Every year dozens of professors come to Harvard from institutions as close as MIT and as far as Australia to hold named and unnamed lectureships, to use the University’s library facilities, or to fill the shoes of regular Faculty members as they take sabbaticals or retire.

This year’s more than 64 visiting professors descended on campus, and even after the first stumbling block—securing a position—they face a variety of challenges: finding housing in a competitive real estate market, uprooting family, and adapting to Harvard’s teaching model.

Coming to Cambridge

Unlike the process by which a scholar gains a permanent appointment at a university, word of possible visiting positions circulates through a world-wide grapevine.

“The search process for visiting professor is very different from hiring a regular professor,” said Robert David ‘KC’ Johnson ’88, a visiting professor in the spring term from Brooklyn College, a division of the City University of New York.

Though they are transient, such instructors play an important role. Even though visiting professors may come and go in just six months, former History Department Chair Akira Iriye said that his appointment of Johnson and other visiting professors was “one of his proudest accomplishments while I was chair.”

In many cases, Harvard departments look to people they know and trust. Johnson, for example, is no stranger—he graduated from the college and, in the early ’90s, taught here as a graduate student and post doctoral fellow.

This spring, Johnson will teach a lecture course in constitutional history, a seminar in inter-American relations, and a section of the History sophomore tutorial. In a bizarre twist, he will be living in Quincy House—where he lived as an undergraduate.

Visiting From Afar

Harvard also attracts visiting faculty from further afield. This year visitors spring from as far as Australia and Germany.

Professor Craig Gotsman, a visiting professor of computer science from Israel, said that most visiting professors must take on the initiative to contact someone within a university themselves.

“The visiting professor usually contacts someone—a colleague, most likely—who would be willing to support the application,” Gotsman said.

Gotsman’s link to Harvard was Steven J. Gortler, Goldman Professor of Computer Science, with whom Gotsman had collaborated before and who aided Gotsman throughout the application process.

Many of these faculty members have to move not only themselves, but their entire families as well.

Visiting professor of physics Bernard Julia, from Ecole Normale Supérieure in France, brings his wife and four children.