Guide to Professorspeak
This page is part of my advice pages.
Read This First
I wrote this guide as a glossary of terms used by a certain segment of faculty at US universities: those who are research-intensive, tenure-line professors in STEM disciplines. It explains a mix of basic and advanced terms, though it's not comprehensive. This guide may interest (1) new faculty, (2) students who overhear these terms and are curious about what's going on, and (3) people outside academia who are perennially mystified when talking to faculty about their work.
Research administration and finance are overrepresented in this guide because the jargon for these topics is cryptic, and they are significant topics for faculty. (Sympathy for the new professor whose relatives mistakenly assume they have a side gig as a private investigator, or the new professor who attends an introductory presentation about grants that doesn't explain indirect costs.) This guide also might be biased toward including terms that I found puzzling or particularly interesting when I began working as a professor. Finally, remember that my discipline is computer and information science, and terminology may vary in other disciplines.
New faculty also may wish to read Inglorious Proposals, about getting research funding from NSF. Aspiring faculty may benefit from my guide to getting a tenure-track job.
This information in this guide is unofficial, and any errors are mine.
I've added pictures to break up the text. All of them are mine.
The Glossary
AAU: Association of American Universities. An invitation-only organization of US and Canadian universities, both public and private, with strong research missions. Membership is considered prestigious, but note that many universities with strong research missions aren't part of AAU. See also R1.
AAUP: American Association of University Professors. Unrelated to AAU, an organization of professors and other academics, with chapters at many US universities. AAUP advocates for academic freedom and shared governance. At some universities AAUP facilitates a labor union or advocates for unionization.
academic unit: An academic subdivision in a university: a department, school, or college.
base salary: The salary amount that a faculty member is guaranteed every year, regardless of additional sources such as grants or overload teaching. Base salary is often compensation for nine months' work in a year, though (confusingly) it is paid out over twelve months. See also summer salary.
bibliometrics: Quantitative measures of scholarly productivity, which often focus on citations counts for papers and publishing venues. Bibliometrics can play a role in promotion and tenure decisions, but they (the metrics) are also criticized for many reasons. H-index (for individual researchers) and impact factor (for publishing venues) are two common bibliometrics.
buy-out: When a professor uses grant money to pay their academic unit for an exemption from teaching a course. There are caveats: some funding sources don't permit buy-outs, and the department head or dean has to approve.
C&P: Current and Pending funding. Part of a grant proposal, a document that lists research funding that a professor currently has and other funding they've applied for.
camera-ready: For a manuscript, ready to be published. The term has historic roots from a time when conferences and journals printed physical copies of their proceedings.
capital budget: In university planning, funds for large-scale physical improvements, such as construction of new buildings or renovation of old ones. In research finance, the term may apply to funds for especially expensive equipment.
CAREER Award: A prestigious NSF grant from its Faculty Early Career Development ("CAREER") program, which pre-tenure faculty in NSF-funded disciplines are encouraged to apply for.
CFP: Depending on context, either Call For Papers (a document that explains how to submit a manuscript to a conference, journal, or other venue) or Call For Proposals (a document that explains how to submit a grant proposal to a funding program).
cluster hire: A faculty member who belongs to a coordinated group of faculty hires across the university, as part of a strategic effort to boost expertise in a particular area of research. Cluster hires are typically expected to spend part of their time working with the cluster on projects.
COA: Collaborators and Other Affiliations. Part of a grant proposal, a document listing a professor's collaborators and any affiliations they hold. This information is used to avoid selecting proposal reviewers who would have a conflict of interest with the success of the proposal.
COI: Conflict Of Interest: A situation where a faculty member could improperly receive personal benefits from things they do in an official capacity. Universities have formal mechanisms for faculty to officially disclose these situations and avoid them.
cost sharing: When an external grant requires the university to cover part of the expenses of a project. Cost sharing is often represented as a percentage of a proposal budget (e.g., a funding program requires a 50% cost share from the university).
courtesy appointment, courtesy affiliation: An affiliation with an academic unit that comes with limited responsibilities, granted for mutual benefit. For example, a professor may receive a courtesy appointment with a department to collaborate more easily with its faculty or to be able to advise its graduate students. In exchange, the department can count the faculty member's expertise in its profile.
