Lecturer
[1] In India, one can appear for interviews for a post of a lecturer after passing the combility Test conducted by the University Grants Commission.
A permanent lecturer in UK universities usually holds an open-ended position that covers teaching, research, and administrative responsibilities.
Permanent lectureships are tenure-track or tenured positions that are equivalent to an assistant or associate professorship in North America.
In North American terms, a fixed-term lecturer can hold an equivalent rank to non tenure-track (visiting) assistant professor.
Like adjunct professors and sessional lecturers in North America, these non-permanent teaching staff are often very poorly paid (as little as £6000 p.a.
Data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency show that in 2013–14, 36% of full- and part-time academic staff were on fixed-term contracts, down from 45% a decade earlier.
The most noted use of this policy happened in 2012 at Queen Mary University of London where lecturers on permanent contracts were fired.
This policy is complicated by the 2008 Ball v Aberdeen tribunal decision, the distinction between teaching and research faculty is blurring—with implications for who can and cannot be made redundant at UK universities, and under what conditions.
On a generic level, the term broadly denotes college-level faculty who are not eligible for tenure and have no research obligations.
At non-research colleges, the latter distinction is less meaningful, making the absence of tenure the main difference between lecturers and other academic faculty.
(For example, at Columbia University in New York, the title of lecturer actually requires a doctorate or its professional equivalent; they also use the term for "instructors in specialized programs.
[15] Major research universities are more frequently hiring full-time lecturers, whose responsibilities tend to focus primarily in undergraduate education, especially for introductory/survey courses.
[16] When a lecturer is part-time, there is little practical distinction in the position from an adjunct professor/instructor/etc., since all non-tenure-track faculty by definition are not on the tenure track.
However, for full-time lecturers (or those regularly salaried above some stated level, such as half-time[17]), many institutions now incorporate the role quite formally—managing it with performance reviews, promotional tracks, administrative service responsibilities, and many faculty privileges (e.g. voting, use of resources, etc.).
[14] An emerging alternative to using full-time lecturers at research institutions is to create a parallel professorship track that is focused on teaching.
When confusion arose about President Barack Obama's status on the faculty at the University of Chicago Law School, the institution stated that although his title was "senior lecturer", the university considered him to be a "professor" and further noted that it uses that title for notable people, such as federal judges and politicians, who are deemed of high prestige but lack the time to commit to a traditional tenure-track position.
In France, the title maître de conférences ("lecture master") is a permanent position that covers research and teaching (and usually administrative responsibilities).
[20] In German-speaking countries, the term lektor historically denoted a teaching position below a professor, primarily responsible for delivering and organizing lectures.
Nowadays, the German term lektor exists only in philology or modern-language departments at German-speaking universities for positions that primarily involve teaching a foreign language.
The equivalent rank within the German university system is something like Juniorprofessor, Dozent, Hochschuldozent, Juniordozent, Akademischer Rat or -Oberrat, Lehrkraft für besondere Aufgaben, and the like.
[21][22][23] In Poland, the related term wykładowca, is used for a teaching-only position, and as profession, academic teacher (nauczyciel akademicki), also with doctoral degrees or title of professor.
In Russia, a lektor is not an academic rank or a position name, but simply a description of an educator who delivers a set of lectures on a specific course.
In Sweden and Denmark, a lektor or universitetslektor is an academic rank similar to that of senior lecturer in Great Britain and associate professor in USA.
