The Professor Is Famous. Is That Worth the Controversy?

When David H. Petraeus signed on to teach at the City University of New York this fall, it was supposed to be an opportunity for the retired four-star general to reinvent his public image by way of the classroom.

Accepting an academic post, some CUNY professors said, could go a long way toward helping Mr. Petraeus, whose reputation had taken a hit after he resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency last fall amid a scandal over an extramarital affair. Beyond helping Mr. Petraeus move away from the negative limelight, the high-profile hire also had the potential to bring positive publicity to the institution, professors said.

Instead, the move has bred a controversy of its own.

At first, Mr. Petraeus was going to earn $200,000 for teaching a three-hour seminar each week at CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College. When word of his salary got out, it sparked outrage. CUNY professors said that Mr. Petraeus would be making far more than any of them; his salary was an insult, they said, to the part-time faculty whose wages are barely sustainable.

In response to the outcry, Mr. Petraeus later announced that he had agreed to do the job for just $1.

The former CIA director’s efforts to appease the faculty fell on deaf ears. Professors have continued to decry the hire, saying that CUNY needs a reality check.

The fallout from Mr. Petraeus’s appointment has fueled a continuing conversation in academe about the value of hiring visiting professors with household names. Over the years, many institutions have hired celebrities for short- and long-term teaching roles. Among the Hollywood and Washington personalities who have donned the “professor” title are people like James Franco, Al Gore, and Oprah Winfrey.

Celebrity adjuncts can bring much to the table. Students can learn from the real-life experiences of top practitioners in their fields. For universities a celebrity hire can bring prestige, bolster name recognition, and provide fund-raising opportunities.

But, as the case of Mr. Petraeus shows, the hiring of famous people can also be divisive. Professors and others have voiced concerns about whether the money used to hire celebrities, who often do not hold Ph.D.'s, would be better spent on promising young scholars who might have a longer-term effect on a campus’s intellectual life. And when a celebrity’s salary is especially high, some professors complain that the university is paying for a name and not an academic qualification.

“There’s a legitimate question to be asked about the benefit of bringing in visiting professors who cost an exorbitant amount of money,” says William G. Tierney, co-director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California. “No one is suggesting that visiting professors are a bad thing, but when you bring someone in with a nebulous job description and a huge salary, it’s within the faculty’s prerogative to inquire about it.”

Risks and Benefits

Institutions that hire prominent people run the risk of alienating their faculty, particularly when the visiting professors earn more than their peers. When Eliot L. Spitzer, a former New York governor who resigned in 2008 amid a prostitution scandal, taught a course at CUNY from the fall of 2009 to the spring of 2012, he was paid slightly less than $5,000 a semester. After some professors complained that his salary was more than what most other part-time faculty make, he gave his earnings back to the institution.

Though they are outsiders to higher education, celebrity adjuncts often prove to be popular with students. Melissa Lynch, who took Mr. Spitzer’s course, “Law and Public Policy,” as a junior in the fall of 2009, says she considered the former governor to be among the best instructors she’d ever had.

But there were signs, she says, that Mr. Spitzer came from far outside of academe. One time, Ms. Lynch recalled, he said that he did not have a sense of how long a term paper typically is. So he asked the class. One student proposed that a single page would be a fitting length; another said it should be 50 pages. The former governor ultimately settled on eight to 10 pages.

“What we all want is excellence for our students as far as teaching goes,” says Charles J. Gomer, president of the faculty at the University of Southern California. “These individuals often offer that excellence.”

Southern California will also have Mr. Petraeus on its faculty this fall. He is slated to be a Judge Widney Professor, a title reserved for prominent individuals. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the actor-turned-California governor, is another famous face there. The university hired him last year to lead a policy institute and serve as a professor, his first faculty appointment.

Sometimes, though, celebrities bring years of academic experience to universities. Since 2009, Jill Biden, the wife of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., has taught English at Northern Virginia Community College. Ms. Biden, an English professor and longtime advocate for community colleges, began teaching as an adjunct instructor and was promoted to a full-time professorship in 2011.

Robert G. Templin Jr., Northern Virginia’s president, says that Ms. Biden’s academic expertise alone is what qualifies her for the position. “Usually celebrities have as their credential being a celebrity,” he said, “but that doesn’t go very far in this case.”

Mr. Templin says the institution has never asked Ms. Biden to use her political sway on its behalf. “If I made a command-performance request of her, I think she’d do it, but I’d never do that,” he says. “She’s here to be part of our faculty.”

