Talk:List of academic ranks

Section for Russia

The section for Russia is a complete non-sense. E.g., there is not such a thing at all as assistant professor. Also it is not clear what is what, as there is no standard translation. It should refer to Russian names of positions. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.96.104.206 (talk) 18:10, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Subdivision of undergraduates

I wonder, should one include the US terms for undergraduate students: freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior? Or would that be irrelevant, plain wrong, or going too far (down the ranks)? In Norway, btw, we just call those people Nth year students. --Wernher 22:53, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)

And in Britain, although first years are informally referred to as "freshers". -- Necrothesp 20:48, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The word "freshman" originated in England, and I think may have died out there while continuing in use in America. If they're now using the word "fresher" in that way, I wonder if in the last few decades they re-imported "freshman" from America and then corrupted it into "fresher"? Michael Hardy 21:13, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I don't think so. It's not a new thing. British universities have used the term "fresher" since at least the late 19th century. -- Necrothesp 01:34, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)

This page is about accademic rank: only a senior (final year) doing his thesis/dissertation, industrial placement student (UK) or summerjob/parttime job students work in labs not all students, in particular freshmin (most researcher would not trust a freshmin to get coffee or pizza). --Squidonius (talk) 12:59, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Department Head vs Department Chair in the US

I was not aware of the distinction suggested by the article between "Department Head" as an elected position and "Department Chair" as an appointed one. Is there any reference to back the article's claim ? 200.177.29.149 23:49, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Suggest removal of "frosh" from Canada section

I've been a student at Canadian universities for longer than I like to think about, and I've never, ever, heard the term "frosh" used for first-year students, casually or formally. We don't tend to use "freshman," "sophomore," etc., either, but "frosh" in particular strikes me as a strong Americanism. Never been to school back east, but I know many people who have, and they don't use the term either.142.36.71.172 22:32, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

I am inclined to agree with the above statement. I have never heard the term "frosh" used to describe first-year students in Canada. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, "frosh" is only used to describe a combination freshman-sophomore athletic program in the U.S. Toropop (talk) 02:47, 25 June 2010 (UTC)

Article title

Wouldn't List of academic ranks be a more appropriate page title given it is just a list? Wongm (talk) 16:08, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Possible reference

I notice that this page doesn't have much in the way of supporting references. Here's a possible source if anyone wants it: http://www.iue.it/MaxWeberProgramme/AcademicCareers/AcademicCareers.shtml —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.83.222.100 (talk) 16:22, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

PhD required?

Could you people help in clarifying which of these ranks requires a PhD? For a few of the countries listed, this is stated, but not all. And to my best understanding, not all the titles listed in this article do require a doctoral degree. AmirOnWiki (talk) 17:31, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Capitalization of foreign job titles

Various capitalization styles were in place in this article so I made a pass to bring all the English titles into line with our manual of style as it pertains to titles. Basically, Wikipedia views titles as common nouns unless they precede a person's name where they are seen as part of the name and thus become proper names. I didn't change the orthography of any foreign terms (e.g. Rektor, Profesora) since I'm not sure how we should deal with them. For example, the Egypt section use all upper case for the local terms. I lean towards treating anything written in a Roman alphabet the same as we do in English and leaving everything else (e.g. Cyrillic, Kanji, Chinese) as is. I'd appreciate input on that. Jojalozzo 00:16, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

Is format standardization desirable?

Some sections have the local title first followed by the English translation and notes. Some have the English term followed by the local term followed by notes. Some just have the English term without a local term. Various punctuation styles are used also (colons, commas, dashes) to separate the components of each entry. Would it improve the article if there were more consistency from section to section? If so, is there a section we can use as a model and can we extract a set of simple guidelines to help new editors work here without making more work for others? Jojalozzo 00:16, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

funny redirect

"Bangladesh" - "Assistant professor" refers to "Professors in the United States". I know I could potentially edit this myself, but I don't think I fully grasp all relevant pages and their redirects involved to rectify this. 157.193.250.13 (talk) 13:18, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

Request for comment: Splitting the academic rank topics

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Should we replace the lists of academic ranks here with links to articles on academic ranks for the various geographic regions when such articles exist? Jojalozzo 03:03, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Survey

