Scientists Don't Have To Visit

by Christopher Cumo
C.P. SNOW regarded the humanities and sciences as different
systems; its differences extend to the number of visiting scholars in each. Recently, 16 of 519 faculty jobs listed on H-Net, a Web site which lists positions in history and other humanities, were for visiting faculty. This number is small, but not compared to the sciences.
Of 208 academic positions, both teaching and research, in more than 40 disciplines listed in a recent issue of Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, none was for a visiting appointment.
Of course, the number of visiting scholars in the sciences is not zero, notes John Cross, Executive Vice President of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.
Nor is the number of visiting faculty uniform across disciplines.
In history, three percent of all jobs advertised by the American
Historical Association are visiting appointments, said Robert
Townsend, the Association’s Assistant Director of Publications
and Research. Yet less than one percent of jobs listed by the Modern Language Association fall into the category of fellowship, residency or visiting appointment. But these data may underestimate the number of visiting faculty in English and related disciplines according to MLA Executive Director Phyllis Franklin.
The MLA will list a visiting assistant professor, for example,
simply as an assistant professor. Moreover, universities post
primarily tenure-track positions through the MLA, most of
them at the assistant-professor rank, says Franklin. The number
of visiting faculty in English and related disciplines may be growing, believes the Woodrow Wilson Foundation’s John
Cross, because universities are flush with demand for language
instruction, whether in English composition or beginning Spanish.
These are introductory courses, which senior faculty would
rather not teach. Senior faculty, furthermore, tend to specialize
in literature rather than composition, leaving them ill-qualified
to teach introductory courses, which go to adjuncts or visiting
faculty.
The numbers of visiting faculty are also not uniform across
departments at different universities. The math department
of 35 tenure-track faculty at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
might appoint one visiting scholar every year or two, said
James Voytuk, who once taught math there. By contrast, the
math department of 46 tenure-track faculty at Harvard University
lists 32 visiting appointments.
No matter how one tabulates the numbers, says Peter Syverson,
Vice President of Research at the Council of Graduate Schools,
visiting scholars are more prevalent in the humanities than
the sciences.
“They come out of very different traditions,” he said. The humanities emphasize teaching, and the visiting appointment
has evolved as a training ground in teaching. In the sciences,
by contrast, all the glory is in research, writes Stephen Jay Gould in Wonderful Life. The sciences are awash in postdoctoral positions, the crucible of research scientists. In the same issue of Science mentioned earlier, 93 of the 208 academic posting were for postdocs.
However, the postdoc has not entirely replaced the visiting scholar in the sciences. John Cross believes the number of visiting scientists, and postdocs as well, is higher than the data suggest. Whereas the humanities advertize visiting appointments through traditional channels, the sciences have an informal way of filling them according to Cross. Scientists, working in highly specialized subfields, know the research of everyone in their small specialty. When a temporary position must be filled, whether a postdoctoral or visiting appointment, scientists simply ask someone in their field to recommend a junior scientist.
Dr. Edward O. Wilson, University Research Professor at Harvard,
also believes that there are fewer visiting appointments in the sciences than in the humanities. He posits that this is true because science Ph.D.s have more career options than Ph.D. holders in the humanities. Science graduates need not settle for visiting appointments when demand for scientists in industry is high.
In contrast, The AHA’s Robert Townsend has seen an increase
in the number of visiting appointments during the last four
or five years in history, a field of little use to industry. However, he isn’t sure the number of visiting historians hurts the profession. Salaries for visiting historians are higher than one might expect because universities are increasingly hiring visiting historians at the rank of full professor to fill an endowed chair for a year or two.
Not all visiting historians have such plum positions. The retirement of senior historians has led ivy league schools to “cherry pick” big names from a public universities. As a result, the “cherry picked” university will turn around and hire a visiting scholar until a full scale faculty search may be mounted.
Thus, the visiting scholar is thus part of the contingent labor force and of the demise of tenure, believes Jay Malone, Executive Director of the History of Science Society. Perhaps the demise of tenure will come more slowly to the sciences, but then again the discussion at hand does not take into account the use and exploitation of postdoctoral workers.
It may make an interesting closing note, however, to mention
a new type of job which has cropped up in the humanities: the pre-doctoral teaching year. Liberal Arts colleges offer pre-doctoral students the opportunity for some real world work experience. The hours are long; the pay is low (seldom more than $25,000 per year), and the teaching schedule almost always involves 4-5 sections of an undergraduate prerequite course (such as composition). Come to think of it, perhaps C.P. Snow wasn’t so right after all.