What does the title of Associate Professor really mean???

[polly_mer]

The bottom line is that once you are tenured there are more committees that you can serve on, and when full  and tenured, you can serve on the nastiest committees (like grievances against administrators, or tenure appeals, or otherwise service heavy, unpleasant tasks). 

One red flag of a floundering institution is having so few tenured folks that untenured people who have been at the institution for only a few years and are still at the start of their academic careers anywhere are regularly tapped to serve on those committees.  For example, I remember one year at Super Dinky that the question was whether we let untenured folks sit on a key standing committee to ensure sufficient representation of the diversity of fields or whether we tap all the people who have tenure (will be very heavy on the humanities and nursing in a year that was likely to have zero humanities/nursing cases) to get a full complement per college requirements.