[SML] Clinical Professor

[Dave Tosti-Lane]

AAUP has a position paper on them here
http://www.aaup.org/report/professors-practice

I think they make good points - I have always worked in an institution (not
to be named) that does not have a tenure process, although in effect the
faculty here have until recently a sort of de-facto tenure once they had
completed at least one contract term and proven themselves in the classroom
and the studio/performance space/whatever. That notion was shattered to
pieces with the recent "restructure" of our Fine Art department that,
coincidentally of course, wound up reducing the number of core full time
faculty from 11 to 5, with many faculty who had been teaching here for
20-30 years "choosing" to accept exit packages. (Design department is next,
then the focus of the Eye of Sauron turns to the Performing Arts
departments, Frodo and Sam are already exhausted, and Gandalf has decided
to put down his staff for a comfortable retirement)

So, my sense of the motivation of upper level administrators is hardly
unbiased, but if the givens are that they intend to pay Professors of
Practice LESS than they pay Professors on the tenure track, which they
almost certainly do, then the reason for interest in them is pretty
obvious. Particularly if they build those positions to include all of the
responsibilities and expectations placed on tenured professors.
On the other hand, it's not impossible that the motivation for some of
these positions could be to get around the requirement for academic
credentials attached to tenure track positions - they initially sprang up
to allow recognizing professional practice and experience as equivalent to
academic degree accumulation.

I doubt that really helps, but it was nice to vent for a moment.

Dave Tosti-Lane

On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 6:49 AM, Richard John Archer via Stagecraft <
stagecraft at theatrical.net> wrote:

>
> Those of you out there in academia…….what do you think of the idea of
> Clinical Professor or Professor of the Practice and how it relates to
> theatre programs?
> Good?   Bad?  Indifferent?  Tenure avoidance?
> Cornell has some of these positions but mostly in the Vet and Medical
> schools.  They are now debating expanding these titles to other parts of
> the university.
>
> Ariz State has them, Duke has something similar….others?
>
>
> DickA
> TD, Cornell U
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