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Lecturer is the name given to university teachers in most of the English-speaking world (but not at most universities in the U.S. or Canada) who do not hold a professorship. In the U.S., the term also applies to well-known persons who speak publicly but not as university teachers; this article does not discuss this usage further.
United Kingdom
Lecturers are generally divided into Lecturers, Senior Lecturers, and Principal Lecturers/Readers and are permanent positions in a university which involve carrying out both teaching and research. These positions are generally comparable to "Assistant", "Associate", and "Full" Professors, respectively, under the US system, with the title "Professor" being reserved for only the most senior academics in the UK, and roughly equivalent to a chaired professorship in the US.
However the academic rank system in the UK is gradually changing with promotion to senior lecturer being based on a mixture of teaching, research and administration whilst the rank of Reader is obtained via research. Hence Senior Lecturer/Reader are essentially the same rank with the former position having a higher emphasis on teaching and the latter position having a higher emphasis on research at some institutions.Professorships (or personal chairs) are being awarded much more frequently in the UK than in previous years with this position now becoming the equivalent of the US 'Full' Professor.Most lecturers have Ph.D.s, and in many fields this is a prerequisite of the job.
In the UK, before a candidate is appointed to a lectureship, it is generally required that the candidate spend at least a term as a postdoctoral research assistant, a position that carries a low salary but is a requirement to learn the ropes and to establish new research paths following a Ph.D. specialisation.
Australia and New Zealand
Universities in these nations are organized in a manner similar to the United Kingdom. Despite gradual changes in the promotion policies that seem to be moving institutions in these countries toward the United States' system, generally the rank and promotion policies resemble the traditional UK approach. One development however has the borrowing of the style "associate professor" from North America. Unlike the American usage, however, it is equivalent to reader - and thus a more senior position than an American associate professor, who would be a senior lecturer in Australia and New Zealand. Some universities use associate professor and reader, while others use associate professor alone. Few now use reader alone. The use of the associate professor title is unfortunately highly misleading and leads to confusion with the American system, to which it bears little relation.
United States and Canada
Some American universities have Lecturers whose responsibility is undergraduate education, especially for introductory/survey courses that attract large groups of students, in contrast to full professors, who often have smaller "seminar" style courses with limited enrollment, usually reserved for upperclassmen or graduate students and sometimes restricted to the academic major for that course. The most common US terminology for these academic positions is "Instructor," or "Adjunct." These lecturers generally do not have research duties, or their teaching loads are too high to allow time for research. Many are also graduate students themselves taking their own courses and working towards their Ph.D. dissertation. Some have already completed the Ph.D. but do not yet have a tenured position as a professor. Junior faculty might choose to work as Lecturers in order to secure training required to qualify them for a tenure-track position. The position is generally regarded as less prestigious than a professorship (at the entry level of assistant professor). The salary is considerably lower than a professorship, and tenure is generally unheard of. It may not require a doctoral degree, depending on the university (see the article, "professor"), though a Master's degree (or at least 18 hours of graduate level work in a particular field) usually is required. Adjuncts and Instructors are more frequently found at the Community/Junior College level than full-professors. In some cases, these positions are effectively a source of training or support for the better Ph.D. candidates, and are not in practice held after one's Ph.D. defense. Many US universities are hiring more part-time and full-time lecturers to replace full professors who die or retire. Using lecturers to teach an increasing number of courses is viewed as a cost saving measure by some university administrations and US lecturers are often lacking the same job security and prestige of full professors. Many of these positions are being sponsored by regional studies programs for the purpose of training and specialization on a particular region.
In some schools "lecturer" is a temporary post of teaching for visiting academic celebrities -- a famous writer may be made a "lecturer" for a term or a year, for instance, teaching a course and leading a lecture series, without regard to their academic degrees.
It should be noted, however, that the title is sometimes, paradoxically, used in just the opposite sense: in some institutions, a "lecturer" is actually a higher rank than full professor, a sort of "grand old man" of the college or university: Amherst College, for instance, long listed Henry Steele Commager as "lecturer," the only one in the college, placing him in a symbolic position of seniormost member of the faculty.
Thus, the sequence from juniormost to seniormost teaching faculty position in most US universities and colleges is:
- teaching assistant (a graduate student)
- instructor (usually a newly-minted Ph.D.; no tenure)
- adjunct professor (a part-time, untenured post; often holds a doctorate but not always)
- assistant professor (except for medical schools, usually a full-time post; doctorate necessary)
- associate professor (a full-time post, usually with tenure)
- professor ("full professor" -- only a few, usually, in each department)
- "chaired professor" (a professor who holds a named, sometimes endowed, chair, as the "John Smith Professor of Economics" -- a step up in prestige from a "simple" full professor; sometimes called "distinguished professor" or "university professor"; in some ways sort of analogous to regius professor, at least in prestige, at Oxford and Cambridge.)
with the term "lecturer" very flexible in its meaning and usage.
Germany, Austria, Switzerland
There are a kind of lecturers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, the Privatdozent. Privatdozent or PD is a purely academic title that gives the holder the right to teach at the university but is not necessarily linked to a function in a university department. In difference to PDs, the UK lecturer always leads his/her own research group like a professor and is a salaried position. In Switzerland and Germany, however, many PDs have permanent full-time appointments at universities and lead independent research groups with responsibilities very similar to a US associate professor. The teaching by PDs is normally paid with lecture fees, generating an additional income.
See also
External links
Academia | Education, training, and library occupations | Docent | Docent | Lecturer | מרצה
"Lecturer"