Let’s Raise Billions But Use None of It to Help Half Our Teaching Staff!

by Gordon Haber

He's pooping. Photo: InSapphoWeTrust, via Flickr.

He’s pooping. Photo: InSapphoWeTrust, via Flickr.

 

Columbia University, I Love You!

I’m serious! Its MFA program got me started as a teacher and a writer. And I still don’t regret that career path or that I had to borrow $35K — if it weren’t for that teaching fellowship, I’d have borrowed twice as much.

But in retrospect I see now that teaching at Columbia was but the first of many shitty adjunct jobs.

In 2000, that teaching fellowship gave me free tuition and health insurance and a “stipend” of $3500. Not enough to live on, so, in addition to teaching and graduate work, I had two other jobs. Still I felt it was a bargain. Until I learned that the PhD students were paid $25K a year to teach the same class — not a princely sum, but enough for food, clothing and shelter, especially with subsidized housing.

That was tough to swallow, but I kept teaching anyway, because I liked it and because I didn’t want to finish an MFA, which is kind of a stupid degree, with crippling debt.

But it’s hard not to feel a little screwed. Because the year after I graduated, the administration hired a new director of writing who insisted that everyone get paid a living wage. And then the former director of the program refused to write me a recommendation letter, because she “wasn’t doing that anymore.” What a generous soul!

Plus Ça Change

In Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, I read that the liberal arts faculty are kvetching about decisions that favor “pre-professional schools like law or medicine.” (Or business. I used to pretend to be an MBA student for the Friday night keggers with free pizza.) It seems the science labs are outdated and the school is not being supportive of research sabbaticals (boo-hoo).

But good news! The administrative is starting a special fundraising initiative this January!

This money, by the way, is in addition to the $6.1 billion that the administration raised since 2011. And that money will be used to swell the endowment, of course, but also to hire more full-time faculty and help fund Columbia’s enormous physical expansion in Harlem and Morningside Heights.

Some of the money will even go to students!

But I don’t see any administrators or faculty talking about the 48% of the Columbia faculty working as contingent labor. At a fancy place like Columbia, some of them must feel that teaching an Ivy League university is their version of “giving back.”

But how many of these instructors do it because they need the money? Because they can’t find a full-time job?

 In Conclusion…

My guess is that Columbia has raised billions to help it compete with NYU. And to do that the uptown Ivy has to keep growing and expanding so that it can say that it’s growing and expanding so everybody thinks, “What a wonderful place with all its expansion and growth.”

The students seem to be a minor consideration in all this growth. And part-time faculty? The folks that struggle to put food on the table and pay their bills? They’re on their own. As usual.