I’m in holiday spirit mode, which for me means “I did a lot of housework today.”
But I do have time for one comment, which is to just say I really agree with the underlying insight of this Chronicle of Higher Education essay about “the churn”, about visiting professorships that are not quite conventional contingent contracts, e.g., a permanent use of contingency to fill recurrent teaching needs.
The CHE article is about the kind of gig that often works like this: it’s a three-year visiting professorship that frequently can be renewed once, sometimes with a sabbatical somewhere in the mix, so seven years. The article opens up with the experience of a professor at Harvard, which puts a max of eight years on these kinds of visiting opportunities. And then you’re out, unless somehow a department converts the visiting line into a tenure-track line.
Usually the tenure-track faculty and administration know better than to imply that this might happen, but people hope nevertheless, especially if there’s a retirement happening somewhere in the interval.
As the CHE essay observes, while the compensation of more conventional adjunct faculty is typically much worse than this sort of visiting contract, at least there’s often a prospect of continuing to work for the institution over the longer term presuming nothing happens to disrupt that relationship. The “up and out” VAP is forced to leave regardless.
The Ivies have long been pretty straightforward about what these positions are for: they’re going to do the teaching that some of the senior research faculty don’t do. The Ivies also reassure themselves that they’re doing the lucky visitor a favor, because who wouldn’t want a faculty member who’d been at the Ivy Leagues?
Elsewhere, the justification I sometimes hear is that this is a way for faculty in one department to get exposed to new fields and different perspectives in their discipline. It’s this viewpoint that I really can’t stand. The way you get exposed to new fields and different perspectives is you read in your discipline and you go to conferences in your disciplines. You don’t hire someone for somewhere between three and seven years as if you were leasing a car. This is especially true when these positions are used to bring in fields that are in demand with students and which are a troubling absence in the host department. Then you’re doing just enough to ward of criticism while showing that you really don’t think that field or that method or that kind of scholarship is important enough that you might shift an existing position in that direction whenever it vacates.
This is a problem generally with faculty governance at the institutions where tenure remains relatively strong. Even within departments, many faculty don’t make consistent, clear and defensible arguments about why their department is invested in the fields that it is and not in others that it might be. These kinds of visiting positions are just one more way to dodge having to do that. If you have enough students to justify having those resources granted to you, then ask for them as a tenure line or not at all. Even the best compensated and most fairly treated short-term position of this type is in the end a bad deal that corrodes the overall commitment of faculty to tenure as a basic guarantee of security and academic freedom.
Image credit: Photo by McGill Library on Unsplash