The Quantum Mechanical Adjunct
by Chris Cumo
THIS YEAR MARKS the centennial of Max Planck’s discovery that energy is not continuous but comes in discrete units called quanta. To borrow an analogy from mathematics, it is as though Planck proposed that all numbers consist only of integers with no continuum of fractions to link any two integers. A quantum of energy is so tiny that it can only describe the behavior of the innards of an atom. That is, quantum mechanics, the branch of physics that Planck began in 1900, operates only at the subatomic level, just as the adjunct lives only in the subacademic realm. She is neither listed in a college catalog nor invited to faculty social gatherings. Students cannot track her down at her office because she hasn’t one. She sits on no committees and has no voice in university governance.
The world of quantum mechanics is a strange place, admits Brian Greene in The Elegant Universe. An electron has mass and so must be a particle, but if streams of them are fired through two narrow
parallel slits, they imprint alternating dark and bright bands on a photographic plate, the hallmark of two waves either canceling out or reinforcing one another respectively.
Quantum mechanics cannot define an electron as only a particle or only a wave and so must violate common sense by admitting that it is both at once. True, this contradiction seems absurd, but the
adjunct readily understands that life teems with contradictions. He is many contradictory things at once: a scholar and migrant laborer, an expert in his discipline and a generalist in the classroom, a professional and wage slave, a man steeped in knowledge whose job prospects are little better than those of a high-school graduate. He is the enigmatic electron of the academy.
Stranger still is the fact that one cannot fix the position of an electron; that is, one cannot locate it in space and time in the way that a batter can track a fastball rushing toward him at 95
miles per hour. Likewise, one cannot pinpoint the adjunct, at least not in relation to the full-timer.
The guy with tenure has an office at a single college, whereas some adjuncts think nothing of teaching at more than one college in the same term or even on the same day. David Slavin taught at
two colleges in Atlanta and worked as a janitor to pay the bills before finally landing a full-time position, according to “How a University Created 95 Faculty Slots and Scaled Back Its Use of
Part-Timers,” in the October 22, 1999, issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Ernie Benjamin, director of research at the American Association of University Professors, estimates that nearly one third of adjuncts teach at more than one institution during an academic year.
Because an electron cannot be pinned down in space and time, the best one can do is specify an area that it has a probability of occupying. The adjunct as well can only speak about probabilities. What is the probability that she will at last find a tenure-track job, that she will get the same course load next year or even next term, that a decline in enrollment or budgetary cuts will prompt the
department chair to offer her nothing next semester? Quantum mechanics states that the quantum is the smallest unit of energy. Its analog in the marketplace is the minimum wage. True, the smallestU.S. denomination is the penny, but this discussion centers on labor, where compensation cannot in principle fall below minimum wage.
Benjamin regrets that no “hard data” exist for the adjunct’s average pay, so an estimate must do. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s most recent figures, from 1998-1999, omit adjuncts, though they
reveal that instructors made an average of $33,402. If one supposes four courses per 15-week semester, the instructor made $4,175 per course.
So if roughly $4,000 represents the maximum, it can be counterbalanced by a minimum of $1,000 in 1997-1998, which Cary Nelson cited as “common” in his article, “What Hath English Wrought.” Given low inflation and only a year’s difference between these figures, one may take the mean between them
to get $2,500 as an adjunct’s average pay per course.
This beats my pay and that of the other part-timers with whom I work, so no one can accuse me of juggling numbers to make adjunct pay appear worse than it really is. Assume, as Nelson does that the course requires 45 classroom hours, two hours of preparation for each hour of instruction, two office hours per week, and roughly 100 hours of paper and exam grading. These figures mean that the adjunct would work 265 hours for $2,500 or $9.43 per hour, well above minimum wage.
But every average conceals the extremes. The average American male, for example, lives roughly 72 years, though some exceed 100 and others succumb in infancy. Some adjuncts must make more; Nelson believes many earn less. He cites East-West University in Chicago as an example of an institution that pays $1000 per course, in which case the same calculation yields $3.77 an hour.
If Nelson is right, these adjuncts earn a wage smaller than the quantum of money, a circumstance that violates quantum mechanics but not capitalism. Perhaps Nelson exaggerates in writing that adjuncts “work for wages comparable to those in the worst illegal sweat shops in the country,” but his claim may be close enough to the truth to warrant labeling the adjunct as the quantum worker of academe.
