Growth In Untenured Academic Science Jobs Seen Hurting Careers

if (n == null) The Scientist 9[18]:1, Sep. 18, 1995 News Growth In Untenured Academic Science Jobs Seen Hurting Careers By Franklin Hoke The proportion of poorly paid, temporary jobs in academic science is growing, while the share of full-time, tenured positions is declining, according to researchers and observers of university employment practices. The chance that a new Ph.D. will be able to secure the permanent position that he or she may have been working toward for close to a decade is dropping every year, these sources say. As a result, more young scientists working in universities are finding themselves in professional limbo, spending valuable early-career years waiting and hoping for a more productive research role. The non-tenure-track jobs absorbing many of these young researchers include work as part-time and adjunct instructors, laboratory research associates, or postdoctoral fellows on extended appointments. "It's like planes waiting to land," says Ora Weisz, citing an analogy commonly used among postdocs. After 11 years at Johns Hopkins University -- including five as a postdoc -- Weisz is now a full-time, tenure-track assistant professor of medicine and cell biology and physiology at the University of Pittsburgh. From the point of view of a researcher trying to establish his or her career, there are many problems with these types of part-time and nontenure-track positions, all exacerbated by the amount of time one must spend in them. They provide no job security, low salaries, reduced or no benefits, no voice in institutional governance, and limited opportunities to write grants to begin independent research. Most observers blame the situation on a combination of two pervasive factors. One is the increasing pressure on college and university budgets from many sides, which encourages institutions to cut labor costs wherever they can and to be more hesitant in committing to individuals through tenure. The other is the overproduction of Ph.D.'s in many disciplines, leading to desperate competition for the relatively few jobs available, a relationship that has been documented in a number of recent studies. The prospects for finding significant amounts of new money to ease the fiscal tensions are not good, these sources say. Instead, solutions to the overall problem might be found in reducing the supply of Ph.D.'s by limiting the number of graduate students (see Opinion, page 12), or in increasing the demand for their services by providing them with a more broadly marketable package of scientific skills as part of their educations. Some critics of university employment practices, however, argue that self-reinforcing elements of the current system make administrators unlikely to aggressively pursue remedies. For example, senior researchers rely on highly skilled but inexpensive laboratory help in the form of postdocs, research associates, and similar support personnel. "What if Ford, GM, and Chrysler just kept cranking out luxury models and didn't check to see if anybody was buying them?" asks Patricia Lesko, executive editor of The Adjunct Advocate, a 16,000-subscriber magazine based in Ann Arbor, Mich. "It would never happen. Colleges and universities are the only big businesses in our society that turn out product -- graduate students and Ph.D.'s -- with no tracking system. "It's an employer's dream -- you create your own source of cheap labor." Anecdotal reports are widespread that the numbers of scientists in full-time, temporary jobs who might consider themselves underemployed are large and growing, but reliable statistics are difficult to come by, academic employment observers note. However, statistics concerning part-timers in universities are available. One recent study commissioned by the Washington, D.C.-based National Education Association (NEA) and based primarily on a 1992 Department of Education survey shows that 304,000 -- or about one- third -- of the 899,000 college and university faculty are part-time employees. According to the study, about 43 percent of those part-timers report they would prefer full-time positions but that those were unavailable, points out Catherine D. Gaddy, executive director of the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology in Washington, D.C. Traditionally, the humanities are thought to make the greatest use of part-timers, and the NEA study bears this out. But the education department data underlying the study show that in the "health sciences" and "natural sciences" employment categories a substantial 28 percent and 29 percent, respectively, of faculty are part-timers. "The classical path that people laid out for us when we entered graduate school was that you get your Ph.D., do a postdoc, and then go on to a permanent position in academia, industry, or government," recalls Patrick Loll, an assistant professor of pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania. Loll spent six years in graduate school at Johns Hopkins University and almost six more as a postdoc at the University of Chicago. "It was a kind of polishing thing, where you prove yourself and then go on to take a permanent position. "Now, people seem to be spending more time in postdocs, doing more than one postdoc, and, in some cases, more than two postdocs. And this is, absolutely, because permanent positions are getting scarcer and scarcer, and the number of persons competing for them is getting larger and larger." Loll also describes what he sees as the increasingly common practice of hiring young scientists into substandard faculty posts without benefits or voting rights within the institution. "People get hired into these slots that have a faculty name on them, like research assistant