Shadow Economy & Corruption : Invisible Hands

Glossary of Job Market Terms

Academia: Academia was a public garden near Athens where Plato lectured his pupils. The school became known as the Academy and the teachers and pupils as Academics. Today colleges and universities are referred to collectively as academia or the academy, and professors are known as academics.
Adjunct Professor: A person whose primary employment is outside the university but is hired to teach specific courses for a limited period of time. One of several non-tenure-track academic appointments; for others, see instructor, lecturer, and visiting professor.

Allied Social Science Associations (ASSA): The American Economic Association (AEA) holds annual meetings jointly with other social science associations, e.g. the American Finance Association (AFA), the Industrial Relations Research Association (IRRA), and the Association for Social Economics (ASE). These meetings are collectively called the Meeting of the Allied Social Science Associations. The vast majority of your initial academic job interviews will likely take place at the ASSA meetings, held in early January.

American Economic Association (AEA): The professional organization of economists. The annual meeting is held in early January as part of the Meeting of the ASSA. The AEA website is http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AEA/index.htm Student membership in the AEA is available at bargain rates and includes membership to three journals: the American Economic Review, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, and the Journal of Economic Literature.

Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM): The professional organization of academics working in the area of public policy. They hold their annual meeting at the end of October or beginning of November. The APPAM website http://qsilver.queensu.ca/~appamwww/ contains job listings. You may post your CV on the APPAM website. Interviews at the APPAM meetings tend to be less formal than those at the ASSA meetings.

Assistant Professor: The lowest of three tenure-track or tenured faculty positions. Your first tenure-track job will almost certainly be at the assistant professor level. Progress of assistant professors toward tenure is generally assessed in a third-year review; failure to make acceptable progress can result in non-renewal of the employment contract. In the vast majority of cases, after the third-year review the assistant professor is told to publish more and work harder and is granted a second three-year contract. Assistant professors in most departments have a six-year review at which they are considered for promotion to associate professor. The salaries of assistant professors are driven by three things: 1) the salary at which one was hired, which is determined largely by the market-clearing salary for that year and the presence of alternative offers; 2) annual raises, which are usually a few percent per year; and 3) raises in response to outside offers of employment. Assistant professors may not be allowed to vote on certain issues during faculty meetings, such as a tenure review; university policy varies.

Associate Professor: the middle rank of the three tenure-track or tenured faculty positions. Generally one is promoted to associate professor after spending several years as an assistant professor and passing muster in a review. There are associate professors with tenure and associate professors without tenure; university policy varies. The length of time one must serve as an associate professor before being considered for professor may be left vague.

Campus Visit: see Flyout.
Carnegie Classification: A typology of American colleges and universities developed by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. Institutions are divided into categories such as Extensive Doctoral/Research Universities, Intensive Doctoral/Research Universities, Masters Colleges and Universities, Baccalaureate Colleges, Associates Colleges, Specialized Institutions, and Tribal Colleges and Universities. Universities may tout their status as an Extensive Doctoral Research University as evidence of the university’s commitment to graduate education.

Chair: 1) Abbreviation for chairperson, as in “She is the chair of the economics department,” or “She is the chair of the search committee.” 2) Abbreviation for endowed chair, as in “She has a chair in the economics department.”

Committee Work: Departmental administrative service. Different types of committees on which you may be asked to serve include: search (for new faculty), admissions, curriculum, and benefits. Departments should try to minimize the amount of committee work given to assistant professors so that they have a better chance of publishing the research necessary to pass the tenure review.

Cover letter: a letter sent as part of your application for a job. The letter should politely request an interview, list the reasons that you believe that you are a good match for that particular job, list enclosures (such as research papers and your curriculum vitae) and provide your contact information.

Curriculum Vitae: In Latin, it means “course of life” but in the context of the job market refers to a resume tailored for academic jobs. It should list your contact information and details about your education, employment, publications, research experience, and teaching experience. The term curriculum vitae is often abbreviated either CV or c.v. There is a widespread but mistaken notion that vita is singular and vitae is plural; in fact, vitae is correct for both the singular and plural.
Dead Wood: slang for faculty who do not contribute to the productivity of the department but who cannot be easily removed because they have tenure. Often a relative term used to refer to colleagues who have been in the department ten years longer than the speaker.

Dean: a university administrator with power over department chairs but lesser in rank than the provost. Deans often have control over the number of lines assigned to each department and can veto the tenure recommendations of departments.

Dual Job Search: a search that is conducted jointly by two people, e.g. a husband and wife. Dual job searches can be especially difficult and stressful, which is why they are called the two-body problem.

Emeritus: an honorary title awarded to retired faculty. Typically emeriti are given an office, library privileges, and the right to participate in commencement but do not remain voting members of the faculty.

