Scientists Share Adjunct Concerns

by Peter Miller

THEY CAN DEFINE pi to fourteen significant figures, easily. Sometimes, they smell like formaldehyde or a newer chemical used to preserve or disassemble life forms. They might greet you as “fellow carbon-based life form.” They’re typically male, and their dress code hasn’t changed since they proudly declared themselves geeks in junior high.

Scientists. Academic scientists, in particular. Like those of any other adjunct, their jobs come with the one-sided contracts, low pay, and virtual nonentity status that are typical working conditions for adjuncts. Should Ph.D.-level scientists be any more or less likely than others to consider themselves workers with rights to things like health insurance and wages at least comparable with the $30 per hour that many construction
workers earn?

In graduate school, most apprentice scientists are treated well, working in departments with the highest stipends on campus, sometimes double those of art history or other low-pay departments. Workloads seem reasonable, and science graduate
assistants have few complaints, believing they will be moving
on to industry jobs or trying to get the best postdocs that
will lead to academic positions. While it seems that some
science departments (like physics) are more active in graduate
assistant union campaigns than others, activism in the English,
history, and other humanities departments typically overwhelms
participation levels among scientists.

Do scientists retain the individualism and anticollective attitudes that seem apparent in graduate school, or do they come around after a few years as casual academic workers? What motivates adjuncts in the sciences to continue? After all, conventional wisdom says their mathematical and technical knowledge could easily land them much higher-paying jobs elsewhere.

“There are basically three groups of adjuncts who work
in the sciences,” explains Joe Laiacona who teaches C++
programming at Columbia College in Chicago.

“First, you have people who are fully employed elsewhere
or who don’t have to work full-time but take adjunct jobs
because they want some supplemental income, they love teaching,
or some other reason. Second, you have professionals or entrepreneurs who need extra income because they need the income.

Third, you have people who want to teach full-time but can’t
get a full-time job because those jobs have been divided into
part-time jobs on purpose to save money.”

Laiacona, an activist with the Part-Time Faculty Association
at Columbia, falls into the second category. His other jobs
include running Rinella Internet Services, a Web design and
hosting company, and freelance writing. He doesn’t think that
the issues for scientists are different from those for other
adjuncts.

“Basically, it boils down to respect,” he says. The money paid to adjuncts in Columbia’s professional, scientific, and technical departments wasn’t much different from that paid to adjuncts in liberal education departments, separated only by about $50 per semester. “We all have lives. We’re all busy scrounging our existence.”

Scrounging an existence is exactly what Brian Carrigan, an
astrophysicist trained at Washington University, has been
doing for the past fourteen years. Jumping from one small
college to another, he’s gone from full-time to part-time
and back, and the quality of his adjunct faculty experiences
has varied. Carrigan’s story resembles many others.’ He enjoys
research but places teaching at the top of his list of interests.
When he was first hired for a non-tenure track position, he
was promised a tenure-track job “in a year or two.”
Seven years later, the tenure-track position went to someone
specializing in a different physics subfield. Carrigan now
lives elsewhere and teaches at a “much better” institution,
where he is welcomed as a member of the faculty and receives
health insurance and contributions to a retirement plan. He
has his eye on a possible tenure-track job at the college
but is also keeping other options open.

Asked why he’d endure fourteen years as an adjunct, he says,
“I like teaching. I really enjoy the academic life,” adding that he’s not trying to make the most money he possibly can.

Unlike Laiacona, Carrigan says he never really considered
a union as a solution to the problems that adjuncts face. He thinks he would have supported an organizing campaign had one arisen at his former job, although he doubts he would have led an organizing effort for fear the administration would single him out and take retribution against him.

Without systematic data, it’s difficult to say whether adjuncts
in the sciences differ significantly from adjuncts in other
fields, although conversations with scientists suggest that
they share most of the common concerns of non-scientist adjuncts.
While scientists may be paid a little bit more, their overall
working conditions are just as bad as they are for other academics
and for low-wage contingent workers everywhere.