CPT: Curricular Practical Training: a program that allows international students to work at internships related to their studies before they graduate. Universities' international student offices manage the details of CPT, but faculty must approve it for their graduate advisees. Also see OPT.
DCL: Dear Colleague Letter: a letter issued by NSF to draw attention to something. DCLs address a variety of topics including new funding opportunities, changes in existing opportuinties, updated policies, or invitations to provide feedback. A DCL is different from a solicitation, although a DCL may clarify or bring attention to a solicitation.
de novo: Latin for "anew"; often refers to preparing a course "from scratch", with little or no prior materials. De novo preps are more time-consuming than preps when the instructor has materials from a prior run of the course.
department chair, department head: Two different kinds of leadership positions for an academic department. A chair is elected by the faculty in the department, and a head is appointed by the administration. A department has one or the other, but not both.
direct costs: Costs in the budget of a proposal that are specifically for the activities in the proposal. Contrast with indirect costs.
discretionary funds: Money that comes with relatively few restrictions on how it is spent: for example, it can be used to pay students, to support professional travel, or to buy equipment. These expenses can be for an existing project or a new one. RIF/RIA is an common source of discretionary funds.
Division I, Division II, Division III: Categories of universities that are members of the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association). Division I universities allocate the most resources to athletics (e.g., money and facilities) and Division III universities allocate the least.
downselect: For some grant competitions, a university's internal process to select a subset of applications to forward to an external competition for funding. See also limited submission.
endowed chair: A professorship that provides extra salary or extra research funds, as bestowed by a donor to the university.
extension: Most often used as expected (e.g., a deadline extension), but occasionally shorthand for agricultural extension: farming-related education and services that a land-grant university provides to the general public.
external: Used throughout this guide to describe a source of money outside a university. It could be a government, a nonprofit group, a company, or another organization.
facilities and administration ("F&A"): See indirect costs.
festschrift: (pronounce as FES-shrift) A collection of papers published as a book to honor a senior professor's work.
graduate faculty: Faculty who are permitted to serve as advisors for graduate students' theses. Tenure-track faculty almost always receive graduate faculty status, while faculty in other roles are less certain to have it. Having the terminal degree in one's field (typically a PhD) is a requirement.
hard money: Salary that the university guarantees regardless of the faculty member's success with grants, contracts, consulting, or other sources of money. Tenure-track faculty positions are typically considered hard money positions, meaning employment isn't contingent on raising one's salary through these sources. Contrast with soft money.
HBCUs: Historically Black Colleges and Universities: Colleges and universities with a historic (and often continuing) focus on serving African-Americans. Wikipedia has a list of HBCUs.
indirect costs or indirects: Part of the budget of a proposal devoted to supporting the university's ability to host scholarly activities (e.g., research), but not attached to the specific activities described in the proposal. Often indirect costs are required to be a certain percentage of an external proposal's budget, specified as a single line item without details. Also known as "F&A" or "overhead". Contrast with direct costs.
IRB: Institutional Review Board, a university office that provides ethical oversight for research activities that involve human subjects or animal subjects. Faculty or students who want to perform experiments on human subjects or animal subjects must seek IRB approval first. Informally, people sometimes say "an IRB" to refer to an application sent to IRB for an experiment protocol, or the permission from IRB to perform an experiment.
lab: The group of researchers and research support personnel that a faculty member (or multiple faculty members working together) supervises; alternatively, the space in the building where they work. Personnel may include graduate and undergraduate researchers, postdocs, lab managers, technicians, and others. Some faculty members use the term "lab" for their group, and some don't. The term "lab" typically isn't regulated by the university, which means a faculty member can create a lab simply by naming it and referring to it. Creating an "institute" or "center" often requires permission from the university and a large funding source, though.
land-grant university: A university designated by its state to receive public benefits from the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890. Historically, the designation once meant focusing on agricultural and technical education, but modern land-grant universities often have a full array of educational programs that cover the liberal arts, sciences, and engineering. The term retains connotations of providing extension services and, more broadly, serving the public good.
liberal education: a style of education with an emphasis on breadth of knowledge, especially including the arts and humanities. "General education" requirements represent a basic liberal education. Note that "liberal" here is unrelated to political uses of the term.
limited submission: A competition for an external grant that limits the number of submissions it considers from each university. A university may have to run an internal competition (a downselect) to select among its possible submissions.
