great insight. I know about the politics and the begging for funds part in academia but I didn't know about the problematic underlings in the lab. I always thought they are more like grad students who do not need babysitting but I am dead wrong.
What's about those pharmacy professors with one or two years of residency who teach like one or two modules/courses? Is teaching their main thing or they have the same obligations as a PhD?I don't believe they get paid much and it is more like a prestige thing? I don't see them hanging around for long.
No, adjunct or practice faculty do not have the same rights as tenure-track/tenured faculty. About adjunct (part-time) practice faculty in general, there's two or three types of professors who fit that definition (in order of preference):
1. Occupational hobbyist (Academia is a hobby): Genuine practitioners who do a couple of classes out of sense of mission or playfulness and know that it's a nice career enrichment activity, but not their mainline source of income (it sometimes is a decent supplement but not usually). This is almost always the good kind, the sort of person who brings a reality check to your ivory tower, but always gets back to the real world. Happens with good teaching hospital relationships and can even happen with CVS and Walgreens when they send practice faculty over (if they draw from their actual ranks and not their boosted monkey jobs). If you sit on the faculty relations committee, you are looking for someone where teaching is an end of itself for the candidate. (Privately, you also hope but not officially try to select someone who is married, because a story as old as time in the business is a "volunteer" practitioner shopping for a spouse among the students and resigns when the mission is accomplished.)
2. Disenfranchised nomadic dilettante (Academia is a denied Arcadia): One rank up from the eternal postdoc, it's a faculty member that brings in no money, does not do any service, and is not considered critical for any teaching job. They have to cobble together a bunch of adjunct positions to keep afloat. Inevitably, they burn out, get jaded, and basically put themselves in mediocre territory, bad enough that you don't want to keep them, good enough that you're not willing to active look for someone else.
3. Occupational escapist (Academia is a psychic prison): Could be from 1 or 2 as well, but for whatever character defect is present: ego, introspection, womanizing (this is becoming a thing of the past with enforced sexual harassment rules) or external motivations (seven sins), both drives the person to teach but is inevitably a slave to their defects and the classes suffer for it. Tenure-track spouses on support and out-of-process hires (like from industry) tend to be this sort. Rarely, you'll get a company like Walgreens who volunteers one of their management pharmacists as faculty, where they actually have other missions as well. We literally got a faculty member once when they closed part of the Groton Pfizer facility with a massive grant (>6M a year for 8 years) with instructions to keep him occupied and not let him work for a competitor for that amount of time. The Dean though we scored a coup, but cooler heads thought to themselves, "why the hell would Pfizer not just pay the guy to stay in an office rather than go through this overly complicated route." Among other things, turns out that he was an HR problem magnet, and we had to go so far as refuse the money after three years, because the guy was such a problem.
