Category talk:Faculty by university or college in the United States

Untitled
What are the criteria for applying this category? Current? Former? Prominently associated with that faculty? Do visiting scholars and associate faculty who didn't get tenure apply? What about adjuncts who are prominent for their private practice/work & happen to adjunct at this or that university? I bring this up because I was looking at the entry for Karl Llewellyn, who out of 6 substantive categories, had 4 that reflected affiliations with various schools. 2 faculty; 2 degrees; 2 birth/death. I added the generic american academics category & it should probably be more substantive, like american legal academics. But there were no substantive categories that tied him to academia or field of study or accomplishments. Just affililation categories. Such lists could go on ad infinitum for academics with long or well-travelled careers. So, I would propose that there be some sort of criteria established about when an affiliation is notable enough to be included as a category, and when an affiliation is itself not-notable. (Or maybe there are, and we should link to them at the top of this page.) --LQ 19:46, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Should we split the category by state
This has been done with the alumni by college or university, but there are lots of schools with alumni categories but not faculty. California has been broken off, so should we just break off states piece meal, or disperse every state at once?Johnpacklambert (talk) 00:07, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Rules for inclusion
What is clear is that current and former faculty both apply. The person does not need to be prominently associated with the institution. For example, John Quincy Adams is in the category Harvard University faculty, even though that is not considered one of his largest contributions. Harvard though has a huge number of people who might with other institutions count as faculty in the category "Harvard University staff" because faculty has a clear definition at Harvard. I have created staff categories for a few other large and prominent institutions in the United States, but there are still ambiguities.Johnpacklambert (talk) 00:31, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Are adjunct professors faculty? Should we count visiting professorships, on one hand with some being prominent named positions (like the one Borges held at Harvard) while some are very short. What about non-tenure track positions? Since under current conditions many professors start out in such positions, do we recognized they spent a year teaching at Oregon State before spending 30 at Wayne State, or whatever? I would say if the were there a year and teaching more than one class a semester, or there in a well respected visiting professorship count them, and if you do not know for sure, put them in also. If they only taught in a summer course at a given university, I am not as sure. Even more intriguing though is, what if they were a non-teaching employee? Some places coaches have been made a sub-set of faculty, and there are researchers, some of whom have tenured positions, and anyway is it research or teaching that makes one faculty? Librarians, especially head librarians, Museum curators (at least major museums and the people who actually build the collections, docens or one semester aids are another story) and people with administration positions are another story. This is why I like the staff category, because a universities general counsel, especially if he is later a federal judge (see Thomas B. Griffith as an example) clearly is a major employee of the university, effecting it in more profound ways than most faculty, but is he a faculty member? Later I learned that Giffith did actually teach at BYU's law school, but that was seperate from his position as General Counsel.Johnpacklambert (talk) 00:31, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

However the staff issue may not be a solution. If we see coaches as part of staff, we might be able to make it have four sub-categories in many cases, and if a university has enough notable people connected with it, there might be ten listings (outside of Harvard, with its over 300) and it might not drive the faculty category to small. However, what about schools were a total scouring of every referece to them in wikipedia still gives us under 20 faculty? Should we include the presidents of that school in "faculty" and then in the general universities and colleges presidents category? What about a person who is notable but in their work with the school was the development director? Or the head of the university police department?Johnpacklambert (talk) 00:31, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Part of the ambiguity comes from changes over time in position names and titles and descriptions. There are even more confusing issues. Several current colleges and universities, well at least a few, began their lives as high schools or acdemies or essentially the high school rank. So people who were full faculty at that point were not of the same type as the modern university faculty. However, even though they taught at a substantially different institution, at least in some cases it was clearly the same institution we have today, others the institutional continuity may be more difficult to demonstate, but it tells us that really we need to seek to include not exclude. My general conclusion is that where large enough we should go to having a faculty, a staff and an alumni category for a university. The staff can pick up the cases of people who are in positions that are not clearly faculty, when there is large numbers of faculty listed. What to do in cases of small numbers of faculty, whether to include Dean of students who only held that position there are became notable for some other reason, and general counsles I am unsure. What to do about coaches, how bestto link them into a system of universty related categories is another issue that I am unsure of. One thought on that is that prior to 1920 or so many of the college sports coaches were also instructors at the institutions, but since that time (or maybe more recently, I just threw that year out, I have no researched enough to say how accurate it is) the college coaches have tended to be people who only do that, and in some cases they move on to coaching pro-sports, or bounce between the pros and college sports.Johnpacklambert (talk) 00:31, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Should adjunct professors be added to this category?
Just wondering if adjunct professors are considered faculty? XOttawahitech (talk) 20:48, 1 August 2013 (UTC)