Second-hand bookstores have always been an unlikely place of wonder for me. It was one day during high school by sheer chance, sheer marvelous chance, that in Half-Price Books I managed to stumble upon the book **Kafka was the Rage**. My last expectation was a biography of Greenwich Village, and bohemian life in the 1940-50s. But that’s what I got from a certain Mister Anatole Broyard. The cover was a cheesy grainy lithograph of a mid-century man effeminately smoking a cigarette. The loss of $9.50 didn’t even cross my mind as the neon of the storefront vanished behind a rapidly closing door.
Desk light: on. Cue the midnight oil. AP Macroeconomics can wait. Suddenly, I heard the wail of Lena Horne at Cafe Society, and Dylan Thomas was dying on 11th Street. Isadora Duncan did a twirl, and Jewish emigres presented talks at the Communist Party headquarters. This was an America I yearned for more than anything.
So, when orientation day happened a year and several months later, contemporary New York didn’t quite match up to this ideal picture of mid-century intellectual and artistic life. I went walking among the oaks of Washington Square, anxiously anticipating the beatniks to jump out behind the shadows of lululemon moms and the wolfpacks of NYU freshmen wearing nothing but purple. Instead, I overheard snippets of conversation like, **“The new West Village Marc Jacobs bookstore is perfect. Who even uses laundromats anymore anyway?” My reactions to these were: okay, the Village has switched patchouli for Prada, free love for well nothing free. But the New School represents a bastion of that old way of doing things, right?**
Wrong. Instead, I was barraged with talk of the 2009 occupation, the illusory and destructive mimicry Bob Kerrey enthusiastically performed in the backdrop of NYU’s colonialist logic, building flashy buildings at the expense of faculty pay and student well-being.
I was shocked, exasperated, and taken aback. How could we participate in radical social critique, and pay the majority of faculty members poverty-level wages? About 85% of New School faculty are part-time; the median annual adjunct wage nationally is around $22,000. This wasn’t an exclusive New School problem. This was a higher education in the United States kind of problem. In the past 30 to 40 years, we’ve seen the radical disappearance of even the possibility of tenure track jobs as contingent faculty and the tenuous employment they embody came to become the norm of the American academe.
Begun in the tumult of World War I, amidst a burgeoning anti-war movement, solidified by its commitment to the best and brightest of Jewish European emigres, with a pragmatist principle that education is deserved by everyone, that was the New School. I wonder how the founders of the university, John Dewey & Charles Beard, the president who gave the school a legacy, Alvin Johnson, and the wailers of German angst would moan and shudder in their graves at the shocking impertinence of a Miss Paula Scher today, given untold sums to once again “rebrand” the university, reading student criticism of the awful and secretive initiative with contempt in her voice.
The university today, even with an ostensible “branding” of radicalism, is a business. Public, private, the logic of these beacons of criticality, dialogue, and refuge are now ineluctably corporate. Maximize profit (your ever increasing tuition), reduce expenditure (paying professors poverty wages), attract the appropriate demographic (wealthy prospective students who will pay any amount of tuition), streamline performance (close down “unprofitable” departments), and most importantly enrich ourselves (ever higher administrative salaries).
These priorities are quite simply destroying a space that was once thought to be vital to American public life. Who are making these decisions? The secretive collusions of the administration and the Board of Trustees. Who exactly is on the New School Board of Trustees? Bankers, mongols, the 1%, a member of the Durst Organization even. And in an institution that is funded and driven by tuition, does it make sense that they make all decisions on administrative pay, faculty pay, tuition, and university governance?
As a first step, we as the foundation of this university, students and teachers, demand transparency and accountability. A good way to achieve this is majority student and faculty representation on the Board of Trustees. The University Student Senate has been pushing this for years, and in the grips of final negotiations the Board has acquiesced to two student representatives who would be excused from Executive Sessions where the vital questions of the university would be discussed. We must push back, and support the initiatives of the USS and expand the realm of their demands. It’s our institution. We should take it back.
Secondly, we must begin open conversations between students and faculty on the injustice of current labor conditions among contingent and part-time faculty. The educational prowess of the university is suffering under the unreal expectations of adjunct faculty to create syllabi, hold office hours, conduct advising, facilitate independent studies, all unfunded. The modicum lump sums currently given are not enough. We must begin to articulate a social movement between the adjunct union, the unionization efforts of grad workers, and concerns around student debt. All these social issues have common cause, and organizing together will give us greater leverage to challenge administration talking points and to begin building the equitable university we all desired and yearned for upon entering the doors of the New School.
Returning back to that powerful image of utopic return I felt reading Broyard’s portraiture of the New School as accessible, radical and free-wheeling, I refuse to limit the legacy of our university towards the streamlining of an unequal, exploitative, and hypocritical facade. It’s time we break down the alienation and fragmentation of existing solely in our own solipsistic categories and divisions, and organize together across class, power, and lines of institutional positionality. Silence is no longer an option. The university must change. Or we shall be witnessing its death knell.