For the Love of Learning, Money or Masochism? Research Maximus
by Chris Cumo
Actor Russell Crowe, as Maximus Decimus Meridius, recreated a cinematic version of gladiatorial combat in ancient Rome. Dean Davies is in pursuit of the real gladiators. Yet conventional wisdom labels Davies an anomaly. He has taught English part-time at Mesa State College in Grand Junction, Colorado, Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Indiana, Pennsylvania and Idaho State University in Pocatello, Idaho.
Conducting research while off the tenure-track is, perhaps, akin to the mastery of medical texts without the benefit of enrollment in medical school. Part-time faculty who conduct research and publish are often rewarded with cold indifference from their employers. Why, then, would any part-time faculty member devote time and (her/his own) money toward academic research?
It’s certainly clear why full-time faculty do.
Michel Bedard, an assistant professor of psychology at Lakehead University, and Director of Research at Lakehead Psychiatric Hospital, both in Thunder Bay, Ontario, knows the game. His Curriculum Vita boasts four book chapters, 67 articles and 89 conference papers. Bedard, and people like him, do research not as an end in itself but as a means to an end: a tenure-track job. Publications become an exercise in Vita elongation and that elongation marks a path into the academy.
“The length of your CV does count,” says Bedard. “You can’t make it [a tenure-track job] happen without publications.”
However, this rationale doesn’t matter to former Idaho State University English adjunct Dean Davies. He is part of a movement that hasn’t yet burst into the consciousness of people who think in traditional terms about who does research and why. Most contingent faculty do research because of its intrinsic value, not because they expect a better job and more money.
Through research, Davies hopes to resurrect the life of the Dover Street Woman, a gladiatrix who fought in the Londinium amphitheater, when Britain was part of the Roman Empire. Davies believes archeologists have found her in the cremated remains of a woman who died near what is today London in the first century A.D. Buried in a cemetery for commoners and outcasts, her tomb includes ceramic objects and evidence of an exotic funeral ritual, neither of which one would expect in the grave of a peasant or prostitute. Perhaps she was a slave whose owners profited by sending her into the arena to fight animals and people to the death, speculates Davies. Her success in killing whatever confronted her won the Dover Street Woman accolades, money and perhaps inclusion in the Cult of Isis, a circumstance that would account for the funeral ritual.
“What went on in the heart of this young woman?” wonders Davies, who admits to having more questions than answers.
He wants to know what she wore and ate, whether she had a family or lover, whether she was a member of the Cult of Isis, and what her status was among male gladiators. Davies plans to go to London in search of these answers. Dean Davies isn’t after scientific certitude: he has the sensitivities of an artist rather than the logic of a scientist. Davies wants to intuit who this woman was and to translate this intuition into a novel.
A novel won’t impress a search committee that wants peer-reviewed books and articles, but Davies doesn’t care. He wants more than the tenure-track; he wants to stir the hearts of readers by making the Dover Street Woman live again in the pages of his novel.
Biologist Paul J. Watson sees gladiatorial combat of another kind. When a female spider exudes a pheromone that she is ready to mate, male spiders gather on her web to kill one another for the right to copulate with her. The survivor is the strongest and most robust of the combatants, and will pass these traits to the offspring of this mating, improving their likelihood of survival.
To Watson, reproductive success is the yardstick that measures all life, whether insect or human. Reproductive success is the parlance of evolution, the lens through which Watson seeks to understand everything from the incidence of depression in humans to the origin of religion.
Watson is a research assistant professor at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, a position he likens to an independent contractor. He is more independent scholar than faculty member. Watson needs little more from the university than an office. He funds his position with grants from the National Science Foundation and other agencies, with the university taking a cut for overhead. Watson isn’t simply uninterested in a tenure-track job: he doesn’t want one. He hates departmental politics and has no interest in administrative duties. Watson fondly recalls his mentor at Cornell University who was so inept at administration that his colleagues left him to his research, his aim all along. Watson has carved out the same independence, one that frees him to teach only when he wants to and to devote his energy to research and to securing grants.
