Adjunct Award Winners
[private]by Christopher Cumo
2003 was quite a year. Part-time, adjunct and temporary faculty used their research as bait to reel in the big fish, and landed some of the country’s most prestigious fellowships. The diversity of interests and achievements of 2003’s award winners defies easy summation. One winner is a physicist whose research takes her to within a few millionths of a degree above the theoretical minimum temperature, and to the ultimate stuff of reality. Another is a filmmaker who explores the connection between computers and human consciousness. A third studies witchcraft as an attempt to rethink Christianity in the Late Middle Ages. What unites these three and the other award winners profiled this issue is an existence off the tenure-track, and a passion for research that redefines the way we think about matter and energy, our own consciousness, and the past. This is research that pushes forward the frontier of knowledge as it brushes aside the old stereotypes about contingent faculty. The scholars and artists profiled in this issue prove that talent and tenure are not synonymous.
Howard Pflanzer – Fulbright Fellow
Howard Pflanzer, who teaches part-time at the City College Center for Worker Education, Queensborough Community College and Long Island University, never thought of applying for a Fulbright Fellowship until a woman asked to sit in on his theatre course at the City University of New York (CUNY). She was a professor of English at the University of Bombay, India on a Fulbright in the U.S. and encouraged him to apply for a similar position. Two months past deadline, Pflanzer called the Fulbright Foundation to learn that a slot was still open in India. He completed the application in haste only to have it held up in the mail by the Anthrax scare following the September 11th terrorist attack.
The inauspicious timing did not derail Pflanzer: he spent from January to June 2003 on a Fulbright Fellowship at the National Center for the Performing Arts in Bombay. There he lectured, taught playwriting and directed his new play, The Terrorist. Set in a small Midwestern town, the play explores the psychological effects of terrorism on a group of ordinary Americans pursued by a government agent bent on uncovering a “terrorist conspiracy.” The challenge for Pflanzer was to channel the sensibilities of the American Midwest through Indian actors with a realism that audiences in Bombay would appreciate.
“I wasn’t sure I could pull it off,” admits Pflanzer.
But he did with a success that typified his stay in India, where he had to adjust not to culture but status. An adjunct for 12 years he had grown accustomed to careening around the colleges of CUNY to piece together a nightmare schedule. But in India professors welcomed him as a colleague and students esteemed him as a playwright and teacher. Pflanzer was a celebrity in India, where two performances of The Terrorist sold out and reporters from several newspapers interviewed him.
“Being a Fulbright Scholar in India was one of the great experiences of my life,” says Pflanzer.
He knows how lucky he is. Only five percent of Fulbright winners in the last 30 years have been contingent faculty, cautions Pflanzer. Of the seven CUNY faculty who won a Fulbright in 2003, he was the lone adjunct.
“Lots of part-time faculty don’t even know they can apply,” he says.
Pflanzer has also won a New York Foundation for the Arts Playwriting Fellowship, two grants from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, a Puffin Foundation Grant, a grant from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture and was co-winner of a Media Arts Grant from the National Endowment of the Arts. Pflanzer has been a writer-in residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Sweet Briar and the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois.
To be sure, Pflanzer would like to translate these awards into a tenure-track job, but one senses his pride at having scraped together a livelihood as an adjunct. He serves on the International Committee of the Professional Staff Congress, the union of staff and faculty of all ranks at CUNY, and in Fall 2002 chaired a panel on contingent labor with longtime CUNY activist Vinnie Tirelli. Playwright and proletarian, Howard Pflanzer is the fusion of talent and grit that marks the heights to which adjuncts can scale.
Peter Shippy – NEA Fellow
In December 2002 Peter Shippy, a poet and part-time English instructor at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts, came home to a voice mail from Cliff Becker, a Grants Administrator at the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA). Shippy dismissed the message as a joke and wondered which of his friends had turned prankster. No one confessed and he called Becker, who confirmed that Shippy had won an NEA Fellowship in Poetry.
“When I came to I was happy,” says Shippy.
The award crowns an umbilical attachment to poetry. Before Shippy could read his parents bought him a set of Collier’s Encyclopedias. With the purchase came a slim volume, Best Loved Poems for Children. Shippy and the book became inseparable; he even took it to bed with him.