• RfC comment. I found this discussion from the notice at WT:PROF. In reply to a question asked below, RfCs typically run for one month. I've read the discussion below, but I haven't read the draft pages or the discussions at other talk pages, linked there. Broadly speaking, I think that it would be a good thing to start moving the content of the list page out of list form and into regular article form. WP:There is no deadline, and I realize that doing so will be a long-term project. This list page as it is now seems to me to be somewhat difficult to use, because it is a very long compilation of different lists, with very little contextualization as to what the various ranks mean or what the requirements are for a given rank. Thus, I think that eventually a text-based rather than list approach would be helpful. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:38, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

Discussion

I started this RFC because a discussion among a few editors at Talk:Professor led to an editor replacing the lists of academic ranks here with links to existing articles on academic ranks for the various geographic regions. This may be a fine idea but it seems prudent to allow those active on this page to have a say in how this page is managed. To see the results of these replacements, see here. Jojalozzo 03:03, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

@Jojalozzo: Thanks for calling the discussion. Let me point to an earlier version before the split started: Academic ranks and Professor. As you can see, there was lots of materials duplicated across the two pages. E.g., Canada section. Furthermore, both pages were growing too big. I've also created two navigation templates: Template:Academic ranks overview and Template:Academic ranks worldwide, and a similarly named category. The idea is that Draft:Professor and Draft:Academic ranks serve as overview-type articles, comparing and contrasting regional settings, in a summarized form. E.g., English-, German-, Spanish-speaking countries. Country-specific summaries may also be included in the future (one sentence min and one paragraph max), but these pages need some pruning before they can grow healthy again. Thanks for your thoughts. Fgnievinski (talk) 03:29, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Oh, and if I may, it'd be nice to have each country-specific academic rank page linked from the respective country's page -- it should bring the attention valuable experts (please help linking if you agree!). Thanks. Fgnievinski (talk) 03:31, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Also, the original list of academic ranks didn't contain just bullet lists but a lot of prose in many sections. Several similar pages already existed: Argentina, Australia, France, Finland, United States. I just created some more. Fgnievinski (talk) 03:48, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

I don't think a list without explanatory phrases would make sense. They helped explain how the ranks compared and what authority and responsibility went with each rank. I agree that the list should avoid excessive prose. Jojalozzo 03:58, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Comments

1. Duplication of academic rank information makes it difficult to maintain consistency across many articles, so it may be a good idea to link to one or two locations where the information can be kept consistent and up to date. However, one of the features of this list has been the ease it offers in comparing ranks in different locations. If this page is just a list of links this will be more difficult.
2. I do not think we can call this a list of academic ranks if it becomes just a list of links to academic ranks. What should it be called? Is there a need for such a page at all? There would certainly be no need for the headings if all we have to offer is links and no text.
3. The Professor page should just cover the rank of professor, not other ranks, so splitting out the extraneous ranks is a good idea there. That would argue for keeping the other ranks (as well as professor) here since there is utility in having a page listing all the ranks as I said above.

Jojalozzo 03:56, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

@Jojalozzo: How long do RFC processes normally take? Would it be a good compromise if we keep a minimal-prose list-type section in each of the split articles, then transclude these sections only in the present Big List article? Thanks. Fgnievinski (talk) 19:29, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

The following is an example of WP:transclusion (here's the edit on the transcluded page: diff) (which contains other sections, see Academic ranks in Colombia: Fgnievinski (talk) 21:51, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

---

Academic ranks:

• Profesor Emérito (Emeritus Professor)
• Profesor Titular (Full Professor)
• Profesor Asociado (Associate Professor)
• Profesor Asistente or Principal (Assistant Professor)
• Profesor Auxiliar (Lecturer)
• Instructor (non-doctoral teacher, mostly holding a bachelor's or master's degree)

Types of employment:

• Profesor de planta (Full- or part-time faculty, may hold any of the above ranks)
• Profesor ocasional o de cátedra (Adjunct faculty)

