promoted on a later schedule it is taken as a sign that S faculty are inferior and need more time to reach the given rank.

When I was at UVA, the S faculty had their process one year later than T faculty.

T faculty in my field are promoted to Associate if they bring in enough grant money, have enough academic publications, and haven’t done anything awful in their other duties. That’s not what policy says, but is what I’ve universally seen in practice. And it nicely aligns with their duties, which center around research and grant acquisition.

S faculty have a wide variety of promotion criteria. That in and of itself is not bad, assuming individual S faculty can find an institution with promotion criteria that match their interests.

A common problem with S faculty promotion is a duty/promotion mismatch. For example, many teaching-focused S faculty like myself have no duties related to research or publishing academic papers but are expected to have published academic papers on their own as unpaid extra work in order to be promoted.

UVA had an explicit clause requiring promotion reviews to weight areas of contribution by official workload. I’ve heard conflicting information about S faculty promotion at UIUC, which is its own kind of problem, but not yet seen evidence of people having to do unpaid extra work so that’s promising.

T faculty are promoted to Associate at the end of their sixth year, or they are fired. This is called up-or-out promotion and is a source of stress for Assistant Professors. But is also an important calibration that keeps the Associate promotion criteria in check: if you’re good enough that the university wants to keep you, you are good enough to promote.

S faculty often do not have up-or-out promotion: they can remain in the first un-promoted job title for their entire career and can be reviewed for promotion, rejected, and retained as S faculty. Many S faculty welcome this as a stress-reducing privilege. But it also means there is no calibration on promotion criteria and often means that T Associate level is doing your job while S Associate level is doing more than your job.

Neither UVA nor UIUC has up-or-out promotion of S faculty. Both CS departments tried to encourage promotion reviews anyway, but both have faculty who delayed beyond the usual cycle and perceptions among S faculty that they have to be better than most to be promoted.

T faculty are given tenure⁴⁴ Short for ”guaranteed tenure of office”, usually shortened to just the one word since the 1960s when promoted to associate rank. This means their continued employment is guaranteed as long as their department exists, provided they do not do anything particularly egregious that requires extreme discipline.

S faculty are typically not given tenure⁵⁵ Some T faculty switch into S-like roles after getting tenure; they can’t be fired for this, so they retain tenure if they do.. But in some institutions they are given a similar guarantee that as long as they do their basic job duties they will retain their job.

At UVA, I was one of the last S faculty to gain the tenure-like Expectation of Continuing Employment. UVA removed that right from future S faculty as part of a move to grant some other rights. At UIUC, S faculty have no tenure-like guarantee.

Barring gross misbehavior, T faculty are reviewed for fitness for employment only twice: once when they are first hired and once as part of their associate rank promotion.

S faculty who lack a tenure-like guarantee may be put on renewable contracts and asked to re-justify their presence on an ongoing basis as part of a contract renewal process. This causes stress and signals that the university considers S faculty as temporary help, not truly part of the university. Other S faculty have either open-term contract of employment that requires no renewal or a contract that is automatically renewed without requiring the faculty member to submit any justification.

Everything in academia moves slowly compared to other industries. If I lose my job at one univeristy but want to remain in the same field I need at least a full year to make that happen: job applications sent in during the fall are followed by interviews in winter, offers in spring, and starting at the new job in summer. And there’s not another timing possible⁶⁶ There are various off-cycle job openings, but they are few and often have limitations that make them not the same as on-cycle jobs.: if I learn I’ll need a new job in January I’ve got at least 19 months before I have hope of getting one.

Because of this, it is important for faculty to have plenty of advance notice if they will not be retained by their university. It is common for contract renewals to be reviewed in the summer, so if a contract is not renewed and I want a chance of getting a job elsewhere I’ll need to have at least a year remaining on the previous contract. That means in turn that 2-year contracts are the shortest that provide this security and then only if they are renewed a full year before they expire.

T faculty can only be fired with cause. In their Associate promotion they can be fired for the cause of not having met the criteria for promotion. After that they can be fired for gross misconduct.

Some S faculty can be fired without cause at the end of their contract simply because some person in authority decided not to renew a contract. The option for such without-cause firings, even if never exercised, create a strong sense of being disposable and not valued by the university.

UVA policies required S faculty non-renewals to cite cause once the contract renewals became automatic. I have not yet found the appropriate policies at UIUC.

Many part of education cost money. I need computers, tablets, card scanners, handouts, examples to circulate in class, food for my teaching assistants and for celebrating student success, means to send students to conferences, and so on.

T faculty in CS typically get this money via grants, which usually allocate most but not all funds to specific purposes and leave some funds for these kinds of extras. S faculty in CS typically don’t get grants and need a separate source for this money.

At UVA, I had $3K per year plus a department-funded conference trip each year. At UIUC, I have $4K per year. I find these funds are roughly the right level for my educational activities.

CS involves a lot of use of computers, which require money and expertise to acquire and operate. Both T and S faculty typically have some of this provided by the department and some they need to pay for out of other funds.

At UVA, I had everything I needed: personal compuers, automated backups, student server access, dedicated course servers, personal site hosting, and experinced and helpful IT professionals keeping it all running and helping resolve problems.

At UIUC, I have a little from the university but thus far every request I’ve put in to the college (even simple ones that colleagues have had granted in the past) has been rejected and the department has only a few services, none that I’ve yet had use for.

T faculty may take a sabbatical every 7 years. This is a semester⁷⁷ Often extended into a year by augmenting the funds from the university with some external funding. where they have no on-campus duties and may investigate some topic of interest. It is seen as an important part of revitalizing research, diversifying approach, and sharing ideas within the academy.

Schools differ in if S faculty may take a sabbatical or not. At UVA they could, and some of my colleagues did, using the break to design new curricula, visit other universities and learn from colleagues, and otherwise revitalize their teaching. At UIUC they cannot.

In many departments, T faculty are paid more than S faculty. In many CS departments, T faculty are paid more than S faculty even though the job market is tighter for S faculty than for T faculty, thus clearly indicating that this is a signal of the university’s values and not of market forces.

UIUC is better than most here, and our department head is making progress in closing the gap, but we’re not there yet.

Are you invited to attend the meetings where decisions are being made and offer your input?

When a proposal is put up for a vote, is your vote counted?

Most operations at both schools I’ve been to that impact me and my students happen at the department level. Some are handled by committees, but many are brought up for full faculty vote.

Most work at the college or school level happens in committees, notably some kind of leadership committee. Some are brought to vote, but rarely and usually after the discussion has past.

At UVA, S faculty were not formally represented in the leadership committee, but were sometimes invited to attend and do serve on various other committees so they have a partial voice; however they were able to vote on issues brought to the full faculty.

At UIUC, S faculty are represented in the leadership committee⁸⁸ or will be soon; this was just added to the college bylaws yesterday; however, they are not able to vote on issues brought to the full faculty.

All university-level work happens in a senate and is associated committees; a vote of the full faculty is never called, or at least never has been in my time at these universities.

At both UVA and UIUC, S faculty and T faculty are treated interchangeably within the faculty senate, with the same voice and vote as one another.

Promotion and tenure (P&T) decisions are made by a series of committees: department, school/college, and university. These are staffed by faculty and their deliberations are confidential⁹⁹ There’s an interesting conversation to have on why they are confidential and the pros and cons of that setup, but this post is not the place for that..

Some P&T committees are limited to T faculty because they discuss tenure. Some let S faculty attend (and sometimes vote) on S faculty cases but not T faculty cases. And some let S faculty participate in all cases, acknowledging that S faculty are also academics and colleagues of the T faculty and are both qualified and invested in tenure decisions.