Link to the NYT article mentioned in class: “That Noise? The Rich Neighbors Digging a Basement Pool in Their $100 Million Brownstone” by David Margolick, NYT (April 5, 2019):
Tamar Gongadze, whose third-floor apartment at 51 West 68th Street was directly above the pit, also just fled. Her law firm lets her work from home, but the continuous drilling and pounding made that impossible. Sure, she could have worked out of Joe’s on Columbus, as her landlord suggested, but how could she spread privileged documents around an espresso bar?
But many others, especially longtime residents like Nick Jordan, a professor of philosophy at Queens College, can’t just up and leave. For one thing, he’s 80 years old. He has lived at No. 51 since 1971. There’s a memorial plaque for his late wife he installed on the lamppost across the street. It’s now part of the construction site, and caked with mud.
Extra: An in-depth article about the vulnerabilities experienced by Dr. Thea Hunter, CUNY adjunct faculty and alum of CUNY and Columbia University:
The gig was ideal: It was tenure-track, it was in her field—her official title would be assistant professor of history and non-Western culture—and it was close to New York. She was wary of chasing a job outside of the New York area—in the Midwest or in the South—because those places weren’t home, and all of her family, including her mother, still lived in the Northeast. Besides, with her strong academic credentials, she figured, there shouldn’t have been any reason why she couldn’t get a job at any of the schools in the area, which was thick with academic institutions.
But the sheen of the job wore off quickly. Her friends told me that Hunter would wake up around 5 a.m. each day, eat her cereal, and make the hour commute from Washington Heights to Danbury, Connecticut. She would often arrive on campus early, around 7:30, for office hours. She would get settled into her office and sit down. She was a black woman in a largely empty building, and people would come by and inquire about whether she was the janitor. Then she would teach classes. Her students loved her, but their parents would call the school questioning whether she had a doctorate.
Read the rest: Adam Harris, “Death of an Adjunct,” The Atlantic (April 8, 2019).
