The Decline and Fall of the "Adjunct Model"

by Christopher Cumo
AS MANY AS 46 percent of postsecondary faculty are part-time,
remarked Jane Buck, AAUP president at its annual meeting last
June. Richard Moser, AAUP associate secretary, decries the
corporate university for defining education as a commodity it buys at lowest cost by subcontracting adjuncts to do the dirty work. Robert Weisbuch, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, writes of “thirty years of unemployment and underemployment” enveloping the humanities in “a culture of defeatism.” Elizabeth Radcliffe, executive director of the American Philosophical Society, laments the desperation of a generation of philosophers in search of full-time work. Adjuncts circulate stories of their colleagues holding office hours in the beds of a pick-up trucks.
The irony is that the adjunct wave may already have crested.
The debate is shifting from the vilification of the contingent-labor
system to the creation of full-time teaching opportunities.
The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation has taken
a tentative step in this direction, awarding some forty two-year
academic fellowships since 1999. But these fellowships are at best a piecemeal solution, for at the end of two years, recipients are on their own. Even if some do land on the tenure track, as Weisbuch claims, what happens to the rest? The Foundation’s answer seems to be to coax them into corporate America, but this doesn’t solve the problem of part-time and temporary labor; it is merely a tacit recognition of the status quo in academe.
The status quo isn’t good enough for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which will award $1 million each to twenty scientists who agree to spend four years teaching undergraduates. The awards may turn the traditional logic of the academy on its head. Rather than allow scientists to scurry off to their labs, leaving the teaching to part-time and temporary instructors, the Institute is enticing them to consider teaching, and teaching undergraduates at that, a priority.
The notion that teaching requires a full-time commitment from its practitioners, who must be integral rather than ancillary members of a university, may reconfigure the academy. The University of Vermont uses an Institute grant to pair junior biology majors with a faculty member who oversees their research. Mentors aid them in writing grant applications, submitting articles for publication, and presenting their research to a gathering of faculty and students.
“Our students aren’t just in a lab with an advisor telling them what to do,” says Judith Van Houten, assistant professor of biology at the University. “They really have to think through their projects and make them work.”
This collaboration between scholar and student would be impossible in a university that defines education as a commodity that can be delivered part-time. Teaching has at last become too
important to leave to adjuncts.
“Teaching is a major part of why we’re here,” says Tory Hagen, a biochemist at Oregon State University. “I consider undergraduates a major, not peripheral, part of my lab.”
Thanks to this view, the university now weighs teaching, and mentoring in particular, with publications in granting tenure and promotion.
“Howard Hughes Medical Institute seeks to develop a
cadre of scientist-educators who will become leaders in undergraduate teaching as well as research,” says its president Thomas Cech. “The Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professors
and their teaching strategies will serve as models for fundamental
change both on their own campuses and elsewhere, helping to support and encourage research universities in their efforts to enhance undergraduate education.”
The awards are only a fraction of the $50.3 million the Institute
will grant to further undergraduate teaching in biology this year and of the $476 million it has given colleges and universities since 1988.
“Clearly Hughes stands for high-level research, but we are also saying that we also equally value high-level education,” says Peter Bruns, vice president for grants and special programs at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. “The idea is that institutions will say it’s okay to spend your time on this kind of thing.”
Research universities are not alone in benefiting from this largesse. The money has allowed Canisius, Harvey Mudd, Haverford, Kenyon, and Occidental Colleges to hire new assistant professors, not adjuncts, postdocs, or temporary lecturers, in bioengineering and computational biology.
Put simply, there is no humanities program as ambitious as
the Institute’s. In fact, granting programs within the humanities
often work at cross purposes. The National Humanities Center,
for example, offers research fellowships, allowing faculty to leave the classroom for a year. The home university has little alternative but to hire an adjunct or a temporary lecturer to shoulder the teaching load that year.
Perhaps the time has come for the humanities to recognize that they can enrich the academy through both research and teaching, but not if they do either part-time. The time has come, notes Weisbuch, for the humanities “to understand their capacities.”