Today is the day my University has slightly moved away from the traditional UK University job titles (as many other Universities in the UK have done). The academic ranks used to run Lecturer → Senior Lecturer → Reader → Professor. Now they have made the rather minor change to Lecturer → Senior Lecturer → Associate Professor → Professor.
This seems a slightly odd thing to do, as in the US, which rather dominates the world in higher education, the job title of Associate Professor is more like our Senior Lecturer, while our Reader roughly corresponds to the lower half of the US professor grade.
Well, the changes make little material difference to anything. Being a Reader (my grade) is a bit of a strange job title, as people not familiar with universities must wonder how someone's job can be to read stuff, and "associate professor" at least includes the recognised word "professor". Still... those already on the disappearing Reader grade were given the option to keep it for now (until promoted to professor). In the end, I decided I would keep the reader title that I've had for a while. I have around 20 years left to fail to get promoted, and I might just end up the University's only Reader in the mid 2040s since anyone newly promoted to the grade will have to take the new associate professor title.
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