Do teaching-only faculties get tenures? [closed]

Question

As far as I understand, there are two types of faculties in the universities/colleges:

1. Research + teaching faculties
2. Teaching-only faculties

Do teaching-only faculties get tenures (i.e. permanent employment) in the universities/colleges?

Answer 1

That depends on the university. There are colleges that focus primarily on undergraduate education in which the research "requirement" is very modest. It is more "keeping current" with your field than advancing it. In these places, yes, tenure is the norm.

Other, primarily research universities, such as Duke, Stanford, CMU, and some others have two types of faculty. The "normal" research faculty who do some teaching but likely mostly advanced and graduate courses. Some of those, such as the ones named have a separate classification, sometimes called "Professor of the Practice" in which their focus is on the undergraduate program. At some of these, at least, tenure is not available, but people work on long term contracts and have some of the protections of tenure but no guarantee of permanent employment. I know quite a few folks like this. Most have doctorates, most do "some" research, but it may be more pedagogical than strictly field related.

At Duke, for example, long term contracts substitute for tenure in some sense. I don't have specifics about the others.

It may be quite different outside the US, but here, most universities are able to set their own policies for such things. So tenure might be available or not.

Some of the people I know would create a huge gap if they were to leave their jobs for any reason. They are highly valued, provide a good undergraduate education, one of the stated goals of nearly every university, and free the research faculty from a lot of lower level tasks. Win-win mostly.

Note also, that the teaching faculty at such top universities do more than teach. They are in many ways responsible for the design of the undergraduate (especially the lower half) curriculum. There are the usual meetings and such as expected of other faculty. These positions have quite a lot of responsibility.

Answer 2

From a U.S. perspective, in math: there is no clear dichotomy between "teaching" and "research" faculty. Yes, there are some faculty with "professor of the practice" title, or, lower status, "lecturer", or "adjunct", and so on.

Also, unsurprisingly, at four-year colleges, inevitably "teaching/mentoring" is a bigger part of faculty roles.

At "research universities", at this moment in time, in many places the definitely-not-research roles are not tenured, but only have long-term contracts. I have not witnessed any of these arrangements "blow up", but I'd suspect that it would be not publicized, anyway.