Lecturer

Lecturer is the name given to university teachers in most of the English-speaking world (but not at most universities in the US or Canada) who do not hold a professorship.

United States

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 are "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. The position is generally regarded as less prestigious than a professorship. 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 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 shamelessly exploited due to lacking the same job security and prestige of full professors.

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