A visiting professorship is the go-to Plan B for many a job candidate whose hopes are dashed on the tough tenure-track market. With this year’s faculty-hiring cycle underway, candidates will know in a few months if they should start seeking a visiting post. No, it’s not your dream job, but it is a reasonable way to keep building your CV until the next hiring cycle.
As senior professors, we’ve seen a lot of misunderstandings about what these positions can and can’t do for your career. Some are satisfying opportunities; others feel exploitative. If you accept a visiting offer, you need to do so with eyes open and with a clear set of expectations.
Generally, visiting professors are hired for a limited time — often for a full academic year (fall through spring), but sometimes for as short as a semester or as long as two to three years. Administrators approve temporary positions for all sorts of reasons, such as when a professor goes on sabbatical or when a budget shortfall delays a tenure-line search.
Some departments will interview visiting candidates with all the bells and whistles attached to tenure-track searches (i.e., Zoom interviews, overnight campus visits, job talks and/or teaching demos, meals with department colleagues, meetings with a dean or a provost). Others have an abbreviated hiring process. In the post-Covid era, as budget problems snake their way through institutions great and small, departments are more likely to cut corners in filling visiting positions.
Throughout our respective careers, we have hired and worked with many visiting faculty members and watched them go on to achieve varying degrees of success in the profession. What follows is our best advice — the dos and don’ts — on making the most of a visiting-faculty position.
What to Do as a Visiting Faculty Member
Interview as if it’s a tenure-track job. You cannot predict how your future might unfold at the college that offers you a visiting post. Prepare for whatever audition awaits by giving it your all. Examine the websites of the campus and the program. Evaluate whether the visions and missions you read are a good fit for your own values, and build those connections into your informal conversations and your formal job talk. Even if you don’t land the job, the experience will provide you with practice to be better prepared for your tenure-track audition.
Recognize the value of saying yes. A visiting appointment doesn’t just pay the bills; it gives you a great opportunity to make typical early-career mistakes without long-lasting repercussions. The stakes of making rookie teaching errors are lower than they would be in a tenure-track job, giving you the opportunity to fine-tune your craft and enhance your appeal on the job market.
Once hired, be an enthusiastic colleague. Be warm to your potential colleagues and accept invitations to departmental events. Word will get around if you behave as if this temporary position and these short-term colleagues are beneath you, merely a way station on your path to greater academic glory. Do your homework about your new colleagues so you know who they are and what they’ve done (without being too stalker-y!). The full-time faculty members in the department can be a source of friendly support and potential research collaborations, or just help you navigate the new culture.
A visiting position, while not ideal, can be a terrific opportunity.
Recruit local mentors. Some departments provide effective faculty mentoring, even for visiting academics. If nothing formal exists, you can always appeal to a friendly senior professor to take you under their wing. Even if these short-term colleagues don’t become a permanent part of your academic journey, they can provide strong letters of recommendation if they know you and your capabilities. Consider inviting some of the people you’re closest with in the program to observe your teaching and provide constructive feedback. Showing that you care about improving as a faculty member can generate a lot of good will.
Your focus will be on teaching, but carve out time to do research. Chances are, your full-time visiting job will specify only teaching responsibilities. However, if you intend to be competitive for next year’s tenure-track openings, you will need to demonstrate your research potential. So exploit your dissertation for as many publications as reasonable. The fact that you’re not a full-fledged member of the department means your schedule should be free of certain work obligations that would otherwise eat into your research time. Take advantage of those free hours to write, because you won’t have them in a tenure-track job.
Also consider engaging in some research on teaching and learning by gathering assessment data in your own classroom and seeking an appropriate outlet for your findings. Your attention to the accountability demands facing most faculty members these days will impress future interviewers and may help you establish a less time-consuming way to show your research chops in a constrained situation with limited research support.
Recognize the pecking order. Like it or not, as a visiting professor, you simply do not have the same status as a tenured or tenure-track faculty member in the program. Do not ask for expensive resources (and yes, we’ve seen this happen) to support your work when it is unclear whether the investment would be of any long-term benefit to the host department.
You also may not be automatically entitled to professional-development grants or travel monies doled out by your host department. Once you’re offered a visiting-position job, negotiate your benefits explicitly up front and see what they’re willing to offer you (if anything). It doesn’t hurt to ask — but it does hurt to ask for too much or to be presumptuous about what you believe you deserve.
Ask your supervisor to evaluate your teaching. Departments may not have a high priority on monitoring the classroom performance of a visiting or a contingent instructor, even when they should. However, you can request time with your supervisor — perhaps at the halfway mark in your initial semester on the job — to find out how satisfied the department might be with how you are managing the appointment and whether you need to make improvements or adjustments that would strengthen your case for an extended or full-time appointment.
Make yourself invaluable and reliable. As a visitor, it is unlikely that you will have voting rights on issues that arise in the department. However, many programs will involve visiting faculty members in other ways to support the mission of the department. For example, you may be asked to serve on a committee and attend department meetings.
Remember: Your priority here is your own teaching and research. But if you can spare the time without overextending yourself, by all means, accept such invitations. Both activities will serve you and the department well. But make certain to deliver on any commitments you make. Department citizenship is an important element in faculty evaluation, and your visiting year gives you a great showcase to demonstrate the value that you add to the academic operation and culture, and is experience you can note on your CV.
