As a professor isn't your chair funded and guaranteed? What are you stressing about? Retaining the chair?
The biggest worry for most professors I talk to in grant-funded fields (which is most of the natural sciences and engineering) is not getting grant funding and having to lay off some or all members of our research group. In Canada, biomedical grant application success rates are around 14% so this is a pretty big worry.
People who are pre-tenure or in organizational units where there is no tenure (which includes a lot of medical researchers) also have to worry about losing their job.
In the U.S., very few professors can get paid their whole 12-month salary without getting some grant funding to pay for it. Some universities will commit 75% of the professor's salary as "hard money"—these are the ones with the bigger teaching loads. Others will provide only 5% of the salary and expect the professor to get the rest through grant funding. If you can't do it, expect to get a pay cut or lose your job. This is the prevailing model at elite medical research institutions like Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, or University of California, San Francisco.
Becoming a professor is called getting your 'chair' isn't it? I don't know any professors who don't also have tenure - that seems a contradiction in terms to me.
But if you don't know what I mean we're probably talking about different things and possibly talking at cross-purposes.
No.
> I don't know any professors who don't also have tenure - that seems a contradiction in terms to me.
Assistant professors generally do not have tenure, and at some institutions being an associate professor or full professor is no guarantee either.
> But if you don't know what I mean we're probably talking about different things and possibly talking at cross-purposes.
I know what you mean; you're just incorrect and spreading misinformation based on your limited experience.
> Meaning "office of a professor" (1816) is extended from the seat from which a professor lectures (mid-15c.).
https://www.etymonline.com/word/chair
Seems to be in-use in the US?
https://depts.washington.edu/givemed/prof-chair/creating-you...
It even talks about how the endowment for the professorship or chair funds the professor.
There are "chairs" like this in professional orchestras too.
The taxonomy of academic titles could fill a book.
Furthermore, it's not something that's available right away (exceptions do happen for exceptional people, but they're exceptions).
For a random example of a successful professor, look at the carreer ot Terrence Tao (https://www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/preprints/cv.html), James and Carol Collins chair in mathematics at UCLA. He got his PhD in 1996, got full professorship at 2000, and was a non-tenured non-chaired Assistant Professor for the four years in between.
Seriously, just look up a random professor from your local community college (not something like Stanford) and take a look at their CV - how many years it took for them until the full professor position.
Think of it like you're a shopkeeper at the mall, and someone is paying your rent for you, which is nice, but you have to figure out how to actually make money.
I don't understand how you can be a professor and not be tenured, so I guess we're talking about different things.
https://www.bu.edu/handbook/appointments-and-promotions/clas...
Sound like you are laboring under considerable misconceptions about the way academia works. To the best of my knowledge, there are no institutions that automatically grant tenure upon being hired as a professor, let alone a chair, which is considered prestigious.
There are various ranks of professorship and assistant professors (entry level) have to work their way up to earning tenure and it not rare to fail to do so; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_ranks_in_the_United_S...
For what it's worth, the job titles can be ambiguous.
The formal progression in the US/Canada is usually "Assistant Professor" -> "Associate Professor" -> "Professor." However, someone in any of these positions can be called a (lowercase-p) "professor", with the most senior job referred to as a "Full (or University) Professor."
Somewhere in the last decade or so this nomenclature was revised to "Assistant Professor", "Associate Professor", and "Professor". I can't speak to the rationale for this, but it brings it in line with the naming convention in the US.
While the minimum requirement for an Assistant Professor job in India is a Masters, in practice now you really need at least 2+ years of Postdoc experience. To move up to an Associate Prof. position, the minimum requirement is at least 5+ years of post PhD experience, to have guided at least one PhD student, and n number of publications with x Impact Factor. A Professor requires at least 10 years of post PhD experience, and at least 3 PhD students. Of course, these are minimum requirements, and I know of several people who far exceed those qualifications and still waiting to move up the ladder. For example, a senior from my graduate lab has been an Assistant Prof for about 14 years now, has 15+ publications, and 3 PhD students who've gained their degrees.
I think there's also a practical problem in attracting students to a new lab. Another Assistant Prof I'd interviewed with at a premier research institute in New York had established her lab over 3 years ago, and still hadn't managed to recruit either a PhD student or any postdocs. She may be an outlier, of course.
You will also have newfound responsibilities such as teaching classes, and the university will expect you to teach more classes if you are not bringing in grant funding or doing prestigious research. It is not a free ride, and universities will take space from you and give it to people who can produce if you can't as space is scarce.