Blaming Scientists for the “Adjunct Problem”
by Chris Cumo
RAMAN SUNDRUM BREATHES easily in the rarefied air of theoretical
physics. He is a postdoc at Stanford University where, in
collaboration with Princeton physicist Lisa Kendall, he has
proposed that Einstein’s General Relativity predicts the existence
of an extra dimension. We are familiar with space and time,
which are really a single dimension according to Einstein,
but this extra dimension is infinite and beyond the scope
of our senses. If Sundrum is right, we inhabit an infinitely
tiny dimension of the universe, where we experience but a
fraction of the forces at play in the cosmos. The idea is
wild, but that does not matter to Sundrum because he enjoys
his work.
Therein lies the problem: most scientists, even those in
tenuous postdoctoral positions, are satisfied with the status
quo. What adjuncts in the humanities decry as a crisis of
underemployment, scientists see as an opportunity for research
and publication. Scientists and humanists do not inhabit the
same world, C. P. Snow observed in The Two Cultures,
and this fact makes rapprochement difficult. Without a shared
vision, the job market will continue to frustrate humanists
and please scientists.
Robert Weisbuch, president of the Woodrow Wilson National
Fellowship Foundation, is painfully aware of this divide.
A former English professor, he recalls in “Six Proposals to
Revive the Humanities” serving a year as an interim dean at
a research university. Whenever scientists scheduled a meeting
with him, their sole purpose was to extract money for some
grandiose project, whereas faculty in the humanities came
to him for consolation about the low esteem of their discipline.
A friend who was president of another research university
told Weisbuch that when he announced the availability of funds
for new projects, scientists responded with more than 50 proposals
whereas those in the humanities had none. They hoped only
for enough money to continue existing programs. The sciences
have a cachet that the humanities lack, and everyone in academe
knows it. Elizabeth Winzeler, a Stanford postdoc, is learning
how drugs affect specific genes, knowledge that will lead
to designer drugs: medications that are tailored to a person’s
genotype. Her work made Winzeler the lead author of an article
in Science, the Journal of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science.
Winzeler is not the only postdoc making headlines. At George
Washington University, Brian Richard discovered that the wrist
bones of a three-million-year-old hominid prevented the hands
from bending backwards. Chimps and gorillas also have this
feature, suggesting that three million years ago, hominids
walked on their knuckles, as chimps and gorillas do, at least
in infancy before learning to walk upright. Richard’s work
raises the question of when hominids first began to crawl,
as human infants do. Is crawling rather than upright gait
the signature trait of human evolution?
This sort of research can land a postdoc on the tenure track.
David Bradley investigated diabetes in graduate school but
switched to research on the human brain after receiving his
Ph.D. in physiology from the University of Southern California.
The switch has paid off. In four years as a postdoc at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute
of Technology, he published two articles as the lead author
in Nature and one in Science, articles that won him an assistant
professorship at the University of Chicago in 1998.
Sometimes careers in corporate America are more enticing
than those in academe. Cheri Wiggs was a neuroscience postdoc
at the National Institutes of Health for six years, during
which she published 20 articles. “I got to do what I wanted,”
she told the Chronicle of Higher Education. At the end of
the sixth year, she parlayed her experience into full-time
work as a grant reviewer for the National Institutes of Health.
The story is similar for Susan Fitzpatrick, a neurology postdoc
at Yale who has translated her research into work as a spokesperson
for a spinal-chord research center, the Executive Director
of a foundation for brain research, and a program officer
for a foundation that funds biomedical research.
The most attractive options may exist in computer science.
In 1998, the salary of an assistant professor of computer
science started between $65,000 and $70,000, a figure that
rivals what full professors in the humanities earn at some
colleges and universities. But these numbers pale beside the
$100,000 plus stock options that are the average in the industry,
according to the Computing Research Association. In Washington,
the average computer scientist in 1998 earned $295,000 including
perks. The flight of computer scientists from academe has
left Carnegie Mellon and Princeton unable to fill positions.
Saginaw Valley State University has been unable to hire an
assistant professor of computer science since 1997.
When the search committee tried to interview two candidates
that year, both had already taken jobs in industry. In 1998,
Ohio State University could only hire four computer scientists
when it had hoped to fill seven slots. That year the University
of Washington hired four computer scientists, only to lose
five others to the corporate world. Likewise, the University
of Illinois at Urbana hired five computer scientists but lost
five others. What is a surplus of labor in the humanities
is a dearth in the sciences. There is no crisis for scientists,
many of whom are awash in money. There is little money for
humanists, who face a crisis of underemployment.
Scientists can choose from opportunities both in and out
of academe, whereas too many scholars in the humanities see
a world barren of possibilities. Postdocs should be the natural
allies of adjuncts in the humanities, but are instead confident
of climbing the academic ladder or dazzling the corporate
world. With scientists and humanists so far apart, there exists
little hope of restructuring the academy so that more humanists
win the money and status that scientists have for so long
enjoyed.