---

I've started to notice that several of the recently split country-specific pages have been "adopted" by the respective WikiProjects, such as WikiProjects Netherlands and WikiProjects Thailand, which is a nice development, as these folks are the experts on their country's matters. Fgnievinski (talk) 01:06, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

After ten days since the RFC started, I intended to resume the splitting process, as the original requester has not presented further objections to my follow-up comments, and this RFC attracted one only other commentator. Fgnievinski (talk) 15:22, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

Sure. No one seems to have an opinion and you're willing to work on this, so go ahead. Jojalozzo 00:00, 16 November 2014 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

New questions

• Unfortunately, this RFC was not widely announced. Instead of cleaning up the current list, it was decided to split up the article in sub-articles. This has resulted in the creation of several unsourced stubs. Much of what is present in these stubs is redundant/repetitive. This is, of course already the case here: instead of concentrating first on what all or many countries have in common and then briefly describing where specific countries differ from this general pattern, we have a lot of redundancy, with for many countries the repetition that they have full/associate/assistant professors (sometimes translated in the local language). We have a lot of info on administrative ranks, which doesn't even belong in this article. I fear that by splitting this into a myriad of small articles, we are going to make a bad situation worse. Too bad that Tryptofish's council was not followed. To make things even worse, apparently the effort to split this into substubs was started but never finished, so we now are hanging in-between. --Randykitty (talk) 15:05, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for pinging me, although I must admit that I pretty much do not even remember this discussion anymore. (At least I cited "there is no deadline".) Given the lack of editor interest, my suggestion would be to wait a day or two in case anyone else responds here, and assuming not, then just take a be-bold/so-fix-it attitude, and change it to whatever you think it should be. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:21, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

The original problem was uneven quality across the sections about each country; splitting was one way of isolating the crap, and also for each article to be owned by the corresponding country WikiProjects and general categorization. I agree an overview & comparison general section would be a valuable addition to the present article. fgnievinski (talk) 05:28, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

I guess one alternative would be to merge each academic rank by country page in the respective member of Category:Higher education by country. fgnievinski (talk) 06:20, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

As with professor, that just moves the problem but doesn't solve it. There's no need to repeat things for every country over and over again. Just explain first the general/most common cases and then, for the different countries, only discuss what is different. The article also needs sources. Moving all the "crap" to separate sub-articles just results in the creation of a lot of unsourced low-quality sub-stubs. --Randykitty (talk) 08:25, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

US

Why can't I find the United States on this page? Kdammers (talk) 21:41, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

It's listed int Template:Academic ranks worldwide, which is transcluded at the top of the article. But your comment and the numerous new sections duplicating existing main articles indicate that the template is not being given due attention. So I've created empty sections to indicate existing main articles more clearly. These empty should be populated with the list of ranks only, not the prose, found in the respective main articles. fgnievinski (talk) 14:40, 5 November 2016 (UTC)

Terminology: Academic rank

How is "rank" distinct from "job title"? Can we clarify this in the text? Perhaps an example of a job such as vice-chancellor, often performed by a professor? EdwardFlach (talk) 23:26, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

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Research “chairman”?

I’m from Canada and I have never heard of “research chairman”. It’s “research chair”, at least in Ontario. al12si (talk) 22:13, 22 December 2018 (UTC)

Request for comments

Greetings to all,

A Request for comment has been initiated regarding RfC about whether to allow use of honorofic 'Allama' with the names or not?

Requesting your comments to formalize the relevant policy @ Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Islam-related articles

Thanks

Bookku (talk) 18:01, 9 July 2020 (UTC)

Portuguese section

In the Portugal section, it says:

"Extinct ranks:

• Assistente (teaching assistant) - without a PhD"

At least in FEUP, Assistente still exists, it is not extinct. I was one for a few years. PhD students are usually called "Assistentes" because they have not completed the PhD yet, therefore cannot be called Professors. You can see that there are many "Assistentes" in FEUP if you go to the search page, then press button next to the "category" section https://sigarra.up.pt/feup/pt/FUNC_GERAL.FORMQUERY

There are also "monitors", which are students that help with a specific course -- these are typically bachelor or master students, who are still completing the degree but have already completed that course with distinction.

--Ricpcruz (talk) 10:04, 21 July 2021 (UTC)