All Adjuncts Should Be Scientists

by Chris Cumo

THE CRISIS OF underemployment for adjuncts stems from the collapse of the humanities. Ernie Benjamin of the American Association for University Professors notes that in the fall of 1998,
53 percent of English faculty were adjuncts compared to 32 percent in physics and chemistry. But numbers are only part of the story. The chemist who picks up an extra class at the local college
often has a full-time job in industry, whereas the literature part-timer, according to Benjamin, has nowhere but the academy to turn for work.

The adjuncts I know are all historians, philosophers and literati, and their plight will not improve until they become scientists. That is, the humanities must sprout branches on the tree of science. People who have traditionally thought of themselves as part of the humanities now need to see the humanities, in turn, as part of science. This process is already underway in history, which
in some camps is little more than biological determinism. If the past has grand laws, they are embedded in the growth and migration of populations, the domestication and spread of crops and livestock, and the surge of epidemics.

Alfred Crosby, professor of American studies, history and geography at the University of Texas at Austin, may be the leading practitioner of this history. In The Columbian Exchange, he writes of the European triumph over Native Americans in Darwinian terms. Europe had for centuries before 1492 traded with Asia and Africa, and with merchants came microbes that killed the vulnerable and spared the resistant. Additionally, because they had evolved no resistance, Native Americans died en masse
from the smallpox that arrived with Columbus and his ilk. With disease leading the way, Europeans conquered a continent and spread American corn, potatoes and tobacco around the globe.

Physiologist Jared Diamond at UCLA enlarges Crosby’s argument in Guns, Germs, and Steel, which won a 1998 Pulitzer Prize. Diamond roots the triumph of Europeans in their adoption of Near Eastern wheat, barley, and peas, all self-pollinators that breed true, unlike cross-pollinating Indian corn; and of cattle, which infected Europeans with smallpox, tuberculosis and measles and so
evolved in them the resistance that natives of the Americas, Australia and Polynesia, bereft of cattle, never developed.

This brand of history has blurred the distinction between history and biology to the extent that Ernest Mayr, who taught at Harvard for half a century, could write in “What Is Biology?” that
biology is the science that creates historical narratives of species, implying that the history of the human species is but one type of biology. Diamond makes explicit this implication in Guns,
Germs, and Steel, by defining history as a science. This unity of science and history may explain why Diamond, Mayr, and Stephen Jay Gould have all written histories with flair and popular appeal.

The reduction of history to biology is paralleled in philosophy and literature, both of which may be subsumed by computer science, as Heidegger foresaw in 1966. In his essay “Computing Machines and
Intelligence,” which can be found in The Collected Works of A. M. Turing, British computer scientist Alan Turing equates the human and the computer. Suppose that a person is in one room, a computer in a second, and another person in a third. The person in the first room must identify the occupants of the other rooms but can do so only by asking them questions. If his questions elicit conversations of equal complexity from both occupants, conversations sustained over months or years, he would have to admit that humans and computers are indistinguishable.

In Turing’s view, the human and the computer are identical in the important respect that both use an algorithm, a methodical procedure for solving problems. The product of our mental algorithm is language, and so the reading and writing of literature are distinctly human activities only in the sense that the speed with which the human brain processes information trumps that of the computer, at least for now. That is, no computer can yet pass the Turing Test, though some can compose fugues and checkmate Gary Kasparov.

Perhaps most striking is Tulane physicist Frank Tipler’s claim in The Physics of Immortality that theology, once the loftiest of the humanities, is merely a branch of physics and that the
21st-century theologian will need a Ph.D. in particle physics if she hopes to approach God. Theologians have, for example, stressed omniscience as an attribute of God, but, according to Tipler, omniscience will only be possible at the end of the universe, when all matter and energy converge at a single instance of time and space: the Omega Point, which Tipler equates with the God
of the monotheistic religions. The Omega Point may then resurrect all of us as computer emulations, a logic that flows from Tipler’s metaphor of God as a computer with an infinite capacity to store
and process information. Time, of course, will no longer exist, and so we will be immortal by definition, not by virtue of possessing a soul. The soul has no place in Tipler’s theological physics.

Students may object to these ideas, and in defending their objections they will reassert the relevance of the humanities. They will ask anew what it means to be human, to fashion culture,
to define justice or truth or beauty. The humanities, by joining the sciences, will again claim the issues of the day. The humanities will be seductive, and the humanistic scientist who teaches
them will be too valuable to her university to be an adjunct.