Must Visiting Assistant Professorships Be Career Purgatory?

After earning her history degree in 2007, Tamar W. Carroll spent three years in temporary positions — one as a postdoc at the University of Michigan, two more at Cornell University.

All the while, Carroll says, she tried to focus on research for her book on postwar history, because a publication would help her earn a tenure-track job. She felt, however, like she never had time for that research because she was too busy looking for her next job. She wondered, “Was it going to be viable for me to stay in academia?”

Her fate changed when she took a visiting professorship at the College of the Holy Cross, a small, Jesuit, liberal-arts institution outside Boston. Thanks to that position, she says, she is now an associate professor and acting chair of the history department at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Carroll feels lucky, she says, because not all academics make it to the other side.

Another history scholar is alone in her apartment, putting the finishing touches on an academic essay and preparing for what will probably be her last-ever conference. Erin Bartram felt strange calling the conference organizers, asking them to change her affiliation on her name tag from “University of Hartford” to “Independent Scholar.”

As she completes her research, Bartram doesn’t have the company of her colleagues in offices down the hall. When she types into her web browser, the academic job site she regularly visited no longer auto-fills the search bar. She has decided to end her cycle of visiting assistant-professor positions, of always being “on the market.” And to end that cycle, Bartram says, she has to end her academic career entirely.

Visiting assistant professors, colloquially called VAPs, make up a growing portion of the faculty population at colleges and universities. But while VAPs may acknowledge the supposed benefits of the positions — the relative job security, the research opportunities, the experience — many are vocally dissatisfied with the way the system works. They feel trapped — torn between their scholarly passion and the need for financial stability.

Many contemplate leaving the field altogether, as Bartram is doing.

‘No Standard to Any of This’

Visiting positions take a variety of forms, says William G. Tierney, a professor of higher education at the University of Southern California. When he pictures a beneficial visiting position, Tierney thinks of his experiences in visiting fellowships overseas, at universities in Malaysia, China, and India.

International fellowships, Tierney says, are a good opportunity to gain cross-cultural understanding and connect with colleagues worldwide. As a result of such connections, he is editing, for instance, a volume with two colleagues in Saudi Arabia.

But these positions differ greatly from most domestic VAPs, which he says are hardly distinguishable from adjuncts.

“I generally don’t think of those as visiting positions. I think of those as adjunct positions,” he says. When universities use visiting professorships to fill temporary openings created by faculty taking sabbaticals or leaves, he says, “I think of that as an adjunct faculty member that is being exploited.”

Often, VAPs don’t feel welcome. “You have to provide the individual with some support,” Tierney says. “You know — a phone, a library card, an office,” benefits that make it “something that is sought after, rather than just filling in the blanks.”

Research shows that at most institutions, visiting professors are grouped with adjunct faculty under the umbrella of “contingent faculty.” A report from the Government Accountability Office, “Contingent Workforce,” includes among such positions “full-time non-tenure-track professors and lecturers, part-time instructors and adjuncts, and graduate student instructors.” It documents the instability associated with those positions: an inflexible schedule, lack of professional benefits, limited career advancement.

But because visiting positions differ by institution, with different labels and conditions, there is little research exploring the conditions of those jobs, specifically. “There’s no standard to any of this, so it’s difficult to even talk from one program to the next,” says Bartram.

Potential Positives

Well-designed visiting positions give academics time to complete important research or publications. Too often, though, that is not the case, and visitors get caught in a cycle, working at one university after another. As they continue, their chances of achieving tenure diminish.

Bartram was swallowed up in that kind of situation. After working as a VAP at the University of Hartford for two years, she took a temporary adjunct position there for a year. She says it was, essentially, another visiting position with slightly different work requirements and lower pay. But after all that time, she was unable to find a tenure-track position. (The university did not respond to requests for comment on its visiting assistant professorships.)

The College of the Holy Cross aims to prevent the VAP cycle, says Margaret Freije, provost. Tenure-track positions are few and increasingly difficult to obtain, she says. That is the reality for visiting professors at any institution.

At Holy Cross, Freije says, VAPS are similar to early tenure-track professors. That’s because she wants to prepare them for the tenure track from the beginning. The college’s visitors’ program is structured with two goals in mind: supplementing the curriculum and making VAPs more competitive on the tenure-track market.

“What we would like to do is have this experience be a benefit to them as well as to us,” Freije says.

The college uses several strategies. Visiting professors and new tenure-track faculty complete a new-faculty orientation together. Visitors have the same access to financial support for conference travel and scholarly studies that tenure-track professors are given, and they are invited to regular faculty-development workshops.

Carroll, for instance, attended a workshop on writing opinion pieces for publication. After the workshop, she says, she started writing for a commentary forum called the Conversation, with one of her pieces republished by PBS.

Visitors are usually close to completing their degree, or have just completed it, so Freije says she wants to provide as many opportunities as possible for them to practice their skills. VAPs at Holy Cross teach six courses a year, with no service requirement, while tenure-track professors teach five courses, with a service requirement. Department chairs often make visits to classes during instruction to provide teaching feedback later, and many departments will meet to help visitors practice giving job talks to prospective employers.

“Visiting faculty, generally, are extraordinarily talented individuals,” says Freije, “and in another world and another time, they would probably be in tenure-line positions. So what we want to do is treat them as the professionals that they are.”

Holy Cross, however, recently changed its program to reduce the number of years a visitor could remain from five years to three. “We want you to be thinking about what the long-term picture is,” says Freije. Otherwise, at a certain point, the college benefits more than the visiting professor, she says.

As the market has deteriorated, Holy Cross has become much more “intentional” about the design of its visitors program, she says. Several grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation over the last 10 years have given the college financial support for the positions.

‘I Wasn’t Good Enough’

When Bartram left the University of Hartford, she was concerned about the effect on her students. To people who don’t work in academe, Bartram says, a professor is a professor — they don’t see a difference between those in tenure-track positions and those who aren’t.

“There are moments,” she says, “where I had to remind them: ‘I actually can’t revise your thesis. I can’t be your adviser.’”

It felt almost cruel, she says, to get a taste of the career she wanted, to fall in love with a job that would eventually come to an unceremonious end. “It made me realize how much I wanted to do that,” Bartram says. “I had a good sense of what it would be like, which really made it hurt more when I had to give it up.”

Now an outspoken critic of the VAP system, she wrote an essay on her blog that was later republished by The Chronicle, joining the plethora of “quit lit.”

She describes mourning her lost career and wondering what she will do next. She writes about the feeling of failure. But she didn’t really fail, she says. The system did.

So maybe it was luck that allowed Carroll to achieve a tenure-track position and remain at the Rochester Institute of Technology for eight years. She was once a visitor, just like Bartram.

But Carroll says that being a visitor at Holy Cross was different, that during her job hunt, she turned down many visiting positions that were “exploitative,” with high teaching loads and low pay.

“Holy Cross has a great reputation for teaching, so I think that enhanced my CV and the way people received me while I was on the job market,” Carroll says. Faculty members there “were willing to mentor me, to take time out of their busy schedules to offer advice on the job-interview process, as well as teaching advice. And so I think that probably helped me be more successful.”

The stakes in structuring visiting professorships are high, says Bartram.

“I wasn’t good enough,” she says. “But also nobody’s good enough, and it’s a big mess.”

Follow Teghan Simonton on Twitter at @teghan_simonton.