Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Professor (highest academic rank)

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was redirect to Professor. ~Swarm~ ^{sting} 01:58, 28 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Professor (highest academic rank)

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Contains nothing which is not better dealt with in the main article Professor Rathfelder (talk) 21:53, 20 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. Rathfelder (talk) 21:53, 20 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Keep, but consider reorganizing academic rank articles. The article Professor no longer contains details about the various professor ranks. Ranks mean different things in different countries which posed a problem. There is a series of articles besides the one under consideration that provides information about professorial ranks. (There are some candidates for merger here, which could be done using a well-advertised merge discussion.)

We also have

Professors in the United States
Adjunct professors in North America
Professors in Canada (redirect)
Professors in the United Kingdom (redirect)
all the "Academic ranks in xxxx" articles in Category:Academic ranks

In October 2014 there was a merge discussion Talk:Professor#Merge which resulted in the splitting of the very large article into the various academic rank by country articles rather than merging the various professor ranks in. This was disputed again in October 2015 but upheld at Talk:Assistant professor#Proposed merge with Professor. StarryGrandma (talk) 00:31, 21 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Redirect to professor. This article was created by one of the participants in the discussion back in 2014 in a good-faith attempt to resolve the professor article situation, but never evolved beyond the current stub that now also mostly overlaps with the main professor article. Regarding the other articles on ranks below professor: As discussed several times, they shouldn't be merged with the professor article, because we need an article that is specifically about the full professor rank as it is understood in most countries, and articles on other ranks that are widely used around the world. Some years ago the professor article had evolved into a monstrosity of an article that attempted to cover all academic ranks in all countries. The scope of such an article is simply too broad and the length of the article was already exceeding Wikipedia:Article size recommendations by far, despite only covering a fraction of its declared scope and in a very haphazard way (some countries were covered, some were not, so if it had been developed further based on that model it could easily have become much longer). Wikipedia has hundreds if not thousands of minutely detailed articles on specific military ranks, and there has been no proposal to merge all those articles into a single article on military ranks (there are over 200 articles on the military ranks of just a single country, while the total number of articles on academic ranks in the entire world is below 50). In addition, in most of the English-speaking world and most of the world in general the unqualified word professor only refers to full professors and in virtually all countries other than the US, ranks below professor are never referred to as professors (at least not the unqualified word) and frequently have formal titles that doesn't even include the word professor, so "professor" isn't an appropriate title for an article that covers lecturers, senior lecturers and ranks at comparable (non-professor) level. The appropriate title for an article with such a scope would be academic ranks, but that article already exists as a list. The inflated US informal usage of the term "professor" is also primarily covered by a separate article, Professors in the United States, and while this US-specific usage should be mentioned in the main article, it shouldn't be the basis for the entire article when pretty much the rest of the world regards "professor" as synonymous with the specific rank sometimes known as "full professor" (for instance in the UK, just about 10% of the academics of a university are professors, and the situation is the same in many other European countries). --Bjerrebæk (talk) 09:42, 21 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Comments: I don't know, nor can figure out, what this article title is supposed to convey. It appears what is covered now could be used in Professor. Information is vague at best, as it seems to indicate that a professor is a professor (also full professor) ---is a professor. If I wanted to know information about a professor of the highest rank in the U.S. (covered in the article) what would I learn from reading "In United States and Canada the word professor is also used in the two lower ranking positions, assistant professor and associate professor.". The highest level terminal degrees would not be seem to be considered the "highest academic rank". A college professor with a "Masters degree" might be senior as well as tenured at that institution but that would not seem to convey the "highest academic rank".

In the U.S. a professor of the "highest academic rank" would be a senior tenured distinguished/endowed full professor and I would think certainly with a PhD correct? In some other parts of the world hierarchical rankings places the equivalent rank as associate professor (level D or senior principal research fellow and SC-level 4 in Western Australia. A level E (professor) and the equivalent rank of Level 8 (Senior Principal Research Scientist, Western Australia SC-level 5) appears to be lower than a Level 9 (Chief Research Scientist) and SC-level 6 chief, in Western Australia. It seems that in an attempt to "break down" all the academic "ranks", I suppose to create a less unwieldy article (monstrosity), splitting off is required but to do this just to create a title, that is not supported by sources, does not make sense.

My concerns are 1- Can this "modified title" be used to create an article of substance? I had opened 14 tabs that included six Wikipedia articles and my 12 year old grandson was watching over my shoulder. He offered that from what he saw it seems that the article was not needed so should be deleted or redirected. I asked him where he came up with the terms "redirect" and "deletion" and he stated "it is an option listed above" as an alternative to deletion. WOW! I just thought it amazing that I had an intelligent conversation like this with an seventh grader. I then had to explain that I was trying to decide "if" there was really a subject here. Otr500 (talk) 17:39, 25 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Any useful information is already in Professors in the United States.Rathfelder (talk) 08:34, 27 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect or delete: Per User:Bjerrebæk. The title might be useful on a search so can be redirected to professor that should explain a "full professor" which is actually the main subject just renamed. The "concept" of habilitation, used in some European countries is a post-doctoral qualifications for teaching, and not actually a higher academic ranking so I can see no advantage in keeping this subject as a stand alone article. Otr500 (talk) 12:06, 27 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.