Promotion Commotion
So I have just received the formal letter from the UBC President, President Benoit-Antoine Bacon, that I have been promoted from Associate Professor to Full Professor (achievement unlocked ✅).
Firstly, this is a great milestone, and there are many people who I will thank/remember to thank in the coming days.
However… lets break apart a few thoughts…
What does an academic promotion mean?
This is a question that I get asked by friends & family outside academia, a lot. It is also a question that those inside the academy should continue to ask each other.
In terms of career progression, a job promotion can have a few meaningful changes:
(1) Your terms and conditions can change.
i.e. you get paid more and/or the contract changes (i.e. tenure/permanence) and/or your compensation package changes.
For Associate Prof (with tenure) →Prof (with tenure), at UBC technically I get paid a little bit more but the relative pay rise is quite small, this is because our Faculty Association (my Union) has a collective agreement that has a structure which provides other mechanisms (merit + performance service awards, PSA), as well as career progress increments (CPIs) for lengths of service (details are found here). These mechanisms provide a smoother salary increase through different ranks, which ~small changes year-on-year.
Note that some of these small changes do add up to quite a significant change with time, due to the accrued benefit over a career, but as with most jobs the quickest way to raise your pay is either to change job (i.e. move institution) or to take on a second job (e.g. consulting on the side), rather than receive a direct pay rise from your primary employer.
In terms of other factors in my compensation, there are no substantial changes. The biggest change for our system is really the awarding of ‘tenure’ which has specific contractual and legal implications. At UBC, we now have the system that Assistant Profs, if they get promoted, will get tenure at their promotion to Associate. Those who join at Associate rank (like me in 2021) may or may not join with tenure, subject to the negotiation at the time. I left a permanent job in the UK to come here, so I made it a condition of my recruitment and fortunately that argument (and the paperwork) was sufficient to give me tenure as I ~arrived.
(2) You now can have different people reporting to you, due to the elevation in rank.
For academics in North America, each Assistant/Associate/Full Professor effectively operates their own ‘mini business unit’, i.e. their research group (which consists of students who you are training/educating, and staff who you employ, like Post Docs or technical staff). The shape and size of your research activity is largely driven by your research income and portfolio, and not by your rank — so technically this does not change with rank. We’ll come back to this in a minute.
Other aspects of academic rank and reporting, that can be related to your administrative load and what you are responsible for but this is largely independent of rank. For us at UBC, the ‘tenure’ status is more important with regards to the ability to have responsibility, mostly because of how you can deal with conflict if there is a disagreement and the formal protection that tenure affords.
Now, I do have some administrative load (Associate Head of Department, and member of the UBC Senate) and these opportunities were clearly available to me as an Associate Professor. A few other opportunities may be easier for me obtain in the administrative track, if I wanted them, now I am a Full Professor — but many roles (e.g. Associate Dean, even Associate Vice Provost +more) have been occupied by individuals who are suitably qualified but not a Full Professor.
Of course, while there may not be a requirement that someone be a Full Professor, it is normal that people of higher experience, which may be demonstrated by academic rank, are more likely to have more senior roles if they choose to have an administrative focus for their part of their work.
Huh? Promotion but no major changes… what’s the fuss about?
So… if you don’t get new responsibilities, and you don’t get a huge change in pay/compensation, what does a promotion to Full Professor mean? What motivates you to go thought his step?
This is the important question — and simply put — my mum is happy that I did this. I am being slightly facile with that comment, but it’s also very true (and it’s the same comment that my DPhil supervisor told me when he got promoted up via a ‘titular promotion’ at the University of Oxford).
Expanding this more broadly, “my mum is now more proud that my achievements have been recognized” can be broadened to highlight that there is now a public statement that my home institution, for one reason or another, has went through quite a lot of energy, effort and work to recognize that my paperwork is consistent with my professional practice being of sufficient value, quality and external ‘reputation’ in the three areas of ‘research’, ‘teaching’ and ‘service’ (40%, 40%, 20% over the course of my career for my focus) that they wish to put their this in writing by giving me an opportunity/reason to order some business cards and update my email signature.
This means that the promotion is largely a reputation ‘game’ where we trade on a community value of ‘who is in the Full Prof club’ with what social benefits we wish to put upon this group. This extends mostly towards — who gets ‘the benefit of the doubt’ when doing activities that they don’t have the spend as long justifying themselves/building up their reputation. It manifests via who we will consider ‘suitable’ for invited talks, access to some higher level of achievement awards, ‘easier’ access to certain funding streams, and other ways to launder one perception of ‘academic reputation’ to give you access to more resource.
The other aspect of this reputation management, which drives many people, is the ego of now being a ‘Full Professor’. This ego aspect can be a key driver for people and the work that they do — though if your sole driver for being a Prof is to be introduced differently, what’s your motivation for doing a good job once you’ve been promoted…?
The ego driver can be used a bit as a matter of ‘control’ to incentivize good/proactive behavior while people are desperately climbing. I do understand how and why this is used, but it’s also a bit of a problem as what’s the new stick to use once someone does get past the line…?
The other kicker when it comes to promotions, which I’m well aware of in all of this, the cumulative advantage of ‘who gets the benefit of the doubt’ has some very important consequences on the shape of the profession in which I work, specifically in who gets to make decisions and who holds it out long enough. There’s a host of data out there with a gender-based lens, and much more, including a great report on the “Differences in tenure status and feelings of fairness in hiring and promotions among male and female faculty in Canadian universities” by Sharanjit Uppal and Darcy Hango for Statistics Canada.
I’m quite aware that for lots of my work, my expertise is not questioned and people will just assume that because I (occasionally) speak proper/with a ‘classic British accent’ and I’m/I present as male, they just trust me without me needing extra credentials. From my EDI work + lived experience, I am also well aware of the impact of disabilities & sexual orientation, as well as the benefits and privileges of my education and how I speak. If you want a bit more of a dive into that, see the important topic of about ‘untitling’ that I’ve written about previously.
Overall, I’m happy I got promoted. I think I worked (and continue to work) pretty hard, and I’ve been quite lucky/played on my luck to my advantage. I’m also very cogniscient that this new status, and perception of status that others may have of me, is used to make it easier/more fair/and more fun for those who I work with, and especially for those who are climbing their way up in the complicated and hostile-until-proven-otherwise academic world that we continue to work within.
Professor Ben Britton works in the Department of Materials Engineering at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. His place of work is situated on the unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Traditional Territory. He’s also an Associate Head of Department (Graduates) and an active member of the UBC Senate. He writes about academia and life in general, and tries to reflect on occasion about his career, profession and life via social media, including LinkedIn, BlueSky and Medium.
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*EDIT — 2024/10/24 — PSA = Performance Salary Adjustment. Thanks AP for the correction.
