By Katie Meyer
Students gathered in Keating Hall this past Tuesday to discuss Adjunct rights. Casey Chun/ The Fordham Ram.
On Tuesday night, one Duane Library classroom played host to dozens of activists. Made up of students, professors and community representatives, they all hailed from different organizations — some from Fordham’s chapter of Faculty Forward, a national group dedicated to raising faculty wages; others from the university’s Fight for $15 group, another national organization that aims to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour; and still others from Fordham Students United (FSU), a campus group that, on its Facebook page, calls itself an “intersectional coalition of student leaders, activists, faculty and alumni. Others were unaffiliated, simply to give support. But they all had one message: workers in the U.S., from fast food workers to college faculty, deserve to be paid a living wage.
The student and faculty coordinators of the event dubbed it a teach-in. “Many students don’t understand exactly why we’re fighting for a higher living wage, and we’re hoping to show why,” said Julia Gagliardi, FCRH ’18 and a member of FSU.
So then, why?
As the teach-in’s panel explained, they believe there are a number of reasons wages should be reconsidered across the country. The three panelists included Chris Brandt, an adjunct professor of communications and creative writing at Fordham, Hannah Jopling, an adjunct in the anthropology department and Jorel Ware, an employee at the Times Square’s McDonald’s restaurant.
As Ware explained, the assembled groups are fighting to raise wages because they believe the cause is “all about being human.”
“Everyone,” Ware said, “wants to be human…you want to be able to take care of your families, you want to be able to make a living wage.”
Ware began campaigning for a $15 per hour minimum wage in 2012. At the time, he said he was “tired of wage theft, tired of not having unions [and] tired of this poverty wage. “
He currently works an average of 32 to 34 hours per week at McDonald’s. Any more, he says, and he does not qualify for food stamps or state healthcare. He primarily works at night — his current hours are 2 a.m. to 9 a.m., which frees him up for activism work with Fight for $15.
Ware acknowledged that many detractors of Fight for $15 do not believe fast food workers deserve such a high wage. But fellow panelist Brandt noted that Ware’s job, and resulting financial situation, is not so different from his own.
“I want to be out there with Jorel [Ware] because it’s the same fight,” he said. “We’re not any better than they are. It’s the same deal.”
And as Joplin, the third panelist said, that deal is a raw one.
Adjuncts at Fordham, she said, are paid around $3,800 per course — Jopling said she once worked out the math, and found that in one semester, the tuition of about one and a half of her students could pay her entire $3,800 wage. “I guess Fordham pockets the rest of that money,” she said.
As The Fordham Ram has previously reported, adjunct professors are only allowed to teach two courses per semester. The average wage for both semesters adds up to $15,200, a sum that is not, Jopling pointed out, enough to live on, particularly in an expensive city like New York.
Most adjuncts, she explained, make ends meet by teaching at multiple colleges and by taking on additional work in the summers. Jopling supplements her Fordham salary by teaching courses at Hunter College. She said others teach at up to three schools concurrently. Jobs are also not particularly stable, she said. Contracts are only granted to adjuncts on a semester-by-semester basis, making it difficult to plan far ahead.
To complicate matters, classes are taught based on demand — ten students must be enrolled at the beginning of the semester for a class to be held. Jopling said she has seen cases where a class was cut, and the would-be professor, unable to find other work, had to go on welfare, a process she called “humiliating.” This treatment of adjuncts, she said, directly contradicts Fordham’s Jesuit-inspired “lofty stance on social justice.”
Brandt agreed. He believes adjuncts are treated as consummate second-class citizens, both at Fordham and elsewhere.
“I am a contingent employee,” he said. “An academic temp worker. I’m not a professor. I’m not even really an adjunct.” He said he tries to drive that point home to his students, frequently signing emails with the acronym CEATW after his name (for his self-given title, Contingent Employee Academic Temp Worker).
And students, he said, do not escape the effects.
“Students are getting shortchanged,” he said. “What are you getting for this enormous amount of money? You’re getting teachers who can’t give full effort in your education.”
By and large, the Fordham students who attended the teach-in reflected that sentiment.
“It’s important for students to care about their teachers,” said Gina Foley, FCRH ’18, a liaison between FSU and Fordham’s Fight For $15 chapter. “If our professors are having trouble getting by, how are they going to focus on teaching us? How are we going to learn from them?”
Others had more personal reasons for supporting the movement.
“I’m from a union family,” Brad Langhoff, FCRH ’19, said. “If it weren’t for unions and worker rights, I wouldn’t be going to Fordham.”
But regardless of students’ impetus for supporting the wage movements, Brandt said he’ is grateful to have them on board.
“A lot of this is on the adjuncts to do the organizing. But it would sure as hell help if you guys got in there with us,” he said. “Because lets face it, you’re getting screwed too.”
