Silly Academic Titles
The Chronicle of Higher Education contains a piece entitled
Assistant Directors of the Underclass, Unite! [subscription required] by Robert M. Kahn,
about the silly titles that have been cropping up in academia.
As he suggests, some of them are due to downsizing resulting in the combination of what
were formerly separate administrative units:
Division Chair for Engineering-Related Technologies, Health, Mathematics, Nursing, and Sciences
Some seem to be the titular equivalents of vanity license plates, intended to
make the holder feel unique:
Assistant Professor of Nonformal Educational Processes
And some result from political correctness:
Gender Faculty Specialist
Director of Social Equity
But I have to disagree with Kahn's assessment of some of the titles that he
lists under the heading Products of Adjectival Impairment:
- Coordinator of Organized Research
-
Organized Research is probably
what is more usually called Sponsored Research, but is perhaps more
accurate, including group research projects that receive no external funding.
- Director of the Office of Academic Student Instructional Support
- Academic Student Instructional Support is very likely support for
academic students as opposed to vocational students. It needs to be qualified
as instructional support to contrast it with, say, financial assistance
or psychological counselling
- Coordinator of Liberal/General/Interdisciplinary Studies
- liberal, general and
interdisciplinary are not synonyms. In many institutions, liberal studies
would be a some sort of liberal arts program, while general studies usually
indicates a smattering with no focus at all. interdisciplinary studies
might deal with individually designed interdisciplinary degrees, though
in at least one case that I know of it is basically a euphemism for
"postmodern stuff". I suspect that this person's job is to oversee all of the
various degrees that are not traditional departmental degrees. The double-disjunction
is a bit awkward, but it isn't as awkward as Coordinator of Degrees That Are Not
Traditional Departmental Degrees, and it doesn't sound as funky as
Coordinator of Non-Traditional Degrees, which sounds suspiciously like
it involves a lot of meditation and ingestion of controlled substances and things like that.
What Kahn doesn't mention is that you need to watch out for the acronyms that result.
A friend of mine back in British Columbia has just become the Coordinator of
what in Canada is usually known as something like First Nations Educational Support
Services at the University College of the Cariboo. First Nations is a
Canadian cover term for Indians and Inuit and Métis, but at UCC they
have decided to use Aboriginal instead of First Nations. They've
also decided that it isn't necessary to specify that the support services
are educational. The resulting unit is therefore Aboriginal Support Services,
which means that my friend is now the Coordinator of ASS.
Posted by Bill Poser at June 1, 2004 11:46 PM