NDA: Non-Disclosure Agreement: A contract for parties to agree that certain information they will exchange will not be shared with anyone else. Companies sometimes ask a professor to sign an NDA prior to a collaboration. Often the university must evaluate the NDA before the professor signs.
no-cost extension: When a funding source gives a grant recipient more time than they originally requested to spend the money in the grant.
normal school: An institution designed to train teachers. Normal schools no longer exist as such in the US, but the term appears in descriptions of universities' histories. Some US universities began as normal schools in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Office of Research and/or Office of Sponsored Programs: An office that helps faculty apply for external funding. The office prepares budgets, checks proposals for compliance with rules, finds funding opportunities, and performs other related activities. Often an academic unit and the university's central administration have their own separate offices for these tasks, with different responsibilities.
OPT: Optional Practical Training: Similar to CPT, but the internship can happen either before the student graduates or within a certain time limit after graduation.
overhead: See indirect costs.
prep: Time needed to prepare to teach a class; when plural, the number of courses a faculty member must regularly prepare to teach.
prime: Some multi-university grants are structured so that one university first receives all the money and then passes along some of it to the other participating universities; that one university is called prime for the grant.
principal investigator (PI), lead PI, co-PI: Terms for official leadership roles on grants. (They're technically different, but "PI" generically covers all of them.) These terms indicate that the funding source recognizes a faculty member as a leader of a funded project and responsible for its activities. A grant may have one PI or several in a hierarchy.
program officer, program manager, program director: Terms for people at funding agencies who have roles in deciding which grants get funded and following up with PIs about the status of their projects.
proposal: A formal request for money or resources to support scholarly activities, led by one or more faculty members designated as PIs. Proposals can be internal (i.e., to funding sources inside of the university) or external (to funding sources outside the university). Proposals typically contain a plan for work, a budget, and other documents; together they may amount to fewer than ten pages or as many as a few hundred pages. The Office of Research provides essential services for PIs preparing proposals.
P&T or PT: Promotion and Tenure: committees and procedures for two important aspects of tenure-track faculty advancement. Promotion is the progression from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor, and later from Associate Professor to Full Professor. Tenure is the special form of job security that successful tenure-track faculty receive. At most universities, tenure and promotion to Associate Professor are expected to coincide, but there are exceptions. See also RPT.
R1: A designation for universities that have the highest level of research activity, according to the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. Contrast with R2 universities, which have some research but not as much as R1s. Wikipedia has lists of both. The Carnegie Classification has several other designations for universities; R1 and R2 are merely the most research-focused designations.
regional college, regional university: Flexible terms for colleges and universities that don't have the strong liberal arts focus of SLACs or the strong research focus of R1s. These universities might not be well-known nationally, but they are valuable for serving the needs of their respective regions.
RFP: Request for Proposals: see solicitation.
RIF (Research Incentive Fund) or RIA (Research Incentive Account): At many universities, a small fraction of a grant's indirect costs aren't consumed by the university, and instead they are routed to the PI's control in a special fund with a name like this. The money becomes discretionary funds, with relatively few restrictions on how it is spent.
