We all know that the “visit” that a visiting professor takes to Wesleyan is a short one—most visiting professors are here for fewer years than the average undergraduate. This situation creates a stripe of faculty that current visiting professor of African American Studies Mandi Isaacs Jackson rightly calls “contingent faculty.”
This issue is not one specific to Wesleyan; ask a visiting professor where else they’ve taught, and the answer will often sound like a tour of the eastern seaboard’s colleges.
Visiting professors provide a valuable resource to the University, especially one that prides itself on diversity. Visitors can inject into their classes a wide variety of experience, new ideas, and provocative teaching methods not always found within Wesleyan’s bubble. Visiting professors are also often not much older than the students they teach, in some cases making them easier to relate to than Wesleyan’s seasoned academics, and if nothing else better at handling in-classroom technology. Finally, at a time when President Michael Roth is seeking advice as to what can make Wesleyan better, visitors can offer keen outside insight into the University’s failings.
“Contingent faculty” do come with some drawbacks, however. Visitors may be unfamiliar with Wesleyan’s student culture or the dynamics of the department he or she is teaching in. If you develop a good relationship with a visitor, that professor will likely be long gone by the time you need a thesis advisor. And as many have discovered, if assigned a visitor as an advisor, he or she is not going to know anything about General Education Requirements, or even how to sign into an Electronic Portfolio to approve your schedule. And who can blame them, really? They’ll be gone next year.
We worry that “visiting professor” positions are especially skewed towards the arts and social sciences. And by essentially instating a revolving door policy in underrepresented disciplines, the University hurts students who are interested in these topics. Wesleyan’s “Course Clusters,” among them Urban Studies and Linguistics, are not suitable stand-ins for disciplines that could support a real major with tenured faculty positions.
Visiting professors are an essential part of Wesleyan’s academic life, but tenured faculty become part of the University, and by extension permanent participants in its community. We wish more of those visitors could stick around.
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