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How do non-TT lecturer or teaching professor positions look to TT hiring committees?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

I'm curious about the perceptions of those on TT hiring committees vis-a-vis the following issue: Does it in any way look bad to be currently employed as full-time/non-tt teaching faculty (e.g. permanent lecturer or teaching professor)?

My sense is that post-docs and VAPs are often seen as natural stepping-stones to TT positions, but what about non-tt teaching jobs like permanent lecturer or teaching professor? Does an applicant who currently holds a position like this look any better/worse when compared to someone who is a post-doc or VAP? Does it not matter? For instance, say that someone isn't too far out from their phd and is still publishing in good journals. Would it be a mark against this person if they currently hold a teaching-focused job like this? Is it correct to assume that most R1s would simply pass over someone who currently holds a job like this? What about SLACs? I feel like these teaching-focused positions are sometimes looked down on as not prestigious or fancy enough or something. As a result, they might be a liability when it comes to applying for certain jobs. Am I wrong?

I suspect it is probably hard to generalize here, and that a lot depends (as the OP suggests) on the rest of one's file, such as whether one is publishing in good journals. 

Do any readers have any helpful tips or insights? It could be good to hear from search committee members, as well as from people in these kinds of non-TT jobs who have either gotten or struggled to get a TT job.

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4 responses to “How do non-TT lecturer or teaching professor positions look to TT hiring committees?”

  1. once a VAP

    I would say yes, people in VAP or other contingent positions do have a greater challenge ahead of them. I was 5 years on such positions, and then I got a job at a 4 year state college. I now work at a Research University, but I always had to outperform to move up. When I was hired for the TT job, I had more publications than the other full time faculty, more citations, etc.

    Reply
  2. Bill Vanderburgh

    MANY people on the academic job market spend several years in adjunct, temporary, or permanent lecturer positions. So many, in fact, that I’d guess that most people who enter a tenure-track position do so from that kind of position rather than straight out of grad school or directly from a post-doc (there are so few post-doc opportunities). I make this estimate knowing that R1s offer a small proportion of the tenurable positions in philosophy. (3.7% of US institutions of higher education, 146 of ~4000, are Carnegie “Doctoral–very high research activity.”) Some R1s might have a bias against people in teaching positions, but I kind of doubt it: If you have the teaching and research record to be competitive for the job, you have a chance.
    Overall, I’d say being in a lectureship is generally a good thing for one’s prospects on the tenure-track market: Such positions give you an opportunity to acquire teaching experience (most beneficially, across several different course subjects), and to demonstrate that you can be successful at teaching at full load. Search committees also trust those departments’ judgments of a candidate’s demeanor and collegiality.
    There are caveats, of course: A candidate would need to still be competitive in their rate and quality of research productivity, which is no mean feat teaching 4-4 or 5-5.
    A related point is that there is something like an implicit expiry date: at some point, after several years, if you haven’t made it to a tenure-track position, search committees may get the feeling that you aren’t tenure-track material. This is probably a false judgement, and anyway there are exceptions. And there is no fixed number of years anyone has in mind, just a feeling at some point.
    BTW, I think very few search committees make any difference between adjunct, lecturer, and VAP positions. They all involve teaching more or less a full load and low/no research expectations, so they are functionally equivalent.
    Teaching Professor positions might be a different thing, especially if they are the equivalent of tenurable without a research requirement. I could see some committees pigeon-holing folks with such positions as “not researcher material.” The antidote is to have a solid research record, to not stay in such a role too long, and to have a story about why you wanted a non-research job then but want a research job now.
    Is there a better kind of job to have, instead of a non-tenure-track teaching gig, in between grad school and a tenure-track job? I don’t think so.

    Reply
  3. OP

    @Bill Vanderburgh: thanks so much for your thoughts. I wonder, though, why the pigeon-holing for teaching professors? In this kind of job market it’s not so much about choosing the job that you want (as your comment suggests), but choosing the job that you are offered, if you are lucky enough to be offered any. I would hope that hiring committees are sensitive to this fact. There are many people out there who would love a TT position w/ research expectations, but who are not offered one and, rather than leaving the profession, take a permanent/semi-permanent teaching position. In any case, I guess this is something that could be explained in a cover letter, but I would hope that members of hiring committees aren’t (falsely) attributing preferences to candidates on the basis of the job that they happen to hold a particular time!!

    Reply
  4. love

    just anecdotal but i have a colleague who graduated from a very prestigious program in continental philosophy. are current employer is mostly unknown r2. they stay on the job market and their experience has been they get far less first round interviews since getting this job. their suspicion, and i don’t think they’re wrong, is that part of this is simply the change in letterhead on cover letters.
    obviously part of the problem is that these are essentially the only jobs available so you can’t really not take them. however, i do think they can be dead end jobs depending on where you end up. surely the temporary positions at more prestigious universities present a better opportunity to climb, but it looks increasingly like lectureships are places to get stuck for a very long time. (not to mention the teaching demands of these positions are not conducive to research)
    universities know this and are creating internal promotion structures for lecturers so that they don’t have to open tenure lines and convert lines.

    Reply

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