Emily Breitkopf, a doctoral student and research assistant at The New School for Social Research, grew anxious by the third day of the Fall 2016 semester. She had yet to receive notification of her prize fellowship stipend check, which the school should have prepared at the beginning of the school year. With her next rent payment around the corner, she contacted Joseph Warren, the NSSR dean’s office operations manager who emails students once their paychecks are ready. “He told me he didn’t know what was going on,” Breitkopf said.
While she pursued an answer from the dean’s office for the following week, she discovered through word of mouth that other student fellows across NSSR were also missing funds, having difficulties with administration and worrying about paying for basic necessities. Breitkopf repeatedly requested that dean’s office staff email all the fellows to explain when they would receive their checks, although that email would not arrive for another week.
In the meantime, Breitkopf notified NSSR’s Graduate Faculty Student Senate of the issue and forwarded her emails to around a dozen fellows she knew were also missing payments.
On Sept. 7 at 2:48 p.m. the dean’s office informed Breitkopf, now an unofficial liaison between staff and students, that she and other students would have to send their bank wiring information over email in the next 12 minutes to be paid that day.
“I literally said out loud, ‘Are you f–king kidding me? Am I in the Twilight Zone?’” Breitkopf said. She emailed her list of students. No one else was able to send their information in time.
Breitkopf was uncomfortable sending her private bank account information over email but felt that she had no other choice. “I had under $100 in my bank account. I had bills and credit card payments due because I was living on credit cards…It completely distracted me from my responsibilities as a graduate student…It was a really bad situation,” she said.
Breitkopf’s story is familiar to other affected students, who encountered a frustrating lack of communication from administration and sudden financial insecurity.
One student reported that they had only $40 to live on until their next paycheck and had no idea when that would come. Another worried that they wouldn’t be able to pay their child’s preschool tuition. A couple who quit their jobs and moved cross-country to study at The New School were forced to gather all the change in their apartment to buy one textbook. Multiple students questioned whether it was worth it to stay at the university.
Some of these students received fellowships, which are akin to scholarships that are delivered as stipends at the beginning of a semester. These stipends can be thousands of dollars, “a huge chunk of money people were waiting on to sustain them,” Breitkopf said.
Other students worked for the school as teaching assistants, research assistants or teaching fellows and expected biweekly wages throughout the semester. According to an anonymous source from the dean’s office, a miscommunication lead some student employees to believe that their first check for the fall term would be before Sept. 16, the actual first payroll date. Still, the school would not be able to process a small portion of teaching fellows’ checks until Sept. 30.
The cause of these delays trace back to MyDay, The New School’s new cloud-based computer system meant to improve human resources and finance services for school employees. This software program “replaces our current, outdated HR systems in Banner, other applications, and certain manual processes,” as stated on the New School website.
MyDay went live in January, although its payroll service started in June, and if the system did not correctly identify students as wage workers, it left their checks unprocessed.
The anonymous dean’s office staffer reported that they could not easily move student information like addresses from Banner, the previously used software system, to MyDay. Staffers had to manually input this information, which partly caused the delay in processing checks.
“Due in part to a change in our financial management system and a glitch that developed in the process, approximately 80 graduate fellowship stipends were issued later than usual,” said an official response New School administrators. They did not comment on the delayed payroll payments.
Eli Nadeau, GFSS Treasurer, estimated that about one hundred students across the University have reached out to the Senate for help. This includes a few students in other schools but Nadeau worries that others could still be unheard. The New School had only acknowledged the MyDay issue to NSSR students, who were able to organize their efforts with the Senate. The senators are still trying to “blow this up to the University level,” Nadeau said, but they feel that administrators have been largely uncooperative, preferring to resolve conflicts with students on a more private one-to-one basis.
On Sept. 7, the senators began their push for answers by calling for an emergency meeting with the NSSR student body to determine the severity of the issue.
On Sept. 8, the Senate physically handed the dean’s office a nine-point letter of demands asking to ensure student fellowship payments by the next day, and to specifically improve communication between students and the administration and its departments.
The school payed a majority of the fellows by check or wire transfer on the 9th and later on the 13th. All teaching fellows were paid on the 30th. Students could request emergency funding if these dates were inconvenient, although some continued to experience delays and criticized administration for being slow and unresponsive.
“If you have a problem with your money… you always end up having to run around to like four different departments,” said Jessica Engelbrecht, an NSSR student fellow who was paid three weeks late.
“Things aren’t as organized and as streamlined as other colleges I’ve been to, but this semester was so much worse than usual,” said Engelbrecht, who felt that some administrative staffers would have been able to do more, but MyDay reduced or eliminated their ability to distribute checks. She also noticed staff who were “trying not to get too involved, probably because they either didn’t realize the extent of the problem or were hoping someone else would fix it.”
Some students also suspected that a lack of interdepartmental communication exacerbated the MyDay issue. Engelbrecht recalled hearing this from a dean’s office staffer: “Accounting didn’t have the information they needed in MyDay to distribute the stipend checks and that they failed to then tell any other departments this…and the dean’s office and Academic Affairs…didn’t even notice it as a problem until it was already too late.”
Breitkopf also noted that staff in the dean’s office could tell her little of the situation because they were told little by Accounting and other departments.
Tsuya Yee, the dean’s office assistant dean of academic affairs, and Joseph Warren did not respond to a request for comment regarding a lack of communication in administration.
According to the anonymous dean’s office source, this issue in communication with the accounting department could have partially contributed to the MyDay frustrations. They also pointed out that administrative departments across The New School are often overwhelmed and do not have the support they need to do their work.
As for future improvements to MyDay and management, the dean’s office reported that they are working with the university finance office to prevent payment delays and shared a plan Sept. 29 at the Dean’s advisory council meeting.
“We are committed to making the stipends for the Spring 2017 available to students before that semester begins,” wrote Robert Kostrzewa, vice dean of NSSR. “We apologize for the delay in the disbursement of the Fall stipends and are very sorry for any inconvenience that this has caused our students.”
But even for students who have already been paid, this is too little too late. The consensus is that the university could have mitigated weeks of stress and panic by warning students that their pay would be delayed until a further concrete date, rather than falling silent and having students approach administration individually.
“It was disappointing and enraging for me, already feeling as though I’ve been in some ways only given just enough to survive at The New School,” Breitkopf said. “I’m already spread so thin.”