As any student who has worked at The New School can tell you, the compensation for our work here leaves a lot to be desired. Whether we find ourselves in the position of a research or teaching assistant, an office admin or similar hourly position, the story is similar. The university is critically dependent on our labor, yet shows no moral commitment or economic interest to ensure we are paid fairly. As an example, consider Teaching Assistants. The stipend rate is currently $27.50 per hour, with workloads ranging from 3-10 hours per week. TA’s can earn between $1,237 and $4,125 for each class. Based on my own experience as a University Lecture TA, which tend to pay more, 10 hours is often under-counting the work required, especially when you have lecture sections, which often turns out to be closer to 15 hours of work if you take your job teaching seriously, which I do. Suddenly the $4,125 stipend becomes a few thousand dollars less than the actual work you put in.
As most grad students like me have come to realize, living in New York on $1,000 a month is next to impossible, so we end up taking a second or third job as an adjunct professor or student worker. As a result, many students at this university, at least the ones shouldering the burden of paying their own tuition bills ($32,000 a year and rising at New School for Social Research), end up with huge student loan debt when we leave, or else take twice as long to complete our degrees, since we’re too busy trying to survive to worry about editing the next chapter of our dissertation. To make matters worse, we often end up competing with each other for jobs, sometimes in extremely cut-throat fashion from some of the horror stories I hear.
For the 2012-13 academic year, 171 NSSR students applied for one of these coveted ULEC TA sections, which had about about 70 openings. Based on the 2012 enrollment numbers for NSSR (668), this is about 26 percent of our students. Fortunately NSSR students were awarded about 58 of the 70 or so ULEC sections, a success rate of about 84 percent. NSSR students were also awarded around 50 of the 100 or so class sections for Parsons’ ADHT non-studio classes. Unfortunately these numbers also tell us that the majority of NSSR students, the other 74 percent, can’t count on New School teaching opportunity to provide income or even classroom teaching experience, which grad students want and critically need. So many of us, myself included, have gone in search of work and teaching experience elsewhere. And this doesn’t even begin to cover the lower paying student worker jobs or other divisional labor issues.
So is there a fundamental tension here between the professed values of The New School, which loves to talk about social justice, social innovation, civic engagement, and now also apparently “shared capacities,” and how we as students experience this institution in relation to issue of labor and work? The New School’s “founding ideals” are too often external values – they are things we should do to others, rather than for ourselves. This ‘to versus for’ distinction is critical, as it reflects the dominant logic of university management – and make no mistake, our everyday lived experience here follows a capitalist management logic that views underpaid grad students and an army of part-time faculty as expendable surplus capital to be spent in the name of progress–er, I mean progressive education.
What students can do about this is a complicated question. Some students have suggested we form a student union and try to win institutional recognition. Others prefer continued negotiations with management for now. Others suggest more campus occupations. I don’t have the answer, but I know that more of us need to be asking these questions. So fellow students, what exactly do we want to do?
Chris Crews is currently a PhD student in the Politics department at NSSR.
Chris Crews is a PhD student in Politics at the New School for Social Research. He is also the student co-chair of the university Social Justice Committee.
