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Don't Bother Me, I'm Just Visiting

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By Paul Martin Lester

Al Gore probably had a lot of reasons why he accepted a visiting professorship at Columbia University's journalism school after his Supreme Court-decided election defeat. Among his reasons, according to CNN, were so that he could work part time and easily visit his daughter and grandson -- although I doubt he included those reasons in his negotiations with Columbia.

In fact, most of us don't mention this in job interviews, but working part time in sometimes exotic locations and being able to visit family and make new friends are among the most appealing perks of becoming a visiting professor.

Since you're only visiting, you can usually avoid messy politics, debates over the campus mission statement, and dull committee assignments. But because you're only visiting, you might not feel accepted within the culture of the institution, you might get homesick for your previous lifestyle and position, and when you return, your colleagues might harbor some resentment about your hiatus.

Nevertheless, there's nothing wrong with working the system to your advantage any way that you can. The first step is getting a leave -- paid or unpaid -- from your main employer.

Leaves with pay and without pay

Two types of paid leaves are available: the faculty exchange and the traditional sabbatical. The faculty exchange works fairly simply: Find an instructor anywhere in the world who has about the same teaching interests as you, get approval from both sets of administrators, and trade homes and lifestyles. Your salary and benefits continue from your own institution.

For a traditional sabbatical, most institutions will pay your full salary for one semester off or half of your salary for two semesters. With another type of sabbatical, known as a "difference-in-pay" leave, your home institution pays you the difference between your regular salary and the minimum salary at an instructor's rank.

For both types of paid leaves, you'll need a proposal that details your plans and is approved by your administrators. A sabbatical leave is typically awarded every six or seven years. A faculty exchange and a difference-in-pay leave can be awarded at any time. Some might ask, why take a sabbatical, which is supposed to be given to escape the rigors of day-to-day teaching, only to seek a teaching position somewhere else? Sorry, I don't have a good answer for that one, but some people do it.

You might also take an unpaid leave to become a visiting professor elsewhere. If you're financially secure, with additional income from published books, a rich relative who left you a wad of cash, or assurances of gainful employment at another institution, then a leave without pay is the easiest to get approved by your dean. You don't even need to think of a project to work on. That's because your home institution gets to bank your salary while paying for a temporary instructor to take your place at drastically reduced pay.

One advantage of an unpaid leave is that you don't need to pay anything back. That is, you are not required to teach a semester for every semester you take off, as is the case with sabbaticals. A big disadvantage is that in most cases, you don't get any of your health benefits. However, if you are working at another institution, you will typically receive benefits, or you can pay your home institution for them directly.

Obtaining a visiting professorship

Departments around the world offer visiting positions that vary in duration.

Why would one department want a faculty member to leave for a time and another department want to hire that person for a short stint? It's a win-win situation. The faculty handbook of the College of William and Mary states the rationale well:

"The College of William and Mary encourages leaves without pay or at reduced pay for academic reasons because such leaves are beneficial to the faculty member, specifically, and to William and Mary, generally. Such leaves offer opportunities for faculty to develop professionally and to acquire new ideas which are shared with the university community. Persons hired to replace those temporarily on leave add to the diversity of academic life, a particularly important consideration for a heavily tenured faculty. Faculty travel and residence at other institutions also bring credit to William and Mary and extend its reputation."

All well and good, but why did I want to be a visiting professor? As a tenured, full professor, I was getting fatter, if not necessarily happier. I needed to retool.

The Practical Ethics Center at the University of Montana at Missoula is the only institution in the country that offers a master's degree in the teaching of ethics. The director offered me a position, an office, a set of business cards, but no salary. Nevertheless, sparked by the challenge of moving from California to Montana, having to "sell" courses to deans I'd never met before, and working on projects I never get a chance to do at home, I made the leap.

So sort of like an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies in reverse, I traded in my Miata sports car for a pickup truck, loaded it up, moved out of Beverly Hills, and am living in joyful poverty. I'm currently halfway through a two-year odyssey. The first year I was granted a leave without pay. The second year I applied for, and was awarded, a difference-in-pay leave.

Leave-taking is not for everyone. If you have tenure, you might find it difficult to receive a leave, and if you don't, you might not have a job when you return. However, if you're looking for a new position, a temporary appointment might be an opportunity for you to prove yourself to a new faculty. If you have a family, a leave with reduced pay for an extended period of time may be difficult to manage. But it can be done with positive results.

Ken Smith, an associate professor of communication at the University of Wyoming, was a visiting professor in media economics for the spring semester at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He had an enriching and rewarding experience, but he offers this advice for those thinking about accepting a visiting position: make sure the pay is sufficient and look for a low teaching load.

A downside I discovered to being a visiting professor with feet in two institutions is that my e-mail messages doubled. I got to read, for example, all of the power-outage warnings from California as well as the news that we have a new "janitorial engineer" for the ethics center at Montana where I share an office.

However, the advantages are enormous. I live on a mountain about 10 miles from Missoula, one of the best places on earth. I'm meeting new friends I never would have known existed if I had not made the move. I finished a textbook that's coming out this summer. I'm writing a third edition of one of my books and making plans to start a new book project with two colleagues. I'm teaching new courses with innovative techniques. I'm writing, with a colleague, a monthly ethics column for a national trade publication and doing radio commentaries for Montana Public Radio. And with any luck, the collaborative efforts I'm beginning here will continue and grow upon my return to California.

One more thing -- I'm looking for a cool cowboy hat for when I drive around in my pickup truck. But I have no plans to get a gun rack.