How do we sustain sustainability: musings from a faculty member @ TNS
A New School security guard asks me on the way out, “Alison, how long have you been here?” It got me thinking. I graduated from Eugene Lang in 2012, New School for Social Research in 2013, New School for Public Engagement in 2014. While completing my Post-Master’s Certificate in Sustainable Strategies I worked as a Resident Advisor on the first Green Floor of the 20th St dorm and as a Sustainability Engagement Program Coordinator, I position I created and funded through Green Fund grants. Building off the work we had done, the summer after graduation, I proposed a sensible position as a Senior Sustainability Advisor of TNS to President David Van Zandt, as a means of ensuring the longevity in the programs we created and to align with the cities climate targets (since evolved) in becoming carbon neutral by 2050.
That was in 2014. He rejected the proposal of course, looked at his watch annoyed of the time I was taking up. Pissed I fled NYC, lived in a haunted house illegally on Marthas Vineyard with a friend, worked on multiple farms and biked home with a flip phone in the pitch dark. It lasted a month until I crawled back to the city, started teaching Sustainable Systems at Parsons as Adjunct Faculty, a course I still teach today.
The heartbreaking thing is so many sustainability efforts I, along with other students and NS community members, implemented years ago have been dismantled, including organics collection in the cafeteria and dorms, but my pay as a teacher, has remained exactly the same.
Part-time adjunct faculty are 87% of The New School teaching body, in a class size of 18, we receive less than 4% of that classes tuition. The President of the University, now Dwight McBride, makes 1.4 million, not including the free 15 million Greenwich village townhome New School provides. With our contract up for renegotiation and many bargaining sessions here is a strike authorization on-going as I write this, I have voted to strike.
A student shared teary eyed after class, “if it looks like I don’t care, it’s not because I don’t, it’s because I do. All these issues (climate change, racial injustice) we talk about are so real and I feel them emotionally. It’s so hard.” It is. It’s so hard. Especially when the university you fought for, the one space you want to be ethically safe, can’t even remain true to the progressive values we teach in the classroom.