Why are there so few visiting (research) associate professor position postings? The field is mathematics (including applied and computational mathematics).
While there are plenty of visiting assistant professor position on sites like MathJobs.org, I rarely see visiting associate professor positions, especially in USA. Is it because departments do not advertise these positions? Or that they just don't have such positions? In either case, how would one look for such a position?
At many research universities, &quot;visiting assistant professor&quot; actually means &quot;postdoc with teaching duties&quot;. In other words, they are postdoc positions paid for by the department and financed at least in part through the revenues that come in through teaching.
The positions are not called &quot;postdoc&quot; because it is a &quot;faculty position&quot; so that the holder of the position is entitled to teach certain courses that only &quot;faculty&quot; can teach, and so that certain visa rules apply for candidates who come from abroad. The requirement for it to be a &quot;faculty&quot; position then prompted universities to call them &quot;X professor&quot;. But because these are not tenure-track positions, one needs a different prefix in front of &quot;professor&quot; from the usual &quot;assistant&quot; entry-level position, and so universities chose &quot;visiting assistant&quot; to make it clear that the position is temporary. &quot;Visiting&quot; in this context is not meant to imply that that person has a position somewhere else and is only temporarily &quot;visiting while traveling&quot;.
Given all of this, it is clear (hopefully) why there are no &quot;visiting associate professor&quot; positions.