What Not to Do as a Visiting Faculty Member
Don’t expect a miracle (i.e., that your visiting post will turn into a tenure-track offer). Academe can be a fickle place. Departments can change their minds on a dime. As a visiting faculty member, you will not be in any meeting where your future in the program will be discussed — and you shouldn’t be. If you are lucky, no one will fill you in on any such discussions, which means you won’t be burdened with irrelevant or inappropriate department gossip or with what turns out to be false hopes or wishful thinking. Although you will find it frustrating to be in the dark about whether you have any future as a permanent hire in the department, do not lobby, pester, or hover because those acts will, at best, alienate people.
Focus on doing a great job so that your temporary colleagues can give you glowing recommendations for your next gig. No matter how much they praise you, do not assume that positive performance feedback means you will be slipped into the program’s tenure-track ranks. Miracles do happen, but not very often. Prepare for the likelihood that this is, indeed, a short-term gig and you will need to move on once it’s over.
Don’t assume you have an inside track. Sometimes departments use visiting positions to fill a gap while they finalize the funding for a permanent, tenure-track appointment. Just because you hold the visiting version of a soon-to-be-tenure-track slot, don’t assume your new colleagues or the dean or the provost want only you for the job. Inevitably and understandably, the search committee for the tenure-track opening will “want to see who else is out there.” Its charge is to find “the best” candidate. If you do make the shortlist, don’t assume the job will soon be yours — there are no guarantees.
The healthiest strategy is to become Zen and be detached.
Make yourself scarce on the days that your competitors are visiting the campus. Don’t try to meet them. And for heaven’s sake — and your own — do not attend (in person or virtually) any of their job talks or informal meet and greets. If you do, it will only be unsettling because you won’t be able to judge the quality objectively and the exposure may shake your confidence. In addition, department members may be scrutinizing you to see how you are responding to your competition. Search-committee members may simply hold your attendance against you as “bad form.”
Avoid becoming too attached to the place. This one’s hard. You may find yourself working on a beautiful campus in a desirable location. The architecture may be elegant, the greenery like an arboretum, and your colleagues may be wise, witty, and even fun. But the healthiest strategy is to become Zen and be detached.
Your earnest desire to remain (even for another semester or a second year) may not happen due to various reasons: budgetary issues, surprise decisions by departmental committees, or some other explanation that will remain forever shrouded in mystery to you. Save your dreaming for the point at which you are asked to apply for a tenure-track opening and then selected. Just don’t assume that outcome is at all likely. Detachment will help you move on when the time comes.
Never become embroiled in departmental or campus politics — you are Switzerland. A department or a campus free of political intrigue is a rare thing. If you were an astute graduate student, you probably learned to stay out of departmental drama, where political alliances can shift like sand on a beach. The need to abide by that principle is even more pronounced as a visiting faculty member.
Resist the urge to weigh in — even if your opinion is sought by some. Your thoughts will not be appreciated by others. One wrong choice can end your chances to be a future hire. Socialize cautiously. Fly below the radar by focusing on your classes and research and not by tuning into the watercooler or coffeehouse gossip — no matter how tempting the grievance du jour might be.
Don’t stop applying for job openings (unless you’re ready to quit academe). It’s easy to get bogged down by new course preparations, grading, understanding your temporary home, and trying to have some semblance of a life, so much so that you forget you are not here to stay. You have to go back on the tenure-track market. (As we note below, only you can decide when you’ve held one too many visiting positions and need to change careers.)
Since you cannot assume your temporary home will become your permanent one, keep applying for tenure-track jobs as they appear. If nothing else, that sharpens your interview skills. And getting interviews at other institutions will impress your temporary colleagues, which may help them re-evaluate your worth for the long haul on their campus.
Avoid the ABD trap. It’s risky to go on the job market before completing your doctorate — as “ABD” or “all but the dissertation.” We have seen our fair share of visiting professors who arrived with enthusiasm, threw themselves into teaching and working with students, but neglected to finish their dissertations. One year out of graduate school quickly became two — and soon the trail to completing their thesis turned cold.
Some institutions have a specific rule about not hiring or retaining ABD faculty members: If the terminal degree is not completed by a designated date, then they are released from their contracts. We have seen too many high-quality candidates who ended up never finishing that last but essential obligation.
So if you accept a visiting position as an ABD, strive to get your degree done before you set foot on the campus, or as soon as you can thereafter. Don’t become a cautionary tale.
Don’t be rattled by potential shabby treatment or disregard. It’s not you, it’s them. Years ago as a graduate student, one of us watched a talented psychologist, who was also an excellent teacher, be ignored for a full year by the department’s tenured professors. No one ever reached out to invite her to lunch or to a faculty party, let alone providing any meaningful professional support. By the end of that visiting experience, she abandoned higher ed altogether.
Some departments fail to integrate visitors into the department in a seamless manner. It’s not fair — in fact, it can be unkind and downright rude. But it happens. And it’s a sign that you don’t want to stay there.
Do not build a career on visiting posts. You may want to make a pact with yourself and decide how many visiting gigs is your limit. We have seen some colleagues who leap from visiting post to visiting post for four years — and no tenure-track opening materializes. If that happens, it’s time to reconsider your future in higher education.
We’ve described a lot of potential landmines here. But a visiting position, while not ideal, can be a terrific opportunity. One of our mentors offered this wise observation: “There is no way not to have a first year in teaching.” No matter what your formal status is in your first academic hire, it will be a challenge. However, a visiting appointment can bring you great insights into the best and worst of higher education. Being embedded in an academic enterprise without having all of the responsibilities of a tenure-track job can provide a good sample of whether real academic life will match up to the dream. If the match is a good one, it just might work out in your favor.
