What does a "visiting writer" mean?
From wiki page about Michael Crichton":
In 1988, Crichton was a visiting writer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
What does exactly the term visiting writer mean?
Does it mean he was there on a visit once or twice?
Or does it mean that he was there a permanent visitor for the whole year(1988)?
Or is it the some kind of a contract with the MIT? E.g. to give lectures on writing for the whole year 1988 to the students?
Thanks for the clarification.
Solution 1:
The term is context specific. As evidence of such, this is what I found when I tried to ascertain what Michael Crichton's position was as a Visiting Writer at MIT in 1988.
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Harper Collins' biography for Crichton is the most factually accurate, in that I can find no evidence to the contrary. It says:
He taught courses in anthropology at Cambridge University and writing at MIT.
- In this case, Visiting Writer does not mean that Crichton was an MIT Visiting Artist. The MIT Visiting Artist program does include writers, see "literature". However, the roster from the program's inception in 1961 through 2013 does not include Crichton.
- Crichton may have been a Visiting Writer for one of the sections of the MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies. I could not find any mention of his name associated with the program when I searched the site. I also searched MIT's publicly accessible content using the MIT custom Google search engine (the only option offered), but found nothing associating Crichton with any writing programs at MIT.
Solution 2:
I happened to find this thread while doing a little research for my MIT dept (the descendent of the old MIT Writing Program), and the most authoritative/detailed answer I can find comes from the 1998 "Reports to the President", wherein every department writes up their activities from the prior 12 months. On page 121 (PDF) it reads:
Two completely new and highly successful presentations occurred in the past year. One was Course 21S47, "The Art of Revision," an intensive six-unit writing seminar taught by author and motion picture director Michael Crichton and jointly offered by Concourse and the MIT Writing Program.
I might check with the Institute Archives to see if there's a course catalog with the description for 21S47, but "21S" refers to a course of study leading to the Bachelor of Science in Humanities and Science.