Stan Nadel sat with fellow historians around a lunch table as they introduced themselves one by one. His peers were greeted with warm nods and smiles, but when he stated his name, Mr. Nadel was met with surprise. The man across from him clapped his hand over his mouth.
“What the hell?” Mr. Nadel says he thought, recalling that moment. It was 1997, and he was attending a history conference in Oklahoma.
The lunch mate had graduated from a Ph.D. program at the University of Hawaii, a place Mr. Nadel had never visited. Perhaps the young man was familiar with Mr. Nadel’s publications, he thought. Maybe he was a former colleague or a student.
It turned out, Mr. Nadel said, that the man had no connection to him at all. The stranger had recently accepted a one-year teaching appointment off the tenure track, which had prompted a colleague to warn him of Mr. Nadel’s experience.
“‘There’s a guy named Stan Nadel, and he got typecast and couldn’t get a real job,’” Mr. Nadel says the man was told. “I had become a lesson, a subject. My reputation was widespread.”
Mr. Nadel, now 68, was a perpetual visiting assistant professor, hopscotching among eight institutions across six states in the span of 13 years. He is now an adjunct professor at the University of Portland’s Salzburg Program, in Austria, where he has been for eight years. He has never earned tenure.
In a tight job market, visiting professorships can be appealing way stations for new Ph.D.'s while they search for permanent posts. Unlike adjunct positions, which are often renewed semester by semester, visiting professorships are set by annual or even multiyear contracts, with most capped at three years. The visiting jobs often come with health benefits and offer better pay than a typical adjunct receives, with visiting professors often earning close to the same starting salary as an assistant professor.
The role is attractive to universities, too, which are using the positions to hire Ph.D.'s for teaching jobs that limited budgets make it difficult or impossible to otherwise fill. A visiting professorship can also offer an institution more stability than an adjunct appointment, as the contract is longer and the professor is often more engaged in departmental affairs.
But while some scholars view visiting professorships as a road toward tenure, with résumé-building experience in teaching and research, others have found the route can become a dead end.
Springboard to Tenure?
Aaron Simmons, a visiting assistant professor at Grand Valley State University, is now working in his third visiting-professor position. Mr. Simmons, who earned a Ph.D. in philosophy in 2006 from Bowling Green State University, believes his experience in that role will strengthen his career prospects. He has spent five years as a full-time visiting professor, he says, during which he has taught 11 different ethics and philosophy courses, repeating some over numerous semesters.
“I feel confident that this gives me some advantage on the job market,” he says, “particularly with those schools which are looking for an experienced teacher with a record of success.”
The visiting appointments also make sure there is no gap in teaching and research on his curriculum vitae, he says.
In a tough job market, a visiting position can be beneficial, says Julia Miller Vick, senior associate director of career services at the University of Pennsylvania and a Careers columnist for The Chronicle. “It’s an opportunity to find people to collaborate with, an opportunity to expand your network.”
Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association, says visiting professorships are common first jobs, particularly in the humanities. The positions have been a “springboard,” she says, for some impressive careers. “It allows you to establish credentials, to get teaching experience, and, if it goes well and colleagues admire your work, you’re in an ideal situation to be a strong candidate for a permanent job.”
Visiting professorships make up 5.2 percent of all job postings in the Modern Language Association’s database for 2011-12. That is slightly above the average over the past five years of 4.7 percent.
The number of visiting professorships may not have increased significantly, but some colleges are beginning to use the position in new ways. The temporary role has historically been used by colleges primarily to fill in for people on leave, but some departments are making the jobs a permanent part of their staffing or using them to expand expertise in certain fields.
Members of the department of theater, dance, and film at Franklin & Marshall College are hoping that a new visiting professorship will help the program expand its concentration in film studies and experiment with interdisciplinary instruction. For example, the person they hire would be housed in this department but might teach a course centered on film in the foreign-language department. Hiring someone who will be a part of the department for three years, rather than filling their teaching needs with an adjunct, will bring continuity, says Carol C. Davis, the department chair.
