From 1885 to 1886 he completed graduate school and finished with a master's degree; he was subsequently appointed to be a teacher of Greek philology and classical history.
In 1893 Fairclough left Canada and became an associate professor of Greek and Latin at Stanford University in California, where he spent the rest of his entire career.
He intensified his studies at Johns Hopkins University, where the classical philologists Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and Minton Warren, as well as the Sanskrit researcher Maurice Bloomfield, greatly influenced him.
Fairclough was also a guest professor for Latin and Greek at Harvard University, and simultaneously president of the American Philological Association; as which he held an official speech titled "The Classics and our Twentieth-century Poets", which was printed in the following year.
Three years after his death, his biography was published posthumously under the title "Warming Both Hands", in which he describes his career and in particular his experiences during the First World War.