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Academe’s Entitled Class

June 10, 2011, 1:47 pm

Tweed has snickered sophomorically in the past at such endowed chairs as “the Ikea professorship of life at home” and “the Pampered Chef endowed chair in family resiliency.”

Today we turn our attention to the slightly different but equally silly topic of academic and administrative titles. In rough financial times (see: now), titles inevitably get sillier because: A) “We’re not able to give you a raise this year, but we’re going to give you the title of …” and B) Downsizing forces job consolidation, and the employee who once managed one department now manages three or four.

Even in the halcyon days of 2005, Robert M. Kahn, writing in The Chronicle Review, found such conglomerated titles as “dean of natural and social sciences and professional studies” and “division chair for engineering-related technologies, health, mathematics, nursing, and sciences.” In addition to downsizing, Mr. Kahn identified three other causes of ridiculous titles: egotism (“assistant director of the underclass”), political correctness (“director of the inclusive elementary education program”), and adjectival impairment (“coordinator of student development in the student volunteer and community-service learning programs”).

We’ve never personally met any people with these titles, but we suspect they’d be the ones pushing their business cards around the conference hall in wheelbarrows.

This week we ran across a new title, one that seems incongruous in these lean times: “director of faculty opinion promotion.” While plenty of faculty members could use help publicizing their expertise, few have difficulty expressing their opinions.

Have you run across a confusing, ironic, or elaborate job title lately in academe? If so, please share it in the comments. —Don Troop

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  • jbarman

    At an institution where I worked twenty years ago, a deserving individual was promoted to the VP level; however, no agreement could be reached regarding his new title.

    After a week of negotiations regarding the title, someone finally taped a sign to his new office: “Vice President in Charge of Sitting by the Door”.

  • http://www.jkcohen.com/ Jonathan Cohen

    I always liked Harvard’s Walter M. Cabot Chair of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, formerly held by Stanley Cavell.

  • rwbuck

    Gary Spiecker, Director of Faculty Opinion Promotion, University of Southern California, formerly Deputy Opinion Editor, Los Angeles Times….would you like to add a comment?

  • 11289932

    One of my bosses with a real sense of humor about her own august title–Vice President for Academic Affairs– commented, “A job that begins with vice and ends with affairs can’t be all bad.”

  • mnprof

    At first I thought you meant the title was “Walter M. Cabot Chair of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, formerly held by Stanley Cavell.” 

    Now, *that* would be a good title.

  • blue_state_academic

    A few years ago there was a position advertised in The Chronicle titled “Coordinator of Sexual Assault”

  • suzannewayne

    We have an associate dean of research, outreach, and technology, which by itself sounds like a victim of downsizing. It was even better when the person in the position (who happens to have a great sense of humor) referred to himself as the associate dean of ROT.

  • dennisgaudet

    I once saw a position advertised as “Director of Student Happiness”

  • mikealfano

    My favorite was a federal title: “Assistant to the Assistant Administrator for Administrative Assistance.”

  • mnprof

    Federal bureacrat titles?  That’s unfair.  It’s like allowing Professionals to compete in the Olympics.

  • drj50

    In at least one institution in which the provost’s direct reports were all deans, in addition to the deans of the various colleges there was one referred to (informally) as the “Dean for Everything Else.”

  • polstergeist

    At my university, the Education Department has an Institute for Evidence-Based Education.  I teach in the English Department (more technically, the subsidiary Department of First-Year Writing, which has gone from Composition to Rhetoric to FYW, and now Written English in the course of a decade or so).

    One of my colleagues suggested that our next department name should be the Department of Conjecture- and Innuendo-Based Education.  I’m in favor of that.

  • prillva

    If you want to throw around informal or unofficial titles, one of my dean colleagues was regularly referred to as “Dean of Miscellany.”  Because the college I headed up had lots of problems with flooding, my own informal title was Dean of Arts, Humanities, and Water.” 

    We also had a university committee to study committee workload differences.  The official title was “Committee on Committees.”

  • wisensale

    Committee on Committees – and I served on it twice!

  • gavin_moodie

    In the 1970s my then university’s faculty of arts added to its struggle to schedule classes to minimise clashes a fast expansion in size which made it difficult to find enough teaching rooms and so of course it formed a committee, which it called the time and space committee.

  • cwinton

    Dean of Freshman Orientation is the one that has always topped my list.

  • greensubmarine

    J. Robert Oppenheimer’s title in his capacity of scientific head of Los Alamos is my personal favorite: Coordinator of Rapid Rupture.

  • schwerdt

    I chaired a Committee on Committees. Seems to be a popular committee…….

  • copesan

    Any relation to the “evidence-based reality” cited by a Bush official a few years back?

  • copesan

    My own title, which I am NOT going to post here, drifts close to the titular shoals discussed here, but titles count in the academy.  When I got it, people started answering my emails and being polite to me as opposed to before, with a shorter, more succinct and even more accurate title, even though there had been no change in my job description…

  • 22185161

    At a former large, multi-facility academic medical center where I previously worked, we had a Wayfinding Committee. I always pictured committee members as having bulging pockets full of bread crumbs which they dropped behind them.

  • 7738373863

    I am particularly fond of the ubiquitous “dean of summer school.”  “Director” would be closer to the truth and need not impact pay grade.  But if one really wants to explore the messy inner recesses of muddled administrative thinking in academe, s/he should take a good look at the titles sported by associate/assistant provosts and deans.  At my institution, one interesting and revealing phenomenon is what happens when one searches for these light-sensitive creatures in the online directory.  They are almost never listed, nor are they found on the units’ web pages.  How about, within a college (at another university), a doctorally prepared but non-faculty “associate dean for student academic life”?  And s/he is only one among eleven associate deans in that college:  too much.

  • esgphd

    I used to be a dean for faculty affairs.  I had to keep explaining to people that the Offfice of Faculty Affairs was, despite the name, not really a dating service.

  • Brian Abel Ragen

    I would love to see a university where the titles reflected the real nature of the job. There would be no provost: instead, their would be a “president’s minder,” “president’s hatchetman,” “pesident’s flatterer,” or “president-in-waiting,” as the case required. And the faculty would give up all professorial pretentions and because simply “fireable teachers” and “malcontents.”

  • missoularedhead

    We often referred to the vice-chancellor and provost simply as ‘the money guy’.

  • 11223435

    I wouldn’t want anyone to jump to the conclusion that any of us might know anything about the porn industry–but how about “the president’s fluffer”?

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