Ms. Davis says the department is not sure if the position, which begins in the fall, will continue its cycle with another visitor after the first three years or if it might be turned into a tenure-track role.
Sometimes, though not often, departments design visiting professorships in ways that can lead directly to tenure-track jobs. When someone on leave does not return or a retirement is expected soon, a visiting professor who has proved to be a good fit can quickly become a leading candidate for the job.
Elsewhere, institutions tell their visiting professors that they probably will not be hired at the end. The point of those positions is not to try someone out for a job but to regularly bring in new ideas and energy.
John Uglietta, chair of the philosophy department at Grand Valley State, says the visiting position “revitalizes the department.” With no graduate program, he says, the department particularly values the varied perspectives that it gains from a steady rotation of younger visiting philosophers.
The department now has six visiting positions, with each renewed annually for up to three years. Another advantage of using visiting professors instead of adjuncts is the quality of the applicants, he says, because the university conducts national searches to fill the spots.
Mr. Uglietta himself was a visiting professor at Ohio State University before landing a tenure-track job at Grand Valley. His department works to help its visiting professors land tenure-track jobs somewhere, including by offering mock interviews and asking the department’s professors to watch visitors’ classes so they can write letters to recommend their teaching.
“It offers the chance to get experience,” he says, “and set up camp to move up for a tenure spot somewhere.”
‘Gypsy Scholar’
For the people who work in visiting positions, the short-term stability is also a plus. But for some, visiting professorships can become little more than a revolving door.
“You keep thinking that next year’s gonna do it,” says Mr. Nadel, who applied to as many as 100 jobs each year for more than a decade. “Then it becomes clear it isn’t going to happen. So much has been invested, though; it’s hard to walk away.”
As he taught in a series of visiting positions, Mr. Nadel continued to conduct research and publish his work. He thought his experience would eventually help him earn him tenure.
“But it wasn’t enough,” he says. “They began asking, ‘Why can’t he stay in one place?’”
In hindsight, he says he didn’t look hard enough for a permanent position immediately after graduate school, and he limited himself geographically. As the years wore on, he started to consider himself a “Gypsy scholar,” a difficult lifestyle that had him constantly thinking about his next move. Eventually, he believed that he had become “too senior” to be hired.
Mr. Simmons, whose three-year appointment expires this year, is in the thick of a new hunt for a tenure-track job. He has applied to 50 permanent teaching jobs, he says. As of last week, he had completed five first-round interviews this year, with two others lined up. As a single person without children, he says he feels fortunate to be able to move relatively easily.
Carving out time for a job search, though, is stressful, he says, while teaching four classes and constantly trying to do research and publish.
Having a looming expiration date on the job, Mr. Simmons adds, can also make visiting professors feel disconnected from their temporary institutions. “It doesn’t affect my relationship with the students,” he says. “But it does make you feel like you have less of a stake. I don’t have the same service requirements, I don’t have to be on committees.”
Ms. Feal, who works with graduates seeking jobs in the humanities, says there is no precise cutoff for the number of visiting professorships she would advise someone to hold. However, she adds, a person should begin thinking about how to pursue a Plan B about three years after earning his or her Ph.D.
Although many people want to hold out for tenure-track jobs, she says, there are a wide range of careers outside of academe that Ph.D.'s may want to consider.
Mr. Simmons says he has started exploring some of those other options. If he does not land a tenure-track teaching position this time around, he says, he will apply to fellowships in related fields, such as medical ethics, which also might keep him on a path toward tenure.
“It’s tough every year going out on the job market,” he says. “But I’ll find my place.”
Tracking the Career of a Perpetual Visiting Professor
After Stan Nadel earned a Ph.D. in history at Columbia University, in 1981, he set out to land a tenure-track job. When he couldn’t find one, he took a visiting professorship in history. Then another. And another. His career became a cautionary tale of how this temporary role may never fulfill its promise as a springboard to tenure.
Scroll through the timeline below to read about Mr. Nadel’s perennial job moves.