The rhythms of verse resonated deep in his psyche, exhorting Shippy to become a poet. He has never regretted the decision. Thieves’ Latin, his book of verse published by the University of Iowa Press in 2003 won him the NEA Fellowship and accolades from the media.
“Shippy’s strange little machines of words are all kinetic, disturbing and weirdly graceful,” says Bin Ramke, editor of The Denver Quarterly, “unlike anything available in American poetry: a dazzling book.”
Shippy welcomes the praise and NEA Fellowship but admits they have not changed his life. While on fellowship in 2003 he continued to grind out 10 courses at Emerson and wrote in the few hours this frenetic schedule left him. The fellowship went to pay bills and bulk up an emaciated savings account.
“Many of my full-time colleagues wondered why I didn’t take a semester off,” says Shippy. “The answer was simple: there may not be a job to return to.”
Despite having so little time to write, Shippy managed to churn out Creepers, a book of poetry, and Ragged Company, a collection of short stories, while on fellowship and hopes to entice a publisher for both. He is eager to publish his way into a tenure-track job but after 17 years teaching part-time he knows it won’t be easy. A product of academic capitalism, Shippy teaches more than many full-time faculty at Emerson but for only part-time pay. His teaching and writing leave him little time to apply for tenure-track jobs.
Shippy is as gifted a teacher as a poet, winning Adjunct Professor of the Year from the Gold Key Honor Society of Emerson College. Shippy has also won the Iowa Poetry Prize and a fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, all in 2002.
Shippy encourages other contingent faculty to apply for grants and fellowships. The NEA review process, says Shippy, favors no one. A candidate’s name and title are purged from an application before it goes to reviewers. A strong publication record, grant proposal and letters of recommendation can elevate an adjunct above senior faculty, Shippy knows from experience. The archetypal adjunct, he excels in a system that tries to marginalize him. This devaluation doesn’t define him; it goads him to excellence. He chisels words from the granite of language, putting each stone in its place to build a ziggurat to the gods.
David Abramson – AAAS Fellow
North of Afghanistan lies Uzbekistan, a nation familiar to few Americans, acknowledges American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Diplomacy Fellow David Abramson. He is a cultural anthropologist who has done fieldwork in Uzbekistan and who is a scholar of the relationship between religion and secularism in Central Asia, not the type of person one expects to land a fellowship with the AAAS. Founded in 1848 by no less than Benjamin Franklin’s great-grandson Alexander Dallas Bache the AAAS is a bastion of the biological and physical sciences. Yet its fellowships are open to anyone who is a U.S. citizen, has a Ph.D. and is not a federal employee. You don’t need tenure or even an academic affiliation. Independent scholars may apply.
Abramson’s knowledge of Islam and Central Asia makes him an ideal AAAS Fellow. Unlike Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships, an AAAS Fellowship is predicated on the belief that strong ties between academe and government benefit both. The AAAS places Fellows in a federal agency with the aim of enabling them to influence policy at that agency. A Fellow in the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom Abramson collaborates with others in the Office to encourage the spread of religious toleration in Uzbekistan and throughout Central Asia. Abramson understands that Uzbekistan is not likely to embrace American-style religious freedom for there is no tradition of First-Amendment rights in that nation, but he hopes it will not fall under the influence of Muslim extremists, as had happened in Afghanistan.
Abramson’s fieldwork in Uzbekistan helps him appreciate the danger. Once part of the Soviet empire Uzbekistan retains vestiges of Soviet influence. The central government for example discourages the spread of Islam or any other religion. Yet students are curious about the tenets of Islam and if they can’t get answers from their teachers, many of who retain the Soviet ideology, they may seek them from extremists, fears Abramson. Without the Soviet Union as the unifying force in Uzbekistan Islam may fill the void, making it important that moderate leaders come to the fore.
The AAAS has given Abramson a sustained presence in the State Department. Whereas a Fulbright or Guggenheim is for one year, the AAAS offers two-year fellowships that, pending approval from the federal agency, may extend an additional two years. This duration helps scholars so inclined to make the transition from academe to the federal government, an option that may appeal to contingent faculty who have had to cobble together a livelihood as an itinerant teacher. Abramson knows the difficulty of this existence as he held a series of temporary appointments at Brown University.
