How does a 9-month position at a U.S. university actually work? In Canada, the assistant-professor jobs I have seen advertised are for 12 months, and I get conflicting explanations from Canadian professors about assistant professorships in the United States.
Am I correct in assuming that, in a 9-month position, you are expected to fund your salary over the summer months from your own research grants? Is your productivity evaluated as though you did research year-round? Does a 9-month gig become a 12-month position when you earn tenure?Any information on this would be much appreciated. I’m in the veterinary sciences.
It’s not just foreign candidates who are perplexed by this. The issue of 9-month versus 12-month faculty positions is a source of great confusion for many new American job seekers as well.
A word of warning before I proceed: I don’t have much experience working with job seekers in the field of veterinary sciences, so I urge you to confirm what I write here with tenured professors in your field at U.S. universities. Actually, the issue of grant funding in STEM fields — where grants cover a substantial portion of salary — complicates this issue so, for any readers in those fields, seeking expert advice is critical.
Many faculty contracts are written on a 9-month basis at U.S. institutions. That means you are paid a salary over the course of 9 months, and not paid for the 3 months of summer. The idea is that you are “not working” over the summer and therefore should not be paid. That’s obviously absurd for many academics employed at research universities and elite liberal-arts colleges that require substantial scholarly productivity for tenure. Teaching and service will take up a lot of your time during those nine months but won’t count much for tenure. Much of the research and writing necessary for tenure and job security will, by default, have to happen over the summer — when you are supposedly not working and not paid. In effect, in a typical 9-month academic contract, you are not paid for the work that is most highly valued and rewarded by the institution that employs you.
This is, incidentally, why it’s so maddening that the general public thinks academics have their summers “off.” While the 9-month contract might seem to suggest that, it is only because the pay schedule is painfully detached from the work faculty members actually have to do. So to answer your question explicitly: Yes, your productivity is evaluated as if you did research year-round. And no, 9-month contracts are not changed to 12-month contracts upon tenure. At some point, you may be able to ask that your salary be paid on a 12-month basis, but that is unrelated to your tenure status. Note: If you’re at a campus where the faculty are unionized, the 9-month versus 12-month payment schedule may be dictated by union agreements.
In any case, what do you do about summer income?
At many institutions, you can elect to take your salary on a 12-month basis. That doesn’t mean you get more money — it just means that your original salary will be disbursed over 12 months instead of 9. That’s a good option if you are bad with budgeting. However, it is not always available. If it isn’t, then indeed, the expectation is that you will budget wisely over the course of the year to have enough money available to sustain your household and research expenses over the summer months.
Of course resourceful faculty members can always seek out summer teaching, if that’s available. That is fine, although the rate of pay for summer teaching is usually lower than your annual salary rate, and may not extend across all of your uncompensated period. In addition, the choice to teach over the summer means that you have less time for the research and writing that may be essential to your tenure case.
Likewise, faculty members can also fund summers with grant money — either short-term “summer research funding,” (typical in the humanities and in the social-science world with which I’m most familiar) or long-term, multi-year research grants that maintain an ongoing project or lab year-round (common in STEM fields). STEM faculty can write summer salary into their grant applications. The question is: Will the summer-salary arrangement with your institution be 100 percent grant-funded, or some smaller percentage? In your field, you’ll want to carefully craft your grant applications to seek as much summer salary as you can.
New hires in any field can seek summer salary as part of their initial contract negotiation, as long as they are hired at an R1 or R2 university or at an elite liberal-arts college. Most lower ranked, resource-poor institutions do not provide this option. In STEM fields, summer salary is routinely offered as part of the startup package at major institutions. In the humanities and social sciences, it is something that must be requested as a separate line item in the negotiation — whether you receive it will depend on institutional budget and convention.
To be clear, summer salary is just that — salary to cover some part of the summer months for faculty on 9-month contracts. When you seek to negotiate summer salary, you ask for it in “ninths.” That is to say, you will seek “1/9” or “2/9” or — rarely — “3/9” summer salary, which means one, two, or three months’ worth of your annual salary.
Typically, you can ask for summer salary for one or two years (or at most, three). It isn’t a permanent part of your contract. Departments offer summer salary to help new faculty members ease into their new lives and responsibilities, and allow them to have research support over the first summer or two while they are still learning the ropes of grant-writing.
For the first year or two at an R1 university, you might be likely to negotiate 1/9 summer salary in the humanities and perhaps 2/9 in the social sciences. Note that these percentages are not full-time salary coverage for the entire summer. You will still have to budget to cover the gap, or arrange summer teaching. I have only ever seen 3/9 summer salary (i.e., full-time salary across the entire summer) offered in fields like engineering and other well-funded applied sciences.
One question that all new faculty must consider is how much service to provide the institution over the summer when you are not being paid. The principle at play is indeed that if you’re not paid, you are not “working,” and should not be expected to provide service. However, that principle is routinely ignored by institutions, who literally depend for their survival on the uncompensated extra labor provided by faculty members.
You will have to make very careful calculations about how firmly to decline requests. It is absolutely within your rights to expect to protect your private time, and your research time, over the unpaid months of summer. However, if your department has a culture of summer service, and you challenge that, it could be harmful for your standing among your colleagues and could harm your tenure case down the road. So move carefully and deliberately. Get advice from mentors about the norms and expectations in your new department, and look closely at your own impulses to codependency and “overgiving.” Say no as much as you can to requests for unpaid labor over the time that you are not paid. The university is not a charity, and you are not a volunteer.
