Visiting assistant or tenure track?

Anita Varma Senior Editor

As students start to look at the class schedule for spring semester, many are interested in both the topic and the teacher. Listings on AskBanner label teachers with their specific rank or type of professor-status, which ranges from instructor to full professor.

According to Dean of the Faculty Ron Sharp, different types of professors have different duties on campus. An outline of what each position entails is outlined in the Governance of Vassar College.
There are 10 ranks of professors and types of researchers listed, and other faculty positions such as coaches and curator positions are described as well.

The four tenure-track ranks of a professor are instructor, assistant professor, associate professor, and professor.

According to the Governance, instructors “shall show promise of achievement in teaching and scholarship or artistic activity. They shall normally hold a Master’s degree or its equivalent.”

Going up one rung, assistant professors “shall have proved themselves to be effective teachers and sound scholars or artists. They are expected to hold the degree of Ph.D. or its equivalent in quality and extent of preparation.”

Specific post-graduate degrees are not specified for the remaining two tenure-track ranks. For example, an assistant professor “shall manifest either distinction in teaching together with scholarly or artistic achievement of high quality, or distinction in scholarly or artistic achievement, together with teaching of high quality.”

Finally, full professors are deemed to have “achieved marked distinction” in scholarship or artistic activity, and “teaching of a high quality.”

Divisions of the faculty do not end with these four positions. The next heading in the governance lists “Academic Full-Time Appointments Not on Tenure Track.” These include lecturer, senior lecturer, and visiting professor.

The visiting professor label is unusual, since it does not denote one specific rank. Instead, it can preface “titles of faculty at any rank appointed on a temporary, full-time basis,” according to the Governance. Visiting professors have this title for as short a term as one semester, or as long as six years.

The description for lecturers and senior lecturers’ descriptions is only one sentence. The Governance reads that they “may be used for faculty who hold special, full-time appointments in departments or programs.”

Sharp noted that in many cases, the practical execution of holding a professor position or lecturer position differs on a case-by-case basis, depending on which department or program the person works for. The Governance provides guidelines and general descriptions.

The final category of faculty types are “Part-time and Special appointments.” Research professors, research scientists or scholars, and research associates are titles for part-time faculty members who contribute to the faculty through research, not through teaching classes. For example, the Governance says that research professors are “faculty who have retired from the regular professorial ranks but continue to perform sponsored research at Vassar.” Research scientists or scholars work at Vassar with outside funding as well, and research associates are defined as “persons holding post-doctoral appointments at Vassar.”

Adjuncts fall into the same category heading in the Governance as the researcher faculty. Although it is possible that an adjunct professor and full professor teach the same number of courses, the full professor often has administrative duties as well, according to Sharp. “The term [‘adjunct’] is used to describe a number of different things, all of which relate to being part-time,” he said.

Although people on tenure-track often climb up the ranks, Sharp noted that it is unusual for someone to shift from a non-tenure track to a tenure-track position. Sharp used the example of a visiting professor to explain what would happen in a situation where a faculty member was interested in shifting tracks. “There will be a national search for which the visiting professor is an applicant and may or may not get the [tenure-track] job.”

In terms of how such searches for faculty are conducted, Sharp said that the College follows guidelines set out by national associations, as well as Vassar’s Faculty Handbook. He added that the Modern Language Association (MLA) is one example of a set of guidelines set out by a specific department. The MLA is for English faculty. “There are a lot of national conventions,” said Sharp. “Most colleges of our kind [have their] own variations.”

The Governance and the Faculty Handbook can be accessed electronically at deanofthefaculty.vassar.edu/handbooks/.