Are There Adjuncts in the Social Sciences?
AFTER THE DISCIPLINE of English, the social sciences employ the most temporary faculty, according to a survey conducted by the National Education Association. Part-timers slog away, keeping introductory psychology, sociology, criminal justice and other social science courses staffed.
I spent three days in August at the ASA’s Centennial conference waiting for the 5,000 sociologists in attendance to present papers about studies on the employment trends within their own discipline. I combed through the whopping 368 page convention program. I found these presentations:
• “Non-academic job search”
• “Wage and Occupational Changes Over Time”
• “Section on Labor and Labor Movements Paper Session. The Internal Politics of Unions”
• “Launching an Academic Career in an Uncertain Economy”
Not one of these workshops offered a discussion on the use of temporary faculty in either higher education or within the social sciences.
I am convinced that The American Sociological Association’s leadership, conference organizers, and its members are in denial. I would say that they are in serious need of therapeutic help from their colleagues in the American Psychological Association, but I went to the APA conference after the ASA ’s meeting. The issue of the extensive use of temporary faculty in the teaching of psychology was equally absent from the APA’s program schedule. To be fair, a much smaller percentage of APA members work in higher education.
But I digress. Back to the sociologists. These people could study and document the impact of the use of part-time faculty on higher education in the U.S.
The ASA’s Section on Labor and Labor Movements was packed. The first person who presented, in all-too-familiar academic conference style, sat firmly in his seat, stared down at his typed notes and spoke so rapidly I thought he was going to have a nervous collapse. He spoke about the unionization of service workers. The second presenter, a young woman who, to her credit, rose to speak, ripped through her notes (and her transparencies) in a painful monotone. She also discussed the unionization of service workers at a “secret” union local. The local remained secret, because her talk contained information critical of its leadership. The third speaker addressed the issue of splinter groups within unions—you guessed it, within the service industry. The final speaker was Stanley B. Aronowitz, a part-time faculty member union organizer from NYU. He was a dynamo, and spoke at length about the need for faculty to challenge non-strike clauses agreed to by, as he put it, “corrupt education union leaders.”
Finally.
The speakers prepared for questions from the 40 or so people jammed into the hot room. Not a single person questioned Stanley Aronowitz about the subject matter of his presentation. Instead, the questioners spoke passionately about the need to study the “inner workings,” as one person put it, of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
What?
It was group dynamics 101—Stanley Aronowitz was invisible. When he spoke during the Q & A period (and I will grant you that he went on a bit), the audience members rolled their eyes, sighed, became irritated, impatient and were eager to leave his commentary and focus, for instance, on the controls one presenter intended to use when she further analyzed her data on union membership growth. Others focused on outing the second presenter’s “secret local.”
Hello?! There are service workers in academe. They’re called adjuncts.
Then, I attended a workshop on finding work in the “applied world,” as sociologists refer to life outside of academe. The issue of why one would leave academe did not focus on the adjunctification of the social sciences. Once again, these sociologists were ready to discuss anything but the issue of part-time faculty in the discipline.
If you think the AAUP, MLA and CCCCs spend too much time naval gazing and lamenting the “adjunct problem,” go to a conference in the social sciences. These people study societal systems. From them, you won’t hear a thing about the exploitation of part-time faculty. Heck, you wouldn’t even think there were part-time faculty in the social sciences. When I mentioned this to one of the conference organizers, she smiled wickedly and encouraged me to “nail” the ASA. What would members of the American Psychological Association have to say about that, I wonder?
Next year, I’m planning to attend the conference of the American Mathematical Society. Math departments rely on research assistants, part-time, full-time temporary and visiting faculty like junkies in need of a daily fix. Will members of the AMS recognize their addiction in public? I’ll let you know.–P.D. Lesko
