Lack of full profs in a dept.

[nopromo]

I have an interview in department with a substantial number of faculty and I noticed on their website that not a single one (including senior faculty) is a full professor. Obviously, there are many personal reasons why someone might not pursue promotion to full professor--having priorities at home, being satisfied with life and salary as an associate professor, etc. But I can't help but wonder whether this could possibly reflect some institutional or departmental structures or policies that should be of concern or that I may want to try to get more information about. Lack of a salary difference between associate and full professor to provide incentive? Lack of department support in the promotion process? Anyone have any thoughts?

[amb]

Interesting question. It seems to me that lack of sufficient financial incentive would not be a great explanation, because it is partly a professional issue, a signal to people elsewhere how you rank so hopefully people would pursue the final promotion stage that exists in this career path independent of salary. Accordingly, this could suggest a lack of ambition among colleagues. Alternatively, there could be something structural at hand, as you suggest: for some reason people are not being brought up for promotion at that stage (the reason could be departmental or based on something at a broader level at the school). Is information about people's dissertation defense years available? Can you tell if this is simply a case of a relatively young department that may have had some few recent retirements? If that's not the case then this may be a cause for concern. That said, it is *not* something I would bring up at the interview phase. If you get an offer and have it in hand then you could bring it up in conversation. But you don't want this type of curiosity to count against you at the initial stages.