The decrease in public funding and the subsequent increase in temporary employment in academia are often viewed as crisis symptoms. While the crisis rhetoric may be premature, the turn towards hyper-competitive qualification systems that generate unfixed career advancement models may indeed mark a break from the tenure-oriented career structure.…

We examined a large sample of Polish science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) scientists (N = 16,083) to study rank advancement and productivity in the past 40 years. We used two previously neglected time dimensions -- promotion age and promotion speed -- to construct individual lifetime biographical and publication…

Honors faculty are defined by their dedication to their craft and their enormous impact on students in every discipline. However, their role within the larger university setting is nebulous, leading to an undervaluation of their contributions to higher education in an era of negative perceptions of the industry. Honors faculty can be tenured,…

Although the nature of the academic profession and related career advancement has been well documented, little empirical evidence has been provided on the professional agency that academics employ to advance from one academic rank to another. Adopting an agency focus, this study therefore investigates what strategies academics adopt when seeking…

We surveyed 230 associate and full professors of counselor education about their perceptions of the promotion process to full professor and to identify factors that differentiated associate from full professors. Promotion criteria and standards varied based on the nature of participants' universities, and both experience and journal article…

This study examined the experiences of faculty members who transitioned into the role of department chair at community colleges in the United States. While there is research on faculty transitioning into department chair roles at four-year colleges and universities, there is very little research on this transition within community college…

Neoliberalism occupies the walls of academia, seeping into the pulse and pace of faculty work and engendering precarity into academic life and the promotion and tenure process, particularly for Women of Color (WoC) scholars. Building on research on early-career faculty and Faculty of Color and informed by the theoretical concept of liminality, we…

Two of the most prestigious, yet elusive, titles that professors in higher education can earn are the designations of distinguished professor and endowed chair. These named positions often come with benefits such as salary enhancements, resources for research and teaching, and favorable adjustments of time allocation within a faculty member's…

Despite efforts to attract Black women in the professoriate, higher education has historically excluded marginalized populations, specifically Black women. This qualitative case study investigated the problem of insufficient representation of tenured Black women in the academy at Historically White Colleges and Universities (HWCUs). Additionally,…

This study explored the extent to which faculty job satisfaction varied by faculty rank and tenure status. 118 Faculty members with varying ranks and tenure statuses from four higher education institutions participated in the study. Surveys were utilized to collect results. Descriptive statistics, and one-way ANOVAs, were utilized to analyze…

The teaching-research nexus is omnipresent in academic professional life. How it is articulated depends on specific situations, contexts, and academic hierarchies. Initiatives to change the nexus in Dutch research universities are now informing European policy processes, but how academics in different positions play it out and deal with various…

This article offers some general guidelines to social work faculty seeking to be promoted to the rank of Full Professor, guidelines that we hope will provide a beginning discussion for individual programs to develop more transparent criteria and expectations for promotion to the highest rank in the academy. Specifically, we offer guidance about…

Mid-career faculty members often seek to advance to the highest faculty rank of "full professor," but research suggests women and Black, Indigenous and Other People of Color (BIPOC) faculty face inequitable patterns in advancement to the full professor rank. This study focuses on associate professors' perceptions of "promotion…

The academic career path for tenure track faculty in most four-year universities in the United States allows those who earn tenure to make an individual choice about whether to pursue promotion to the rank of full professor. Limited research exists on the intrinsic motivators that individuals possess and draw upon to push past obstacles or…

Little research exists that evaluates the existence and importance of mentoring for academic librarians with faculty status who have already achieved tenure but have not yet been promoted to a more senior rank, such as full professor or full librarian. This study represents the second of a two-part research project seeking to better understand the…