Words and money and adjunctdom

In The Washington Post Helaine Owen asks, “How progressive can a college be when instructors make poverty wages?” Before a recent strike and settlement, adjunct faculty at New York City’s The New School (87% of all New School faculty) were paid as little as $4000 a course, “while the university hired pricey management consultants and offered its president the opportunity to live in a multimillion-dollar New York City townhouse”:

This apparent unfairness sat uneasily with the principles of equality that have become so important on college campuses, particularly left-leaning ones like the New School. Like most colleges, the school regularly announces DEI — that’s diversity, equity and inclusion — initiatives. And the school’s president, Dwight McBride, tweets such things as “liberation is intersectional.” It’s not surprising that many less-than-well-compensated staffers eventually asked, “What about me?”

“Words like ‘equity,’ ‘inclusion’ or ‘care’ should be used with consideration for what they really mean,” says Matthew Spiegelman, who teaches photography at the New School’s Parsons School of Design. “The more they get used in conversation and not acted on, the less they mean anything.”