Editor’s Note: The main subject of this investigative report is a full-time visiting faculty member at Northern Kentucky University who was granted anonymity due to concerns about professional retaliation. The Northerner has verified the individual’s identity and employment status. Their account has been corroborated wherever possible through publicly available university records. The decision to grant anonymity was not made lightly and was necessary to allow an important conversation to be reported fully and honestly.
Professor A has taught at Northern Kentucky University for over a decade. They love the campus, the students and the commute. They are, by any measure, a fixture of this campus.
Despite this, NKU calls them a visitor.
That is not a metaphor. It is their official job title, Full-Time Visiting Faculty, a designation shared by 50 of NKU’s 978 academic faculty members. The title was updated by the Faculty Senate in 2024, replacing the previous label “Non-Tenure-Track Temporary.” This change was purely in name; the terms of the employment status remained unchanged.
But still, Professor A signs a new one-year contract every fall. They still have no path to a permanent position. In over ten years, they have never received a single performance-based raise. Their only two pay increases have come in the form of university-wide and across-the-board raises.
They are also quietly looking for another job. “I could cry,” They said, “because I love NKU.”
To understand the position Professor A occupies, it helps to understand how NKU classifies its faculty.
The university broadly divides its academic faculty into two camps: those on a tenure track and those who are not. Tenure-track faculty hold ranks such as Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, or Professor. Their positions come with the institutional protections tenure is designed to provide, job security and academic freedom.
All other faculty fall under a more complicated set of categories. The most relevant distinction for this story is between two types of full-time, non-tenure-track faculty: those on renewable contracts and those on temporary ones.
Full-time teaching faculty, the renewable group, hold multi-year contracts that lengthen over time.
After five years, an Assistant Teaching Professor becomes eligible for promotion to Associate Teaching Professor. After five more, promotion to Teaching Professor becomes possible. Their path, while separate from tenure, is still a linear, secure path.
Full-time visiting faculty have no such path.
According to the NKU Faculty Handbook, their appointments are “one-year, temporary, terminal appointments that can be repeated.” They carry a full course load. They attend faculty meetings. They perform, in nearly every practical sense, the same job as their renewable counterparts, but their contract expires every year, and nothing they do changes that.
In May 2024, the Faculty Senate voted to update these categories. The renewable group, formerly called “Non-Tenure-Track Renewable” faculty, became Full-Time Teaching Faculty. The temporary group, formerly called “Non-Tenure-Track Temporary” faculty, became Full-Time Visiting Faculty. The Board of Regents approved the changes that June.
Visiting faculty still hold one-year contracts. They still cannot accrue time toward tenure. The word “temporary” no longer appears in their title, but the handbook still uses it to describe their appointments. For Professor A, who had already spent nearly a decade at NKU when the change took effect, the new label did not feel like progress.
“Temporary, visiting, it means the same thing to me,” Professor A said. “When you visit your friend’s house, you’re not moving in.”
Note on scope: Part-time visiting faculty technically exist as a separate category under NKU’s classification system, but they represent a negligible portion of the workforce. Only one part-time visiting faculty member appeared on NKU’s books for 2025. The concerns at the center of this story belong to the full-time visiting faculty.
It is important to mention that “visiting” does not mean the same thing at every university. For instance, at the University of Cincinnati, visiting faculty are limited to 2-year terms and have an opportunity for review and promotion at the end of their term. The University of Kentucky, conversely, has a definition and set of parameters more similar to that of NKU
The Northerner reached out to Provost Diana McGil and received the following statement regarding Full-Time Visiting Faculty:
“NKU values the important contributions of visiting faculty, who play a critical role in supporting student learning and helping the university meet instructional needs across our programs.
As with many institutions nationally, faculty appointments and compensation structures are shaped by a variety of factors, including institutional needs, available resources, disciplinary differences, and long-term academic planning. NKU regularly reviews faculty staffing models to ensure they align with the university’s academic mission, student needs, and operational priorities.
The decision to update or change faculty titles or classifications is done through established institutional processes. Most recently, faculty initiated and completed the faculty handbook process to retitle non-tenure track temporary faculty (at three different levels) to visiting faculty (also at three different levels).