Endowed Chair: A faculty line that has been endowed with outside funds that provide for salary and often research support. Given these extra perks, endowed chairs are generally awarded to particularly distinguished faculty and are used to recruit prestigious senior faculty from other universities. Endowed chairs are often named for the source of their endowment; for this reason you may see senior faculty referred to as, e.g., the Jane Doe Distinguished Professor in Economics.

Flyout: an invitation to visit the campus, meet faculty, and give a job talk. Generally occur after the initial interviews at the ASSA meetings and only the top few candidates are initially invited. Also called a campus visit.

Hard Money: A salary offer is hard money if it is guaranteed even if the faculty member never receives any outside grants. This is in contrast to soft money. Most offers in economics departments are hard money.

Instructor: Instructor is one of several non-tenure-track academic appointments; for others, see adjunct professor, lecturer, and visiting professor. Often instructor refers to someone who teaches a class but does not have a Ph.D.; for example, a graduate student.

Job Openings for Economists (JOE): The primary list of academic job openings in economics and related fields. A publication of the AEA and the economics department at the University of Texas at Austin, JOE is published every month except January and July. Each issue is released around the fifth day of the month. The website is located at: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/joe/

Job Talk: A formal 60- or 90-minute presentation of your research for the purpose of allowing prospective employers to gauge several things: the quality of your research, your communication skills, and your ability to think on your feet. The atmosphere of a job talk varies greatly depending on the department’s culture; faculty may sit attentively to hear an entire presentation before asking polite questions or may interrupt immediately with aggressive challenges.

Joint Appointment: the state of having appointments in multiple academic units of a college or university. If you are offered a joint appointment, ascertain which department is the primary appointment (i.e. in which department is the line) -- that department would have the most influence over your reviews. For an appointment joint between units with different objective functions, the appointee may find it difficult to satisfy all the stakeholders.

Junior Faculty: faculty without tenure; i.e. assistant professors and untenured associate professors.

Land-Grant Institution: a college or university designated by its state legislature or the U. S. Congress to receive funds under one of three pieces of legislation designed to increase the efficiency of agricultural production and educate farmers and rural populations. Those three such pieces of legislation are:
1) The Morrill Act of 1862, which gave 17.5 million acres of federal land to the states. Most of this land was sold by the states and the income was used to support the land-grant colleges and universities.
2) The Morrill Act of 1890, which required states that maintained separate colleges for blacks and whites to equitably divide the funds received under the 1862 Act; this caused the creation of 16 black land-grant colleges in the southern U. S.
3) The National Agricultural Research, Extension, and Teaching Act of 1994, which conferred land-grant status on 29 Native American colleges.
The mission of land grant institutions was expanded by two pieces of legislation: the Hatch Act of 1887, which supports agricultural experiment stations, and the Smith-Lever Act of 1914, which supports extension efforts in agriculture and home economics. There are currently 105 land-grant institutions. For some people, the term “land-grant institution” has less than positive connotations; the reason is that many states used the land-grant legislation to start new agricultural universities that were not as strong in classical education as older universities. Today the land-grant institutions are diverse, including institutions with highly ranked economics departments, such as University of California-Berkeley, Cornell, University of Maryland-College Park, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Lecturer: Lecturers generally teach significantly more, but are paid significantly less, than assistant professors. Lecturers tend to have little job security; they are not tenure-track, their contracts are generally for a single year, renewable at the discretion of the department, and they rarely are promoted to assistant professor. Whereas instructor refers to someone teaching a class who does not hold a Ph.D., the term lecturer is usually reserved for a teacher with a Ph.D. Lecturer is one of several non-tenure-track academic appointments; for others, see adjunct professor, instructor, and visiting professor.

Postdoc: abbreviation for postdoctoral fellowship or a person on such a fellowship. Postdoctoral fellowships support one to three years of full-time research after one has completed one’s dissertation. In the life sciences almost all Ph.D.s complete postdocs before starting as assistant professors. Fewer Ph.D.s in economics than in the life sciences do postdocs but the practice has become more common over time. A postdoc is a useful way of getting your research agenda underway before teaching. Salary for postdocs is usually significantly less than that for assistant professors. Some postdocs are formal programs sponsored year after year by organizations (e.g. the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development) whereas others are ad hoc -- for example, a professor might hire a postdoc to help with a specific project. Some postdocs fund you to do your own research whereas others make you a full-time worker on a project of the employer’s design.


Professor: the highest-ranking of the three tenure-track or tenured faculty positions; to distinguish them from assistant and associate professors, they are sometimes called full professors.

Visiting Professor: a non-tenure-track academic position, usually for a single year, often by academics who have tenure or are tenure-track at another university. Many faculty serve as visiting professors while on sabbatical.

posted by Mohammad Reza Farzanegan @ 03:04