The Science of Silence

by Amy Rosenberg

In the middle of the 19th century, just a couple of years after the formation of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Alexander Dallas Bache remarked, “While science is without organization, it is with out power.” He was in a position to know; Bache was great-grandson to the nation’s preeminent man of organization, Benjamin Franklin. He was also one of the founders of AAAS, which started in 1848 with 87 members. Today, the organization boasts an international membership of 138,000, with 275 affiliated societies comprised of over 7 million members. It publishes the widely-respected weekly journal Science, and presents major annual awards for scientific achievement.

A non-profit, AAAS employs over 300 staff members, and pulls
in over $6 million dollars yearly in membership dues alone
from its college faculty and higher education members. Science’s
advertising revenue, donations, and its fee-based Web site,
“Science Online” earn the AAAS over $2.5 million yearly. In 2000, the organization earned more than $1 million from library Web site subscriptions to Science, alone.

All of this suggests that the corollary to Bache’s statement is true: with organization, science is powerful. A large organization with power can choose to leverage that power in many ways. So what does AAAS do to support one of the biggest underclasses of the scientific community, the 300,000 or so adjuncts, temporary
faculty, and part-timers who teach in the nation’s colleges
and universities? Well, nothing.

The adjunct issue in general has become such a visible factor
in higher education that other large professional academic
organizations like the Modern Language Association (MLA) and
the American Historical Association (AHA) have taken very
public stances on the use of non-tenured faculty. The MLA,
for example, holds that: “The practice of hiring numerous
adjunct faculty members year after year to teach courses required
of large numbers of undergraduates undermines professional
and educational standards and academic freedom.”

Having published a report about the use of adjuncts in English
departments, the organization recommends that departments
“establish an appropriate limit” on the number of adjuncts they hire and that it grant adjuncts the same benefits, merit awards, and departmental perks that tenure and tenure-track faculty enjoy.

The AHA, along with the Organization of American Historians
(OAH), established a joint committee to advise on adjunct-related
issues. It published the following statement: “The Organization
of American Historians and the American Historical Association
should publicize existing statements of best practices in
employment of history faculty, and both organizations should
commit themselves to encourage the acceptance of these standards….The OAH and AHA further resolve to support the efforts of the joint committee of both organizations to formulate quantitative minimum standards for part-time employment.”

But to date the AAAS has not instituted a policy regarding
the employment of non-tenure-track faculty. It has conducted
no surveys, published no reports, collected no data about the status of such instructors. While its last annual meeting featured a workshop entitled “Career Alternatives for Scientists,” none of its sessions focused on the issues confronting those who are neither looking for “alternatives” to higher ed science teaching, nor finding “mainstream” university positions. In short, the organization has a blind spot when it comes to the non-tenure-track professorate. Given the fact that this group is a large and continually growing
one–increasing at a rate of about one percent per year-AAAS’s
refusal to acknowledge it as one with urgent needs, or even
to see it at all, is problematic, at best.

That’s not to say that the scientific community in general
ignores the issue. Several smaller organizations–many of which
are affiliated with AAAS–have published their own statements
about adjunct faculty use and employment conditions. The Mathematics Association of America published a statement which says that “Mathematics programs, over time, should decrease their
use of adjunct or part-time faculty and avoid excessive reliance
on such faculty. A larger percentage of full-time faculty
can improve the overall quality of student advising and instruction.”

The American Philosophical Association maintains that “In
circumstances in which an institution has legitimate needs
for a specialized class of faculty in part-time or fractional time positions, the institution should have policies that provide for their long-term stability.” With these less powerful scientific groups urging the need to examine the adjunct issue, why does the world’s largest science association remain silent?

Give the folks there a call to find out and you’ll speak with a pleasant, intelligent, responsive group of people–who just don’t seem know. Two individuals in the news and information
department said they’re not sure if the organization has a
policy statement about adjuncts. Renuka Chander, membership
director, explained the breakdown of member demographics and
expressed surprise at the low percentage of adjuncts. Al Teich,
director of science policy, when asked whether AAAS has a
statement about the hiring of adjuncts, said, “Not that I know of. I’m pretty sure we don’t.” And Alan Leshner, the association’s new CEO, was unavailable for comment.

