Faculty & Staff--General Information

Instructors in the University of Wisconsin System are called "faculty" if they are eligible for tenure or have already obtained tenure--that is, they are eligible for or hold positions of indefinite length--and "instructional academic staff" (IAS) if they are short-term, often part-time teachers (known also as "ad hocs," "adjunct faculty" or "temps").  Instructors in both categories are ranked according to their graduate degrees, years of experience and other accomplishments.  Faculty ranks are: assistant professor, associate professor with tenure, and professor with tenure.  IAS ranks are associate lecturer, lecturer, and senior lecturer.  While faculty members are at the heart of the department and provide stability over time, IAS are essential to maintaining the full curriculum since they make it possible to add extra classes to meet demand and to fill in when a faculty member has recently retired, is on leave, etc.  Faculty members are expected to be competent in four areas of evaluation--teaching, professional development, university service, and community service--while IAS are hired only to teach (though some voluntarily do much more than that).

The current faculty in the Anthro/Soc Department consists of 20 professors, all of whom have a Ph.D. either in anthropology or sociology.  Two of the professors have two Ph.D.'s each.  The Ph.D. degrees come from 14 different universities.  About one third of the professors have their Ph.D. either from UW--Madison or UW--Milwaukee, the two doctorate-granting institutions of the UW System.  Faculty members in the department are appointed following nationwide and even international searches.  The faculty is currently evenly split between women and men.  Three faculty members are foreign-born--from Egypt, China and Germany--while another is American Indian (Stockbridge-Munsee).  Because only one department member is employed on some of the smaller campuses, a few of our faculty members teach both in Anthropology and Sociology.  In order to do this, they must hold the Ph.D. in one discipline and have significant graduate studies in the other.    

The number of instructional academic staff varies from semester to semester.  For spring semester, 2004, there are 9 lecturers.  In part this is due to two faculty members being on sabbatical this semester and in part the IAS are filling in for faculty members who have some release time from teaching for one reason or another.  All of the IAS have at least a Master's degree in Anthropology or Sociology.  Most of them are close to finishing the Ph.D. and three of them have the Ph.D.  As is true with the faculty, IAS vary considerably in years of teaching experience.