Simplifying the Academic Hierarchy

Once upon a time, academic titles and hierarchies made sense. Today's intellectual and institutional diversities make traditional hierarchies less useful and less meaningful.

By John Jeffries Martin

Viewed as a calling or a vocation, scholarship has an inevitably vexed relation to institutional life. What place, after all, can there be within the academic hierarchy for inspiration, intuition, and intellectual passion? Since institutions insist on measuring scholarship, what possible criteria can they employ? If scholarship is measured by quantity, quality is sacrificed. If it is measured by quality, subjective factors come into play. We may believe that our Old Regime of titles and perquisites—reaching from lecturer to professor and beyond—makes sense, but much evidence suggests that our hierarchies are irreparably flawed, if not hypocritical.

Toward the end of the First World War, the eminent German sociologist Max Weber grappled with this question in his famous lecture "Wissenschaft als Beruf," generally rendered as "Science as a Vocation," although a more accurate translation would be "Scholarship as a Vocation or Career." Early in the lecture, on his way to deeper questions about the relation of scholarship to meaning, Weber highlighted the issue of titles or ranks. He found the capriciousness of academic hierarchies unsettling. "Do you in all conscience believe," he asked an audience of university students, some of whom may have aspired to professorships, "that you can stand seeing mediocrity after mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond you, without becoming embittered and without coming to grief?"

Hierarchy and Tradition

To Weber, the problems in academia were intractable, based on the impossibility of reconciling calling with bureaucracy. In academic life, as in modern culture in general, Weber said, progress meant disenchantment, the loss of a sense of mystery in the face of the scientific mastery of the world—a mastery that nonetheless failed to address questions of meaning.

Looking back at the history of the academic profession, I wonder if the problem is as intractable as Weber believed. Legal, medical, and academic careers all developed as professions in the last third of the nineteenth century, but only the academic world embellished itself with a highly articulated hierarchy of ranks and titles. European, particularly German, traditions were influential. Rather than a high income, the German professor enjoyed the "prestige" of his rank, and American academics in this period—many of them from patrician backgrounds—embraced the plutocratic model. Scholarship, moreover, was to be demonstrated throughout one's career. It was the senior scholar rather than the younger academic whose books and articles would win him promotion to the rank of "full" professor. In this sense, the academic career differed substantively from both law and medicine—fields in which examinations could establish whether or not the practitioner was competent and in which most practitioners were never granted special titles. They were simply "doctors" or "attorneys at law."

For a hierarchy to function well, it must be based on shared standards. Such shared standards are elusive in education. Not only does the meaning of a particular title vary enormously among colleges and universities, but the system is flawed within most individual institutions as well. Ranks are meant to be a measure of merit, but the achievement of full professorship depends also upon extraneous factors. In Weber's day, wealth and religion were predominant determinants, with Jews, in particular, facing virtually insurmountable barriers to careers as professors. In our society, gender is a determinant. Academic careers, ostensibly open to women, remain based on a patriarchal model of intellectual labor that assumes indefatigable devotion to one's institution (and hence no or few familial obligations). American colleges and universities have done well in appointing more women to academic positions; they have done less well, however, in promoting them to full professor.

A factor in promotion decisions that is less visible than gender is the diversity of intellectual practices. By "practices," I mean the methodologies, forms of research, and the conventions of publishing that are perceived as normative within a particular discipline. In some fields, articles are given more weight than books in promotion decisions. Subfields matter as well: it simply takes more time to research and prepare a manuscript on Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War or the Umayyad dynasty of the early Islamic world than one on Alfred Hitchcock or John Wayne. Less often acknowledged is the fact that certain subjects (for example, research based on Marxist presuppositions) often exist in tension with institutional hierarchies while others (such as a class in accounting for business majors) support them. Surely these diverse practices have some weight in an individual professor's advancement. It seems probable that teaching or research that reinforces prevailing cultural and institutional norms and values is more likely to be rewarded than teaching and research that goes against the grain.

Finally, Weber emphasized that academic scholarship was carried out on the razor-thin surface where art and specialization coincide. Specialization was necessary to scientific progress; one could not be a master of all things. Yet specialization would be heartless without a sense of calling, for discovery and innovation in scholarship require not only hard work and continuous thought but also, like art, moments of inspiration. Weber recalled to his audience the celebrated remark of the nineteenth-century German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz that his best scientific ideas had come to him "when taking a walk on a slowly ascending street." How many academics are so inspired? In his lecture, Weber confessed to his audience that he knew of no other career where "chance plays such a role."