When renewable faculty positions (tenure track or non-tenure track) become available, they are filled through established faculty search processes. Current visiting faculty may choose to apply and if so, are considered alongside other candidates. And it is common that a visiting faculty member is hired into the renewable role.
The university continues to evaluate staffing needs within the context of its commitment to students, faculty support, and responsible stewardship of resources.”
Of the roughly 50 full-time visiting faculty, 27 earn exactly the same salary: $43,500. That group includes faculty who arrived last August and faculty who have been here for over two decades. Loyalty, experience and years of service don’t appear in the math.
It is what one faculty member involved in these conversations called “inversion compression.” In most professional environments, compensation grows with time. At NKU, for visiting faculty, it simply doesn’t. The floor and the ceiling are the same number for many, and that number has barely moved.
The exceptions to the $43,500 baseline aren’t surprising. Some visiting faculty, particularly those hired recently for high-demand fields like computer science and data analytics, earn significantly more.
There are visiting faculty hired within the past year who earn $70,000. That figure reflects market forces, not a lack of institutional generosity, and it is worth noting that NKU isn’t wrong to compete for talent in competitive fields. But it throws the stagnation of the longer-serving faculty into focus. A professor nine months into the job can earn $26,500 more per year than a colleague who has spent decades building the same institution.
For Professor A, the $43,500 figure isn’t some grand concept. It is a salary that they describe plainly as below a livable wage, and that is before accounting for healthcare. Being enrolled in a high-deductible plan, they estimate their annual out-of-pocket medical costs for their family to be somewhere between $6,000 and $7,000.
Last year, NKU President Dr. Cady Short-Thompson issued a three percent raise, the first broad compensation increase visiting faculty had seen in years. Professor A is grateful for it. They are also clear-eyed about what it means.
“You have to change the base salary, number one,” They said. “Then we can talk about raises.”
The structural problem seems to lie in the lack of opportunity afforded to these faculty. Professor A’s supervisor has asked for a promotion for them as a visiting faculty member to the renewable track countless times over the years. It has never been granted.
The handbook is not ambiguous about why. Visiting appointments are designed to be temporary. The university’s position, as Professor A understands it, isn’t that they are undeserving.
“Their argument is, well, then we have to keep you,” They said. “Well, you should.”
The irony is not lost on Professor A. Their courses maintain high enrollment every semester, generating revenue for the university. The case for a long-term contract seems fairly reasonable.
Professor A does not feel entirely without allies. They described several colleagues who have gone to bat for them at times and offered support. All this being said, there is no formal advocacy body specifically for visiting faculty at NKU. Any informal network that does exist is small and largely invisible to the broader campus community.
“I don’t feel heard,” They said. “I don’t feel acknowledged by the people who should.”
The question they keep returning to is a simple one: who, exactly, has the authority to fix this, and do they know it needs fixing?
Professor A is not trying to cause trouble. They are trying to be honest, which is, they point out, what a professor is supposed to do.
What they foresee, if nothing changes, is pretty straightforward: people leave. Not in protest or with any fanfare, they just quietly find somewhere else that will have them. Their institutional knowledge/legacy walks out with them. The students notice. The enrollment numbers in affected courses start to tell a story that administrators will eventually have to read.
“I’m constantly looking for another job,” They said. “And it hurts my heart.”
NKU is not unique in this. The reliance on contingent faculty, non-tenure-track instructors of all kinds, is a nationwide trend in higher education, driven by cost pressures and enrollment volatility. But the particulars at NKU carry their own weight. A group of faculty who have given years, in some cases decades, to this institution are classified as visitors. They are told, year after year, that their position is temporary. After a long enough time, it’s understandable that some faculty might believe it.
Professor A still doesn’t. They still love the campus. They still tell students to come here. They still knock on wood when they talk about next year. Positive changes have been made, and they acknowledge that.
But they are also still looking for greener pastures elsewhere, out of necessity. And NKU, for all the positive changes it has made in recent years, has not yet given them a reason to stop.