Still, some faculty members are disappointed that Ms. Biden and other part-time celebrity professors have not used their positions of power to advocate for better treatment of adjuncts as a whole.

“The main issue with the celebrity adjunct culture today,” says Maria Maisto, president of the New Faculty Majority, an adjunct advocacy group, “is that it’s helped to solidify the stereotype that adjuncts are not exploited, that they’re people who are independently wealthy and secure. That’s a dangerous message to send.”

Messy Life Lessons

When Michael S. Dukakis was defeated for re-election as governor of Massachusetts in 1978, he decided that he wanted to experience university life. He took a job at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, which has long been a popular destination for politicians. But before he stood in front of a classroom himself, Graham T. Allison, a former dean of the school, gave him an assignment.

“He said to me, ‘I don’t want you to do anything for your first two months here other than observe our faculty as they teach,’” Mr. Dukakis recalls. Sitting in the back of a lecture hall, he says, was an invaluable introduction to teaching.

Mr. Dukakis, who lost a 1988 presidential bid to George H.W. Bush, is now a professor of political science at Northeastern University and a visiting professor in the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California at Los Angeles. The former Democratic presidential nominee often places calls to help students get Washington internships. “I take my teaching very seriously,” he says. “I don’t just come in and tell war stories.”

Like Mr. Dukakis, James E. McGreevey, a former governor of New Jersey who now teaches as an adjunct faculty member in the global management program at Kean University, says he considers teaching to be an “ancient and sacred craft.” Much of his love for teaching, he says, stems from his mother, a longtime nursing instructor.

Mr. McGreevey, who resigned the governorship in 2004 after revealing that he is gay and admitting to an extramarital affair with a man, started teaching in 2007. He says he initially viewed his faculty appointment as a respite from a barrage of negative public opinion. “There’s a great importance,” says Mr. McGreevey, “for the academy to bring in people with life experiences—sometimes very messy ones.”

Mr. Dukakis and Mr. McGreevy have spent more years on their campuses than many other celebrity hires do. High-profile faculty members are often brought in for a semester or two. One of the main dangers in the short-term use of these professors, says Dalton C. Conley, a New York University professor and former dean for social sciences, is that they might “phone it in” and not contribute any real value to the intellectual climate of the campus.

“My bias as a dean was generally against these visiting appointments,” he says. “I understand that there’s a benefit to them, but I generally think money is better spent hiring exciting young faculty who are going to help the institution.”

Payoff in Publicity?

Celebrity hires can work out well, says Cary Nelson, a former president of the American Association of University Professors, but institutions must be more open about their motives. “Universities have tried to find pedagogical cover for their publicity ventures,” he says. “There’s nothing wrong with trying to attain publicity for your school, but there needs to be more truth in advertising what these positions are all about.”

Celebrity professors, says Stephen M. Walt, a Harvard professor of international affairs, can be particularly helpful for lower-profile institutions that want to improve their name recognition. When the University of North Florida hired Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the South African social-rights activist, as a visiting scholar in 2003, for example, the institution was not shy to publicize its professorial catch.

Earle Traynham, the university’s interim provost, says he recalls university officials asking Archbishop Tutu to participate in a handful of fund-raising events while he was on campus. During his single semester at North Florida, Mr. Tutu led several noncredit mini-courses, as well as one semester-long course titled “Truth and Reconciliation,” focusing on his time heading South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a post-apartheid restorative justice body.

It is not uncommon, some administrators say, for institutions to pay more than they would ideally like to hire a high-profile adjunct professor if they perceive a potential payoff. That payoff, says Richard K. Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, may come through things like positive publicity or fund-raising opportunities.

Mr. Vedder has been critical of how CUNY handled the Petraeus hire. The appointment, he argued in a recent Bloomberg column, shows that colleges are spending money without real consequences.

Barbara Bowen, president of CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress, the faculty and staff union, says the appointment was “an attempt to create an illusion of elite education at CUNY and mask the fact that there is a steep, systemic underinvestment in education here.”

Others have defended the hire. “We have always seen major universities arrange for visiting professorships so that students are exposed to faculty with perspectives and institutional connections beyond what is customarily available,” Ann Kirschner, dean of the Macaulay Honors College, said via e-mail. “Is that only for the Ivies? Students at public universities deserve no less.”

What ultimately determines the worth of a celebrity hire, says Mr. Tierney, of the University of Southern California, is whether the person can perform in the classroom.

“A name alone,” he says, “isn’t enough.”