Adjunct Activists in the Sciences: Missing in Action

by Christopher Cumo

Science may be remarkable not for Superstring Theory or
gene splicing but for the obliviousness of academics in the
sciences to the rise of casual labor in academe. Science has
no Cary Nelson. Stephen Jay Gould, Brian Greene and Jared
Diamond let their science do their talking. They have nothing
to say about labor conditions in the academy. The National
Science Foundation has no policy statement on the use of part-time
faculty and does not study the issue, admits Curtis Suplee,
NSF legislative and public affairs director. This inertia
typifies scientists of all ranks.

Walter Oechel, biology professor at San Diego State University,
draws no distinction between full and part-time science faculty;
both teach and do research but leave reform to others. Adjunct
scientists are inert not because they lack the interest or
the will but because “a lot of us are just too damn busy to
get involved in much of anything beyond our work and our families,” said Steven Ward, once a Visiting Assistant and Associate Professor at Harvard University and now chair of the anatomy department at Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine.

The marketplace pushes adjunct scientists to frenetic activity,
notes Richard Sayre, chair of Ohio State University’s Department
of Plant Biology. Competition for tenure-track jobs is keen,
and the scientist with the longest list of publications wins.
This publish-more-than-God imperative sequesters adjunct scientists in the laboratory between 50 and 70 hours a week. The implication is that humanities adjuncts can be activists because research consumes less of their time.

But is this so? The adjunct scientist who spends between
50 and 70 hours a week on research presumably teaches as well.
Ann Throckmorton, chair of Westminster College’s biology department, says science adjuncts teach lab-intensive courses which “consume much, much, much more time than lectures–writing lab exercises, preparing for the lab, grading lab books, etc.” Suppose an adjunct scientist teaches one course per semester which meets 3 hours per week with an additional lab hour. Although Throckmorton says that labs require more time to prepare than lectures, I’ll be conservative and assume as true Cary Nelson’s estimate in “What Hath English Wrought?” that for every hour in class an adjunct must spend “a rock bottom minimum” of 2 hours in preparation. The adjunct scientist in this example, then,
devotes 12 hours per week to teaching which, when added to
his lab hours, yields a work week between 62 and 82 hours.

But the National Center for Educational Statistics report
“Background Characteristics, Work Activities, and Compensation
of Faculty and Instructional Staff in Postsecondary Institutions:
Fall 1998” puts the average adjunct scientist’s work week
at 37.7 hours. According to the same report, a humanities
faculty member clocks an average of 35.1 hours per week. Even
full-time science faculty put in an average of only 54.4 hours
whereas full-time humanists work 51.9 hours. The bottom line
is that scientists and humanists, whether full or part-time,
work about the same number of hours.

More interesting is the assertion of Throckmorton and Beth
Wee, Biology Lab Supervisor at Tulane University, and an adjunct
in its departments of ecology and evolutionary biology and
of psychology, that scientific research differs qualitatively
from humanities research and that this difference explains
the lack of activism among science adjuncts. Humanists can
fit research and writing into life’s interstices, putting
their work aside as other activities dictate. Not so the sciences.
An experiment, once begun, has a momentum of its own and will
not cede ground to other activities. The adjunct scientist
cannot be both activist and researcher, and research is the
higher calling.

But not all science is experimental. In A Brief History
of Time Stephen Hawking writes that life in a wheelchair
does not hamper his science, for all his calculations are
in his mind. He performs no experiments. Much of theoretical
physics and all of mathematics do not rest on experimentation.
This being said, Marjorie Lynn, a union activist who teaches
English at Eastern Michigan University, had trouble recruiting
math adjuncts to join the faculty union.

Thus, Throckmorton and Wee’s explanation may hold for adjuncts
in experimental science but cannot account for the behavior
of adjunct scientists as a group. The lack of activism among
adjunct scientists, despite what scientists say, has less
to do with their research than with the fact that they don’t
consider their status permanent.

Science and math Ph.D.s take part-time positions while looking
for a postdoc or a tenure-track job at a research university,
notes Patricia Goldberg, who held a series of adjunct and
temporary positions before becoming a biology instructor at
the University of South Florida.

“If a part-time or temporary employee knows that they are
only going to be working in a job for a year or two there
is no point in investing energy in changing the condition
of that job,” she said.

Those who do not find an academic position can always leave
for a job in industry, notes Daniel Flath, math professor
at the University of South Alabama. Crop scientist Mark Campbell
took a $9,000 pay cut to come to Truman State University,
Missouri and knows other scientists who lost money by leaving
industry for academe. Scientists, full or part-time, are in
the academy by choice.

“I do it for fun,” said Albert Heinrich, who teaches astronomy
and math part-time at Kent State University, Stark Campus.

A member of the Brothers of Christian Instruction, a Catholic
order, he does not need the money from adjunct teaching to
survive and admits that he couldn’t subsist on part-time teaching
alone.

With his livelihood not at stake, Heinrich has no reason
to be an activist, and he isn’t alone. Frank Jordan is assistant
professor of biology at Loyola University and maintains adjunct
status at Tulane University to work with its graduate students.
Wee is both full-time and adjunct. Johannes Thewissen, perhaps
the expert on whale anatomy and evolution, is associate professor
of anatomy at NEOUCOM and adjunct assistant professor in Kent
State’s School of Biomedical Sciences.

“Many (but not all) of the adjuncts I know in the sciences
are otherwise gainfully employed elsewhere and do the adjunct
teaching for the love of it, or for the extra money, or to try out course ideas before using them at home,” said Andrew Petto, a biological anthropologist who taught nearly 20 years in adjunct and interim positions.

Now an editor at the National Center for Science Education,
he admits that he was active in union organizing only at the
University of Wisconsin, where adjunct teaching was his primary
income, and even in that union humanities adjuncts were more
numerous and more vocal than science adjuncts.

Moreover, activism may be out of step with the scientific temperament.

“Bottom line: it’s not their interest,” said Carolyn Cuff, associate professor of math at Westminster College.

Thewissen has never thought about the issue of activism despite
having grown up in Holland where, by his own admission, unions
are ubiquitous and everybody joins one.

“Mathematicians and scientists have a different style of
thinking than [faculty in the humanities],” said Victor Kutsenok,
chair of the math department at the University of Saint Francis,
Indiana. “That is why they do not feel comfortable in activism
and areas with too many or unpredictable factors and outcomes
or uncertain correlations.”

Marjorie Lynn sees in humanities adjuncts, by contrast, whose
“philosophical interests” that incline them toward activism.

They often do research in unions, notes Cuff, and find an
outlet for their intellectual interests in activism.

The implications are obvious. A lack of activism on the part
of adjuncts in the sciences is not due to the scientific temperament.
It isn’t the failure of science adjuncts to speak with one
voice. Instead, it is the fact that their silence is a tacit
affirmation of the status quo.

Temporary faculty are marginalized, in part, because scientists,
full- and part-time, have raised little protest. This is distressing
because science has enormous prestige, both in and out of
the academy; yet as a group scientists seem unwilling to use
their status to improve academic labor conditions.

Their inaction might not matter if science were an enclave
with only ephemeral ties to universities. But the reality
is otherwise. Philosophy, history and the rest of the humanities
are the disciplines in danger of becoming enclaves in the
academy. University administrators can ignore a critique of
part-time labor by Thomists, for they have long been on the
fringe of academe. A critique by physicists and Thomists would
send a tremor through universities nationwide.