professor, but sometimes that's just because the university has a rule that you can't be a postdoc for more than a certain number of years" he says. "That's misleading, because it was never meant to be anything like a faculty position. It's just a superannuated postdoc." One of the major problems with many of these positions, Loll contends, is that the researcher cannot apply for grants independently and is therefore unable to assemble a track record as a funded investigator. "There's no question that the competition for faculty positions is very difficult," observes Kenneth I. Berns, chairman of the department of microbiology at Cornell University Medical College in New York and president-elect of the American Society for Microbiology, based in Washington, D.C. "It's getting more difficult to find what one might consider to be a permanent position." Berns notes a recent National Research Council report that suggests that universities should prepare graduate students for a greater variety of jobs outside of research and the academic sector, such as teaching high school (Reshaping the Graduate Education of Scientists and Engineers, Washington, D.C., National Academy Press, April 1995). In this way, the demand for science-trained graduates -- and the number of viable employment opportunities available -- could be increased, according to the report. "But I don't know the extent to which those alternate routes are open," Berns says, even if researchers could be encouraged to view them as career alternatives. He cites the fact that in Newark, N.J., recently, thousands of applicants lined up for a few hundred new teaching positions in the city school system. "One of the myths that exists among new Ph.D.'s is that, if I take this temporary position or this part-time position, I'll get a foot in the door, get some experience, get some lines on my vita, meet people who will appreciate my work, and that will be the beginning," asserts Karen Thompson, chairman of the committee on part-time and nontenure-track appointments of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), headquartered in Washington, D.C. "Unfortunately, the reverse is often the case. I tell people not to indicate that they've taught part-time or as postdocs, because it's often taken by institutions as indication of stagnation, not as an indication of experience, as it should be. It's a double-whammy." "There's a kind of pernicious attitude that if someone has been a postdoc for too long, there's something wrong with them," agrees Loll. "And that's tough to fight." The stigma that is sometimes attached to nontenure-track jobs compounds the career-development problems some researchers experience. If these positions were viewed differently, scientists argue, much of the difficulty they present would be obviated. "These jobs are, in and of themselves, all right," says Jaleh Daie, science adviser to the vice president for academic affairs of the University of Wisconsin system. Daie is also a professor of botany on Wisconsin's Madison campus and president-elect of the Association for Women in Science (AWIS), based in Washington. "The problem is that, in academia, we don't put the kind of value on them that we put on a tenure-track faculty position. These jobs should not be viewed as any less important, because a scientist can contribute the same talent whether they are in a tenure-track position or not." The lower status of part-time and temporary faculty jobs dates back to a time when full-time, tenure-track postitions were more plentiful, says Penelope Kegel-Flom, AWIS's current president and an associate professor in the college of optometry at the University of Houston. Then, the nontenure-track faculty may have been less able than the full-timers, she comments, and, perhaps, less committed to the profession, but this is no longer true. In the past, the lesser jobs were also predominantly held by women, observes Kegel-Flom. While this remains the case statistically, employment difficulties in science are becoming more egalitarian. "Certainly, it does disproportionately affect women," she says. "And, of course, while it was considered a women's issue, nobody seemed to be really concerned about it. But now it's doing a disservice to all young Ph.D.'s." "It will continue to be an issue for women," concurs Daie. "But there's a concern for all scientists." The growing practice at universities of hiring part-time and temporary faculty to cut costs will not easily be turned back, according to those who have studied academic employment practices, even though it may be damaging the careers of young scientists. The only bright idea I have is a very unrealistic one," says Christina McVay, a part-time instructor in three humanities departments at Kent State University and the publisher of Pro-fess-ing, a newsletter reaching part-time faculty in almost every state. McVay is also a member of Thompson's AAUP committee on part-time and non-tenure-track appointments. "We should strike. We should just refuse to go along with it. It's exploitation." Some say the best hope for change lies with progressive members of Congress who might be able to press for passage of new laws to protect part-time workers, not only in universities, but also in all types of businesses. "It's part of a pattern of abuse of labor in our society," asserts Lesko. "People used child labor until they couldn't anymore. Businesses are going to abuse part-time and temporary labor until they can't anymore. And colleges and universities are on the cutting edge of this pattern of abuse of labor in our society."

Growth In Untenured Academic Science Jobs Seen Hurting Careers

Growth In Untenured Academic Science Jobs Seen Hurting Careers

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of