The reasons for the organization’s detachment from the issue
may begin with that general shoulder-shrugging–there seems
to be a sense there that it’s not something the organization’s
leaders and policymakers much thinks about. Or the indifference
could come from the lack of adjunct representation in the
organization, that low percentage that Chander commented on.
The AAAS’s membership is 61 percent academic (it’s open to
all, so those who are not academics are lawyers, journalists,
K-12 teachers, medical professionals, ordinary folk with an
interest in science, and others). Of those who are in academe,
60 percent are tenured faculty, 14 percent are tenure-track,
6 percent are post-docs-and just 2 percent are adjuncts. It’s
worth noting that the MLA has similar membership ratios (though
a much smaller collective overall), and still it formulates
policy on the employment of temporary faculty and graduate
students.

Teich speculates that AAAS may attract so few adjuncts “because
people who need Science [AAAS’s weekly journal, which is included
in the price of membership] are the ones involved in research
rather than teaching. The university doesn’t usually give time to adjuncts to do research.” Another reason could be the price of membership: it’s $115 per year, with no discount for non-tenured faculty, though on average the non-tenured adjunct faculty earn about 50 percent less per course than the tenured science faculty do.

But the biggest reason may be that adjuncts choose to stay away because they perceive the organization’s lack of action on their behalf and lack of interest in their situation. As Teich puts it, “It wouldn’t be the kind of association that if I were an adjunct I would look to for leadership in this area.” Perhaps not surprisingly, non-tenured faculty agree. John Arnason, visiting associate professor of geology at the State University of New York, Albany, has been “visiting” for five years. (“People always ask me where I’m visiting
from,” he says. “I’m not visiting from anywhere.”). He belongs to the American Geophysical Union and the Geological Society of America, both affiliates of AAAS, but not to AAAS itself.

“I would be more inclined to join if it had a program for non-tenured faculty. It would be helpful, it would make a difference. It would show that they recognize this group of scientists.”

Chris Haynes also would be more likely to pay AAAS’s membership
fees if the association advocated for non-tenured faculty. A part-time professor of geography at two institutions in California’s state university system, a representative for lecturers and temporary faculty on one of Humboldt State University’s executive committees, and a member of a local contract bargaining team, Haynes echoes Teich’s speculation about why non-tenured
faculty are not joining AAAS: “Maybe because they don’t believe those organizations are dealing with these issues,” he says.

But Teich stresses that adjuncts have not, on the whole,
asked the organization for support: “It’s not clear to me that there’s anyone who’s demanded anything like this from us. If there were people within AAAS who felt strongly about this and they brought it to our council they’d probably get a favorable reception, a sympathetic reception,” he says.

In other words, adjuncts don’t join AAAS because the organization
doesn’t do anything for them. But the organization doesn’t do anything for them because adjuncts don’t join–or if they do, they don’t have the presence and cohesion to make demands for support. The question is whether a low-paid, overworked,
underrepresented labor force can come together to request
the creation of policy statements in support of their rights, or whether a well-monied, well-connected, influential organization
should take the first step toward such policy-making.

If one considers AAAS’s take on postdocs, it seems there’s
hope for change. Postdoctorate students have their own special
set of concerns as an underclass, including extremely low
pay, long working hours, and an ambiguous status in university
hierarchy. The association offers postdocs a discounted rate–membership for them is $90 as opposed to $115. AAAS also sponsors an on-line postdoctorate network, with its own advisory board, which connects postdocs with one another, gives them a forumfor discussing career development issues, and offers advice
on making it through the postdoc years. This network is part
of a larger online initiative called Science’s “Next Wave,” a weekly publication which offers a range of career development services aimed at all scientists- there’s even a collection of articles in “Next Wave’s” archives gathered under the heading “Is Tenure Obsolete?”.

But the fact of the matter is that postdocs are researchers, and the AAAS sees itself as an organization for researchers more than an organization for teachers. One wonders if this self-conception is in the association’s best interest, since AAAS places a huge emphasis on the importance of science education–among its mission statements is the call to “advance education in science.” Yet how far can science education advance if large numbers of those doing the educating are being ignored? And for how long can AAAS remain a powerful organization if the pool of scientists who make up one of the organization’s largest membership categories–tenured faculty–is shrinking?

For AAAS to continue to live up to Alexander Dallas Bache’s vision-that of a scientific community organizing to achieve power–it’s going to have to confront adjunct issues. The results of not doing so–of not organizing fully-will catch up to it sooner or later. As growing numbers of non-tenured faculty feel greater discontent, the general crisis concerning adjuncts in the academy receives increasing publicity, and the quality of science education faces greater threats.