Staff, faculty, and students face an astonishing number of unflushed toilets at The New School.

“There’s always something in the toilet,” Carter Bergstein said, a first-year global studies and economics major at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, referring to the men’s bathroom located on the fourth floor of Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall. 

“No flush whatsoever … and it’s happened multiple times,” he said. 

Ela Lyons, a first-year Journalism + Design major at Lang, explained that she initially didn’t understand how to use the automatic sensor. “I didn’t understand that it was like, wave your hand over …, like don’t press anything,” she said. 

Toilets at The New School flush in one of three ways: a wave-to-flush system, an automatic flush system, or a manual lever. Both the wave-to-flush and the automatic flush have manual override buttons that can be pressed should the automatic mechanism fail. Any remaining waste is due to either a lack of water produced when a toilet is flushed correctly or students failing to activate the automatic sensors that trigger a flush. 

It’s not just Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall’s fourth-floor bathrooms where one encounters such horrors, but all over campus. A smell lingers near the lavatories in the University Center, for example.

“I think the bathrooms in [the UC] are always more dirty … than any other building … like bombed in there,” first-year fashion design major at Parsons School of Design Jaden Gray said. 

User error is partly to blame — students at the New School either choose not to flush or don’t know how. However, they might not be wholly to blame.

In 2010, the Water Efficiency & Building Stormwater Committee updated the New York City Plumbing Code and Administrative Code to require that buildings use eco-friendly toilets that release less water when flushed. 

When TNS made the great leap from manually-flushing toilets to sensor-activated-flushing toilets, the Free Press covered the mass panic this caused among the student body. The article explained how TNS students struggled to understand the automatic flushing mechanism since the opening of the Kerrey Hall dorms in 2013. At the time, many students complained, wondering why their toilets weren’t flushing. However, other students voiced frustration at the incompetence on display. 

“Literally, it’s so easy, you just have to wave!” then-Parsons third-year Casey Barber said to the Free Press at the time. 

Because, due to the updated code, the toilet uses less water to flush waste, it often backs up, according to maintenance worker Uand Gonzalez. 

“Especially in the women’s bathroom, they use too much paper before they decide [to] flush. So … with the lack of pressure that comes in from … the flushometer itself … it’s not gonna push all that out” ,” he said, referring to the piece of pipe that connects the toilet to the wall. Flushometers, which use pressure from the main water supply to cycle fresh water into the toilet bowl, usually work well in commercial environments, where they encounter high traffic..  

Gonzalez suggested students should “flush as [they] go … The sensor goes off by itself, but … you know, just maybe hit the button before you start putting paper in there,” he said. 

Considering users have to flush the toilet multiple times to dispose of their waste properly, students question whether the lack of pressure per flush and automatic sensors waste more water than they save. 

“Automatic flushers in general — I believe that they like, waste a lot of water … but it doesn’t seem like ours are doing anything, so maybe that’s not an issue here,” Meredith Hayes said, a first-year screen studies major at Lang.

Since then, the toilets have remained unflushed, and aside from water, waste remains a persistent issue.

The combination of using less water to flush the toilet and students not activating the automatic sensor leaves the average TNS toilet unflushed, to be smelt and dealt with by the next user.

“It’s mostly user error, Gonzalez said. “I think toilets clogging is user error.” 

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