Lecturer - United States

United States

The term lecturer is used in various ways across different US institutions, sometimes causing confusion. On a generic level, however, the term broadly denotes one who teaches at a university but is not eligible for tenure and has no research obligations. At non-research schools the latter distinction is of course less meaningful, making the absence of tenure the main difference. Unlike the adjective "adjunct" (which can modify most academic titles, from professor to lecturer to instructor, etc.), the title of lecturer itself at most schools does not address the issue of full-time v. part-time status. Lecturers almost always have at least a masters degree and quite often a doctorate. Sometimes the title is used as an equivalent-alternative to instructor but schools that utilize both titles tend to provide relatively more advancement potential to their lecturers.

It is becoming increasingly common for major research universities to hire full-time lecturers, whose responsibilities are primarily undergraduate education, especially for introductory/survey courses that involve large groups of students. These tend to be the courses that tenure-track faculty do not prefer to teach, and are unnecessarily costly for them to do so (at their comparatively higher salary rates). When a lecturer is part-time, there is little practical distinction from an adjunct professor, since neither has the prestige of being on the tenure-track. For full-time lecturers, many institutions now incorporate the role quite formally with performance reviews, promotional tracks, administrative service responsibilities, and many faculty privileges (e.g. voting, use of resources, etc.).

One emerging alternative to the use of full-time lecturers at research-heavy institutions is to create a parallel professorship track that's focused on teaching, which may or may not offer tenure, with a title series such as teaching professor. This would be analogous to how some universities have research-only faculty tracks with title series' such as "Research Professor/Scientist/Scholar."

It should also be noted, however, that the title is sometimes, paradoxically, used in just the opposite sense: in some institutions, a lecturer especially "distinguished lecturer" may also refer to a position similar to emeritus professor. Also, in some schools it's a temporary post for visiting academics of considerable prominence—e.g. a famous writer may serve for a term or a year, for instance. When confusion arose about Barack Obama's status on the law faculty at the University of Chicago, the institution stated that although his title was "senior lecturer," that school actually uses that title for notable people such as federal judges and politicians who are deemed of high prestige but simply lack sufficient time to commit to a traditional tenure-track position.