RPT: Reappointment, Promotion, and Tenure: PT plus reappointment. At some universities the tenure-track faculty have RPT, at some it's just PT, and at a few others completely different terms are used. RPT universities structure pre-tenure faculty employment as a series of 1-3 year job contracts, and reappointment is the decision whether a pre-tenure faculty member receives the next contract. The expectations leading to reappointment are more forgiving than they are for tenure.
sabbatical: A paid break from teaching and other obligations, granted to a faculty member after reaching tenure and then periodically again every several years. A sabbatical allows the professor to focus on scholarly activities that they typically don't have time for.
seed grant: A grant intended to jump-start scholarly activities (such as research) that will lead to a larger grant proposal. Universities sometimes use internal seed grants to help faculty generate preliminary research results to use toward external grants.
service: A faculty member's activities to support their university, academic unit, scholarly community, or discipline in general. Service activities are distinct from teaching or research, and the three form the standard triad of responsibilities for tenure-track faculty.
service teaching: A flexible term for teaching assignments that reflect the academic unit's needs more than they reflect a faculty member's expertise. Intro-level classes and general education classes are typical examples.
shared governance: Processes that allow faculty, staff, administrators, and sometimes others (e.g., students) to share decision-making for the university.
small liberal arts college (SLAC): A small university where liberal education is a priority. "Small" here is relative and poorly defined: SLACs vary in size from fewer than a hundred students to several thousand students. SLACs have a reputation for personalized attention to students' interests and high-quality teaching. R1s are often contrasted with SLACs. Personalized attention and high quality teaching exist at R1s too, but students often must be more proactive to obtain them.
soft money: Salary that depends upon the faculty member's success with grants, contracts, consulting, or other sources of money, rather than a guarantee from the university. Research-track faculty and postdocs often depend on soft money to stay employed. Contrast with hard money.
solicitation: a formal document from a funding source that explains how to prepare and submit a proposal for a funding opportunity.
sponsored research: Research conducted using funds from an external source. Sponsorship may come from a government agency (e.g., the NSF or NIH), a company (e.g., Google), or another entity (e.g., the Sloan Foundation).
startup: A fund that a starting faculty member receives from the university to begin their research. During their first few years, they are expected to transition from startup-funded research to externally-sponsored research. (Note that faculty sometimes launch startup companies, too. Those are different.)
subaward: Typically, when a faculty member receives grant money from another university (i.e., not the one they work for), which in turn received the grant money from a funding agency. Also see prime.
submission window: A period of time when a funding agency accepts proposals. Faculty typically have to turn in their documents to their Office of Research a day or more before the window "closes", so they can perform final checks and submit the proposal on behalf of the PI.
summer salary: Money that faculty receive for performing scholarly activities over the summer. Often, faculty have nine months of salary guaranteed by the university, and they have the option of finding salary sources for the remaining three months. Grant money and teaching are common sources. See also base salary.
teaching load: The number of classes that a faculty member is required to teach per semester, quarter, or per academic year. Often an academic unit has a default teaching load for faculty, but some may receive reduced loads because of research activity, buy-outs, job offer negotiations, leadership positions, or other obligations. Alternatively, a faculty member might teach an extra course "on overload" for more salary.
teaching school: Often, a university where teaching is the dominant priority for tenure-track faculty. SLACs are examples of teaching schools. Contrast with R1s, where research is at least as important as teaching, and (as a historical term) normal schools, which trained people to become teachers.
tech transfer: The process of commercializing research products (e.g., findings, inventions, or datasets). Universities' tech transfer offices help faculty with this process, including (but not limited to) filing for patents. Faculty sometimes engage more directly in tech transfer by working for or starting companies.
Title IX ("Title 9"): A US law that prohibits sex-based discrimination. Title IX has a substantial impact on how universities deal with sexual harassment and how they allocate money to athletics programs.
training grant: Two different meanings: a grant to create or continue an educational program for many students or postdocs (an "institutional training grant"), or a grant that an individual applies for to support their postdoctoral work.
triage: When a proposal is returned from the prospective funding source without peer reviews. Triage is a signal to the submitter that the proposal requires radical changes to become competitive, or it should be scrapped altogether.
university system: Within a US state, a set of public universities that are grouped together by the state for administrative purposes, such as management or policies. A US state may have zero, one, or more university systems. Examples of university systems include Pennsylvania's Commonwealth System of Higher Education and the University of Texas System. Confusingly, a university system is different from a university with multiple campuses, such as Penn State.