Of the 60 fellowships in its 10 programs, the AAAS fields roughly 600 applications a year. The one in 10 odds blow away the miniscule chance of landing an assistant professorship anywhere north of the Rio Grande. Applicants who can articulate how they will transfer their knowledge from theory to policy stand the best chance of winning a fellowship.
“Your CV and publications alone won’t do it,” says Abramson. “You need to be able to think beyond the Academy.”
Who better to think beyond the Academy than contingent faculty and independent scholars, people who don’t live in the cocoon of tenure?
Zoe Beloff – Guggenheim Fellow
Guggenheim winner Zoe Beloff defies easy categorization. She calls herself a filmmaker but she works at the intersection of philosophy, mysticism, the physical and biological sciences, computer science and mathematics and perhaps belongs to all these disciplines. Then again she belongs to none but instead manipulates them as one might a marionette.
Among others, Beloff has read Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alan Turing and in a series of QuickTime movies has turned reductionist. The movies explore Gertrude Stein’s play Doctor Faustus Lights. The Lights, in turn, of course, derives its substance from Goethe’s Faustus.
The movies exist “purely in the virtual realm,” says Beloff, and humans are nothing more than “automata.”
Doctor Faustus, it turns out, has no soul to sell. Like the rest of us he is nothing but a series of electrochemical charges that course through the brain. In Beloff’s cinematic montage about Faustus one learns that he has a dog and that Faustus may not be Faustus after all but instead Ivan Pavlov who used a dog to demonstrate conditioned reflexes. A stimulus, like a computer circuit, is either on or off. Perhaps dogs and humans are organic computers built with carbon rather than silicon and plastic.
The breadth of her cinematic themes reveals the thoroughness of her training. A native of Edinburgh, Scotland, Beloff studied painting and art history at Edinburgh University and College of Art and holds an M.F.A. in film from Columbia University. She has taught there part-time as well as at City College of New York, the College of Staten Island, New York University, the Pratt Institute, Bard College, Hampshire College and the New School for Social Research.
An adjunct for 14 years, Beloff knows how hard it is to keep lit the torch of creativity amid the incessant demands of teaching. She also knows that part-time faculty often must work harder than the tenured aristocracy to prove their worth.
Her advice to adjuncts who would like to apply for a Guggenheim or another fellowship but who fear they would not stand a chance against tenured faculty is succinct: “Don’t be intimidated by full-time faculty!”
One senses that neither people nor ideas intimidate Beloff. The subject of her latest project is Eva C., a medium in French North Africa whose popularity crested in the 1910s. Under Beloff’s creative eye Eva emerges as a complex, contradictory woman. A working-class woman and a fraud, Eva nevertheless managed to craft a life beyond the strictures of conventional morality. Her séances were artistic and erotic, and among her lovers she counted women and Arabs.
Beloff uses the séance as a mode of storytelling, a means of drawing the audience into the drama. The actors in the drama occupy virtual space yet seem to be every bit as three dimensional as those of us who occupy real space. The distinction between virtual and real space is illusory. Reality itself emerges as an illusion.
One senses that Beloff’s work is an allegory of the Academy. Students and part-time faculty are real enough. All that remains is to condemn to the realm of illusion the condescension of tenured faculty, the poor pay and the absence of medical benefits.
Michael Bailey – Mellon Fellow
You’re not alone if you avoid black cats. Fear of them may go back thousands of years, explains Mellon Fellow Michael Bailey. A medieval historian, Bailey is a scholar of witchcraft and the occult and intends to write a book while on fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania Humanities Forum.
The book will be his second and is already under contract with Rowman and Littlefield. Bailey intends it as a survey of magic and superstition in Europe, the type of book that might serve as a text in European history courses.
His first book, Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), reconstructs the religious lives, full of superstition and contradictions, of ordinary peasants, merchants and Church authorities, who themselves were not immune to superstition: they saw demons behind every poor harvest and outbreak of disease, and used the authority of the Church to combat the evil that emanated from Hell. It’s important to remember, says Bailey, that Heaven and Hell were real places and demons real spirits to medieval people. Witchcraft may have evolved as an alternative to Christianity, as a way of controlling demons when the Church seemed impotent against them. Witchcraft was an attempt at reform, a reformation before the Reformation, one that empowered women in contrast to the all-boys club of the Church. The Late Middle Ages were a fertile ground for witchcraft and superstition, for the Church seemed unable to solve its own problem or to improve the religious and moral quality of people’s lives.