One learns quickly that Watson’s research is not about advancement within the academy. He speaks about the diversity and complexity of life with an emotion akin to religious awe. In something as small and humble as a spider Watson finds a miracle. With a brain of only a neuron or two a spider spins a web, what Watson calls “an intricate prey-capture device,” avoids predators and mates with a success that has given spiders a tenure on earth of hundreds of millions of years. By contrast we’ve been around only 100,000 years, and are likely to go extinct with spiders dancing in abundance on our graves. For Watson, research is a way of communing with the rest of life; he leaves to others the grubby business of climbing the academic ladder.
Yet, for some contingent faculty, labor in the academic foundry has become a grubby business that saps time and energy that might otherwise go to research. Gail Graves teaches 12 credits of French per term, a full-time load, at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York. Her classes have as many as 32 students. She is too busy teaching to do research. Even if she had the time, Graves explains that she sees no advantage to churning out articles. Baruch College neither pays her nor gives her paid leave to do research.
“I wouldn’t want to publish, publish, publish and not get anywhere,” says Graves. “I’d rather spend my time teaching than doing research.”
For others, the allure of research has faded with the years. As a graduate student at the University of North Texas, Wesley Britton published his first article on Mark Twain and Thomas Paine, a paper that won an award from the Texas College Conference of Teachers of English. While writing his dissertation, Britton spun off three chapters as articles, establishing himself as a scholar of Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. To these he added book reviews, and he had a book published in January 2004 by Prager Press. Like Lakehead University psychologist Michel Bedard, Wesley Britton saw publication as his entree into the academy. Instead, he has spent the last 13 years teaching part-time, the last five at Harrisburg Area Community College in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
“As time progressed I saw less and less need to publish,” admits Britton. “I had a very good CV, but it didn’t matter.”
Still, others manage to be pragmatic about their research without sacrificing the sense of wonder that fires their imagination. Anatomist Gail E. Krovitz has held postdoctoral and temporary appointments at George Washington University and the Smithsonian Institution, both in Washington, D.C. She is now a postdoc at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. Krovitz is in the thick of applying for tenure-track jobs, and hopes her research on the relationship between modern humans and Neanderthals, the big question in human evolution, will help her as she navigates the job market. Neanderthal is an enigma, appearing in Europe and the Levant roughly 120,000 years ago and vanishing 30,000 years ago. The last 10,000 years of his existence Neanderthal shared Europe and the Levant with modern humans. Perhaps Neanderthal loved with the intensity of the Dover Street Woman and lost his identity by interbreeding with modern humans.
Gail Krovitz doubts that romance played a role. Neanderthal’s skeletal features remained constant, her research shows, during his 10,000-year coexistence with modern humans suggesting that interbreeding, if it occurred, was infrequent. Rather, Krovitz believes Neanderthal could not compete with modern humans for food and other resources and so went extinct, the fate of all who lose the Darwinian competition.
Krovitz’s research stems from her lifelong passion for science. While other kids were listening to Aerosmith, Krovitz was memorizing species’ names for fun. She scrambled over rocks looking for fossils and has always felt drawn to prehistory. In high school she read Clan of the Cave Bear, a novel by Jean M. Auel in which a Neanderthal tribe adopts a young sapiens woman on the verge of starvation and raises her as one of their own.
“Everything clicked,” says Krovitz, “and I knew this [the study of the relationship between Neaderthals and modern humans] was what I wanted to do.”
Whether one speaks with former Idaho State University English adjunct Dean Davies about the Dover Street Woman or University of New Mexico biologist Paul Watson about spiders or Penn State anatomist Gail Krovitz about Neanderthals and modern humans, one senses the intensity of their passion. Curiosity rather than status or prestige drives their research. They prove that academe still has a place for people whose pursuit of knowledge is pure, and whose status as an adjunct, independent scholar or postdoc doesn’t get in the way of their research. For Watson, and one suspects for Davies and Krovitz as well, research is a path toward spiritual fulfillment. Whether on or off the tenure-track, one can seek no loftier goal.
