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Bargaining a TT position into a part-time position with a doubled tenure clock?

In our new “how can we help you?” thread, a reader asks:

Someone recently told me they landed a TT job that they bargained to a full rank but part-time position (i.e., the job title remained ‘assistant professor’ but the job was only part-time hours, with double the tenure clock, half the pay, etc). How frequently would this kind of deal be seriously considered?

I have never heard of anything like this before, and would be stunned if it’s something that a university or department would consider without truly exceptional circumstances.

Have any readers ever heard of this before? Any insights to share?

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5 responses to “Bargaining a TT position into a part-time position with a doubled tenure clock?”

  1. Anonymous

    This is a very unusual request, particularly for a junior hire… I think the chances of it being granted are almost nil, even in cases where the candidate has very good reasons for asking. If the request were related to illness, disability, or caregiving, we would do our best to offer supportive and reasonable accommodations, ideally without halving their salary, but I think the best that we could do would fall short of the ask.

    The big thing for us (large-but-not-flagship state school) would be that we just don’t get a lot of TT lines. They are very precious. It would be unlikely our Dean would allocate to our department the value of the remaining half-a-line left on the table here… or if they did, it wouldn’t be in a way that was very satisfying to us. Outside of tippy-top departments with lots of faculty and even more money, I think this would be an extremely hard sell.

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  2. Daniel

    For a while my university offered the possibility of half-time appointments to new hires, with the arrangement being that you would teach one semester each year. (The tenure clock was not doubled, though.) We don’t routinely offer this anymore and I suspect if someone wanted it they wouldn’t be able to get it, but if you asked for it it wouldn’t be, like, dismissed out of hand as obviously impossible and ridiculous (except maybe the doubled tenure clock). There would be no harm in asking. I have the impression that this is unusual, though, and at most places if you asked about this they would look at you like you had requested to teach your courses underwater in a submarine. That’s just my guess, though.

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  3. Anonymous

    Marcus’ reaction and the two comments posted so far seem very US-focused to me (perhaps reasonably so, given the mention of “tenure track” in the question). In many European countries this would not be a particularly unusual request, and in at least some of them there are relevant laws to the effect that an employer can only refuse such a request if they have a good reason to do so (typical philosophy jobs in typical academic departments would be unlikely to be structured in such a way that such a good reason would exist, i.e., the request for part-time would have to be granted for legal reasons).

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    1. Daniel

      For what it’s worth, my university is in India, not the US. But it is a US-style university (I’m not sure if any other universities in India even have tenure, for instance).

      Reply
  4. AGT

    Italian professors have a default right to choose whether they work part-time or full-time. (But financially it is discouraged, i.e., you would be paid less than what corresponds to your amount of work relative to full-time occupation).

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