These ideas are provocative and ought to have a wider audience than medieval historians, but Bailey isn’t about to morph into Steven Ambrose. Bailey understands that writing for a popular audience might jeopardize his career. But there seems little chance of demise given his prolific output.
In addition to his two books, Bailey has written a reference volume, the Historical Dictionary of Witchcraft (Scarecrow Press, 2003) and a slew of articles.
Bailey is more typical of contingent faculty than tenured professors might care to admit: he is an expert in his field, his publication quiver well stocked with books and articles that hit the mark.
Bailey knows what it is like to scramble for grants and short-term appointments. His stints have included a Fulbright Fellowship in Switzerland, a Deutscher Akademischer Amstauschdienst Fellowship in Munich and an appointment at St. Louis University, each for one year. His Mellon Fellowship extends to a fourth year his trek on the treadmill of temporary positions. This tenuous route is nearing an end: in Fall 2004 Bailey will become assistant professor at Iowa State University in Ames. Bailey proves that fellowships can lead to a tenure-track job, and he encourages contingent faculty and independent scholars to apply broadly for grants and fellowships.
“Apply for everything that seems remotely appropriate,” advises Bailey.
If you can’t seem to get a fellowship or land a tenure-track job, you can always ask Bailey for an appropriate spell to put on the granting administrators, or search committee members.
Deborah Jin – MacArthur Fellow
Physicist Deborah Jin won a 2003 MacArthur Fellowship, known as a “Genius Grant.” The science is embedded in her genetic code. Her father is a physicist and her mother has a degree in engineering physics. Jin’s husband is also a physicist, and the two have collaborated on research.
Jin’s research has the surreal quality of modern physics. She studies the behavior of fermions, particles that along with bosons are the building blocks of quarks, which in turn are the building blocks of electrons, protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons build the nucleus of an atom, and the nucleus and electrons make up atoms, which in varying aggregates of complexity comprise all reality. Jin has cooled the ultimate stuff of the universe to within a millionth of a degree of –273 degrees Celsius, the minimum temperature. At –273 degrees, which British physicist William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) defined as Absolute Zero, fermions and bosons lose all energy. At Absolute Zero, a temperature no physicist has been able to achieve, fermions and bosons and thus all matter cease to move as though time itself were frozen. Absolute Zero is the point of eternal stasis, the probable fate of the universe.
At a millionth of a degree above –273 degrees Jin discovered that fermions and by implication bosons cease to behave as particles and are instead waves. Waves are therefore the ultimate building blocks of matter. But how can waves comprise anything solid? After all only particles have solidity. If I am an aggregate of waves why do I perceive myself to be a solid, three-dimensional entity? Language does not have the power to describe the discoveries of physicists from Einstein to Jin.
“Debbie Jin…has both the intellect and the drive to be one of the truly creative and innovative scientists of this century,” says Katharine Gebbie, Physics Laboratory Director at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Jin has since 1997 been a physicist at NIST, which is under the auspices of the U.S. Commerce Department. She is also a Fellow at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, under the administration of both NIST and the University of Colorado, Boulder and an adjoint (adjunct) assistant professor of physics at the University of Colorado. Her titles and achievements aside, Jin is not on the tenure track, though one senses that she is too immersed in her research to care. To be sure, Jin is not an adjunct eking out an existence. The MacArthur Fellowship comes with $500,000 over five years. But the money and accolades have not changed her.
“I expect I will continue my work more or less as usual,” says Jin.
Perhaps the best way to win a MacArthur Fellowship is to be a NIST physicist. Jin is the fourth physicist at the lab in the last four years to receive a MacArthur Fellowship and the seventh overall.
The MacArthur Fellowship is her fifth award since 2000, when at only age 31, she won the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.
“Debbie has an inquiring and creative mind,” says James Fuller, Chief of the NIST Quantum Physics Division. “She is a super scientists and an incredible human being.”[/private]
