Blaming Scientists for the "Adjunct Problem"

by Chris Cumo RAMAN SUNDRUM BREATHES easily in the rarefied air of theoretical physics. He is a postdoc at Stanford University where, in collaboration with Princeton physicist Lisa Kendall, he has proposed that Einstein's General Relativity predicts the existence of an extra dimension. We are familiar with space and time, which are really a single dimension according to Einstein, but this extra dimension is infinite and beyond the scope of our senses. If Sundrum is right, we inhabit an infinitely tiny dimension of the universe, where we experience but a fraction of the forces at play in the cosmos. The idea is wild, but that does not matter to Sundrum because he enjoys his work. Therein lies the problem: most scientists, even those in tenuous postdoctoral positions, are satisfied with the status quo. What adjuncts in the humanities decry as a crisis of underemployment, scientists see as an opportunity for research and publication. Scientists and humanists do not inhabit the same world, C. P. Snow observed in The Two Cultures, and this fact makes rapprochement difficult. Without a shared vision, the job market will continue to frustrate humanists and please scientists. Robert Weisbuch, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, is painfully aware of this divide. A former English professor, he recalls in "Six Proposals to Revive the Humanities" serving a year as an interim dean at a research university. Whenever scientists scheduled a meeting with him, their sole purpose was to extract money for some grandiose project, whereas faculty in the humanities came to him for consolation about the low esteem of their discipline. A friend who was president of another research university told Weisbuch that when he announced the availability of funds for new projects, scientists responded with more than 50 proposals whereas those in the humanities had none. They hoped only for enough money to continue existing programs. The sciences have a cachet that the humanities lack, and everyone in academe knows it. Elizabeth Winzeler, a Stanford postdoc, is learning how drugs affect specific genes, knowledge that will lead to designer drugs: medications that are tailored to a person's genotype. Her work made Winzeler the lead author of an article in Science, the Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Winzeler is not the only postdoc making headlines. At George Washington University, Brian Richard discovered that the wrist bones of a three-million-year-old hominid prevented the hands from bending backwards. Chimps and gorillas also have this feature, suggesting that three million years ago, hominids walked on their knuckles, as chimps and gorillas do, at least in infancy before learning to walk upright. Richard's work raises the question of when hominids first began to crawl, as human infants do. Is crawling rather than upright gait the signature trait of human evolution? This sort of research can land a postdoc on the tenure track. David Bradley investigated diabetes in graduate school but switched to research on the human brain after receiving his Ph.D. in physiology from the University of Southern California. The switch has paid off. In four years as a postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology, he published two articles as the lead author in Nature and one in Science, articles that won him an assistant professorship at the University of Chicago in 1998. Sometimes careers in corporate America are more enticing than those in academe. Cheri Wiggs was a neuroscience postdoc at the National Institutes of Health for six years, during which she published 20 articles. "I got to do what I wanted," she told the Chronicle of Higher Education. At the end of the sixth year, she parlayed her experience into full-time work as a grant reviewer for the National Institutes of Health. The story is similar for Susan Fitzpatrick, a neurology postdoc at Yale who has translated her research into work as a spokesperson for a spinal-chord research center, the Executive Director of a foundation for brain research, and a program officer for a foundation that funds biomedical research. The most attractive options may exist in computer science. In 1998, the salary of an assistant professor of computer science started between $65,000 and $70,000, a figure that rivals what full professors in the humanities earn at some colleges and universities. But these numbers pale beside the $100,000 plus stock options that are the average in the industry, according to the Computing Research Association. In Washington, the average computer scientist in 1998 earned $295,000 including perks. The flight of computer scientists from academe has left Carnegie Mellon and Princeton unable to fill positions. Saginaw Valley State University has been unable to hire an assistant professor of computer science since 1997. When the search committee tried to interview two candidates that year, both had already taken jobs in industry. In 1998, Ohio State University could only hire four computer scientists when it had hoped to fill seven slots. That year the University of Washington hired four computer scientists, only to lose five others to the corporate world. Likewise, the University of Illinois at Urbana hired five computer scientists but lost five others. What is a surplus of labor in the humanities is a dearth in the sciences. There is no crisis for scientists, many of whom are awash in money. There is little money for humanists, who face a crisis of underemployment. Scientists can choose from opportunities both in and out of academe, whereas too many scholars in the humanities see a world barren of possibilities. Postdocs should be the natural allies of adjuncts in the humanities, but are instead confident of climbing the academic ladder or dazzling the corporate world. With scientists and humanists so far apart, there exists little hope of restructuring the academy so that more humanists win the money and status that scientists have for so long enjoyed.