Suggested Reforms

Many academics have already called for reform. Some have insisted on greater transparency about what is expected for tenure and for advancement, with attention to the rate at which individuals in different fields and in different demographic groups are promoted. Others have recommended a shift to a decentralized method of decision making, with disciplinary clusters complementing the work of university-wide committees on promotion and tenure. To these possible reforms, I would like to add a third: the elimination of the distinction between associate and full professor.

This reform—desirable for most, though certainly not all, institutions—would involve not the abolition but the simplification of hierarchy, which would bring the academic career into greater conformity with other professions. Just as lawyers start out as associates and doctors as residents or interns, professors would begin their careers as assistants. This untenured, entry-level rank provides for a period of probation and should be preserved to ensure that the young scholar is able to contribute to the classroom and to his or her field through activity in scholarship—however "scholarship" is defined by a particular institution.

Would such simplification remove incentives for those who are tenured to continue to develop as scholars and teachers? Probably not. Under the current system, many professors already spend twenty-five or more years "in rank" as full professors with no expectation of further promotion and no detectable decrease in productivity. To the contrary, it is arguably faculty who are frozen in rank as associate professors whose productivity is likely to suffer. In addition, faculty members at those institutions that lack the rank of tenured associate professor, including Harvard, are not demonstrably less productive than scholars at institutions that use this middling, ill-defined rank.

The differentiation in rank between associate and full professor makes sense at certain institutions of higher learning, those that have a clear sense of mission and institutional identity—for example, our leading research institutions and the top liberal arts colleges. Indeed, it is within such relatively unified cultural settings that hierarchies can be meaningful. Most American college and university campuses, however, have multiple and conflicting missions. Far from having unified academic cultures, they are heterogeneous institutions, with diverse disciplinary cultures, employing a cross-section of the American professoriate whose individual members hold a wide range of views about the shape and purpose of an academic career. For faculty at such institutions, the overwhelming majority of American colleges and universities, the ranks are a source of frustration that impede rather than encourage meaningful scholarship and teaching.

Many faculty are, by choice and by temperament, active, publishing scholars. Many others, again by choice and by temperament, place more emphasis on work with students, inside the classroom and out. Granted, the best manage to do both well, but the fact remains that in the current competitive climate, with even second-tier institutions striving to "emerge" as leading schools in the national rankings, promotion and tenure committees are invariably under pressure to narrow the range of possible promotion criteria, placing greater and greater emphasis on publishing and, in general, on the quantity rather than the quality of what the faculty member publishes. Simply by removing the second "hoop"—that is, the goal of promotion to full professor—many universities and colleges would become more capacious workplaces, accommodating the diverse strengths, talents, and goals of their faculties with greater ease.

The elimination of the distinction between associate and full professor would go a long way toward humanizing the campus and enabling each individual faculty member to be more at home in his or her chosen vocation. After all, the primary motivation in academic life must be the sense that it is, indeed, one's calling. And because it is a calling, it entails a risk that most other professions simply do not confront. It depends to a remarkable degree, as Weber stressed, on inspiration, on intuition, on the accidents of discovery, and on a willingness (always a hazard from the vantage point of the modern bureaucracy) to venture outside one's area of expertise and to risk failure, when it is, generally speaking, the experts who are rewarded.

The institution of ranks within academic life came at a moment when teachers in higher education, like doctors and lawyers, were concerned with legitimating their role in society. It had become simply too easy to call oneself a "professor" in nineteenth-century America, and scholars had compelling reasons to institute controls that would make the term meaningful. But circumstances have changed. In almost all four-year colleges and universities, the overwhelming majority of faculty members now hold the Ph.D. degree; professors are evaluated annually; and individual institutions are subject to scrutiny by external accrediting agencies.

In short, we no longer need the complicated hierarchies of the past, and we would do better with a more transparent, simpler hierarchy in the future. We needn't parade ourselves and our titles before the public or one another like the royalty of an imaginary kingdom. Professionalism does not require arcane rituals or ranks. Our calling is to be rigorous about the intellectual life; our duty is to foster institutional structures that do not reduce the life of the mind—learning and teaching—to one simple, measurable thing.

John Jeffries Martin is professor of history at Trinity University and the editor of The Renaissance: Italy and Abroad, forthcoming from Routledge.

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