Leading a double life may not be for everyone, but for many researchers who are pursuing their career in industry, it can allow them to stay in touch with their roots. By becoming adjunct professors — part-time instructors at US colleges and universities — these researchers have found that they can keep a foot in academia and have their scientific assumptions refreshingly challenged by a stream of new students.
If the figures are anything to go by, the idea is a success. According to the American Association of University Professors, the proportion of faculty members who are adjunct professors has more than doubled to 43% in the past 20 years. One of the factors driving this shift is simple economics — increased enrolments at state universities and community colleges, which are suffering budget problems, mean they must either turn students away or hire adjuncts.
But there has also been a marked change in the nature of the adjuncts themselves. No longer are they just people cobbling together two, three or more part-time teaching jobs, usually with no benefits, to make a living wage. Instead, many tend to be scientists with a full-time job in either research institutions or companies. And although some become adjuncts through necessity (see 'Multiple choices'), many are ignoring the fact that the salaries tend to be disproportionately lower than for a full-time faculty job and seem to have much more altruistic motives.
According to the US National Science Foundation in 2001, nearly 41% of science PhDs doing research outside a university setting had a secondary job as a teacher. The main reason for this was simple: they loved teaching. Some liked it so much, they did it for free in addition to their full-time jobs. Some also saw teaching as benefiting them as well as their students, by feeding new ideas and potential recruits back to their full-time employers.
Extra work: John Quackenbush has set up genomics courses.
Take John Quackenbush. Full-time, he is a researcher at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, Maryland, where he works on functional genomics and bioinformatics. But he also teaches at the George Washington University (GWU) in Washington DC and will soon be giving classes at Johns Hopkins University, where he will be involved in the master's course on bioinformatics and genomics that he helped to set up. The job at George Washington is part of an agreement between the university and TIGR, under which Quackenbush gives lectures for graduate courses in genomics and participates in a graduate seminar. He is not paid for his teaching, but Quackenbush gets GWU graduate students to work in his lab and the university gets access to TIGR's genomic expertise.
Normally, adjunct teachers are paid $1,500–4,500 per course, but for some, the money can actually be a negative factor. "It ends up kind of disrupting your income tax at the end of the year," says microbiologist David Hodge. "I usually end up working a semester for free." Hodge works at the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Maryland, but he also teaches a course in signal transduction for the Johns Hopkins biotech master's degree.
MONEY NO OBJECT
Marty Hall, who has been teaching on the part-time master's degree in computer science at Johns Hopkins for 16 years, agrees that most of the adjuncts teaching the degree aren't motivated by money. Hall runs a software training and consulting company called coreservlets.com in Owings Mills, Maryland. Although he is paid fairly well for an adjunct — he gets $5,000 for a 14-week course that meets once a week for two hours and forty minutes — Hall and others note that there are downsides. "Sometimes, it does take time away from my family while I'm grading exams," Hodge says. Teaching does have other rewards, besides remuneration, such as helping Hodge to keep current in his field, that make such sacrifices worthwhile.
Jack Healy has found acting as an adjunct professor to be inspiring.
Civil engineer Jack Healy, who works full-time for Timken, a precision-bearing manufacturer in Torrington, Connecticut, has been an adjunct teacher at what is now Naugatuck Valley Community College in Waterbury since 1989. He teaches environmental engineering and safety, which encompasses courses such as soil science, environmental measurements, waste minimization and hazardous materials. He finds teaching enriching because many of his students are his age or older, which provides him with insight and motivation to describe how theory is applied in real-world settings. He is so immersed in preparing his coursework that he now carries a camera with him when he travels for his job, so that he can take photos to use in his soil-science classes.
"I think teaching makes you a better scientist," says Hodge, who explains that the demands of his diverse classes force him to read materials outside his scientific research niche.
For Fredric Abramson, who has a PhD in human genetics, an MBA and a law degree, the students he taught at Johns Hopkins gave him a particular boost. "One of my students quipped: 'If you're so smart, why don't you make genomics useful?'," he says. That question sowed the seed that eventually led to him starting AlphaGenics, a biotechnology firm based in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
Barbara Finn, vice-president of regulatory affairs and quality assurance at drug-development firm Neurocrine Biosciences in San Diego, finds that her motivation for being an adjunct teacher comes from having an outlet beyond the company. Until last year, Finn taught for San Diego State University's masters on regulatory affairs. "I loved having an audience," she says.
The new breed of adjunct teachers are finding a number of reasons to invest their time in teaching. Whether it be keeping up-to-date with basic science, meeting potential recruits or collaborators, maintaining links with academia, or simply connecting with an audience, these adjuncts have learned that their part-time job makes a rewarding supplement to their full-time occupation.
Getting connected
Multiple choices
Although today's adjunct professors tend to have full-time day jobs, some still take the traditional route of stringing together several part-time posts at different institutions to give themselves a full-time equivalent. Sometimes this is by choice, other times by necessity.
Helen Ortins Boland, for example, began her career in biotechnology. But she voluntarily left it 16 years ago to teach biology as an adjunct, and has been doing it ever since. She teaches three to four courses per semester. At one point in her career, she taught at two different community colleges, travelling more than 60 kilometres between campuses. She says that she didn't mind because the flexible hours allowed her to raise her children. "I've missed very few soccer games," Ortins Boland says.
Claudia Kraemer is also gluing jobs together, but only while seeking a full-time appointment. She has a PhD in molecular biology from Italy, where, she says, adjuncts are unheard of. She teaches an average of 15 hours per week, five to six courses per semester, at three different campuses. Fortunately, all the courses she teaches are interrelated, so she can write a basic lecture and adapt it to suit the course.
To help other adjuncts argue for benefits such as health insurance, pensions, paid sick days, and even use of office space or a telephone, Kraemer has become active on one community college's adjunct faculty advisory board. That activity, hopefully, will benefit all adjuncts no matter what their motivation for teaching.
M.W.Getting connected
With many employers downsizing, the number of people seeking adjunct positions seems to be increasing. Adjunctopia, a website offering a free placement service for adjuncts, gets 30–50 new people signing up each day. Although the site currently lists few jobs, it has a database of 12,000 prospective adjuncts in all teaching fields.
Science seems to be a growth area for adjuncts — especially in areas where industry has a need for more trained professionals, such as bioinformatics. "There are not a lot of people with degrees in these areas," says Joe Pensa, president and founder of Adjunctopia. He says that colleges want people with industry experience to teach professional courses, not people who have spent their careers isolated in academia.
M.W.