Dear President Van Zandt,
When I left a full-time teaching position in 2010 to come to The New School for Social Research, I not only left a sense of financial security and an admirable set of bright young high school students, but also a situation that made it hard for me to further my own education.
The unique magnetism of The New School, whose reputation preceded it as the home of James Baldwin and Jack Kerouac, has happily thrust me into dialogue with a community of highly motivated and unorthodox academics. Indeed, when asked by some of my former students what it is like, I proudly emphasize its positive aspects that set it apart from most other universities.
What I do not tell them, and yet fervently share with my colleagues, is the school’s abysmal lack of financial support for its students. In fact, it has become something of a word-in-the-hall truism that NSSR is used as a stepping stone to more stable, solvent options for doctoral degree programs at other institutions. It is rare that I meet anyone who wishes to pursue a degree here beyond a master’s, and students who do must tightly pack their schedules with a variety of part-time jobs which just about pay for the basic necessities of life in New York. Even those who are fortunate enough to have more remunerative opportunities are still at a far greater disadvantage than their counterparts at other graduate schools. I am sure that their own personal anecdotes offer more nuances. When taken together, they coalesce into that one great narrative of the sad, nervous New School student whose plight has pitifully become a momentary source of relief for other struggling New York students.
This archetype now proliferates at a frightening rate. To throw salt on the wound, Daniel Fisher, the finance editor at Forbes magazine, wrote an article last October which ranked The New School at number three on the list of most expensive universities in the United States. One could only imagine the vitriol Fisher would record had he decided to venture out of his office on 60 Fifth Ave. to conduct student interviews a few blocks away.
All of this should be understood in the backdrop of the current economic crisis. Austerity has so viciously torn through Europe that here in the United States it even threatens the ability for working people to earn a mere pretense of a living. Students in their own right are figured into this arrangement of vampire-like budget-balancing from the existing policies of the university administration. Thus the ongoing discourse echoed in town hall meetings act as smoke and mirrors – a way to deflect student frustration by drowning us in the cold waters of statistical evidence and rhetorical conjecture. Vague promises of a financial strategy to be implemented at some later point in time do little while we tread water above the poverty level.
“We are not ATMs!” was the cry of four years ago, and so it remains to the disgrace of The New School today. I do not presume to speak for every New School student or for any group on campus, as we each have our own story to tell. And I certainly do not mean for this to be taken as an open invitation to offer more distant solutions or a revisiting of promises already made and yet to be fulfilled; I write to say that the university, in its present course, will only continue to hemorrhage more students.
I assume that many would like to stay, but cannot. Most will leave with little fanfare, quietly sending out applications to other programs. They will bid farewell to their friends and to the community they’ve been a part of for two years and move on. These are bitter moments, ones that cannot be captured by a parade of PowerPoint slides that attempt to rationalize the administration’s inability to provide adequate living funds. No amount of emails celebrating tuition freezes will suffice in reining in the downward trend of enrollment.
Only two options remain on the table. The first is guaranteed full tuition remission and substantial funding packages for all who demonstrate their academic potential. The other is to let the institution bury itself as an object of posterity.
Joe Lombardo is an M.A. student in historical studies at The New School for Social Research. His academic interests include the history of international trade unionism during the Cold War and Marxian critiques of political economy.