Imagine opening up an e-mail from your boss on your off day informing you that your yearly salary has been cut in half. For most of you, this would be life-altering news, or as the Dean of Students told me in an e-mail, “truly an unfortunate series of events involving some mistakes.”
I’m a former student at NVU, and just over a month ago, I made the decision to leave the school, not solely, but largely due to the RA staff’s stipend suddenly being slashed in half over the summer. I was an RA at NVU-Lyndon, which was the only reason I could almost afford to go to NVU. The contract I signed included a stipend of $4,800 per school year and free on-campus housing. Unlike my Lyndon State College counterparts, this did not include a pass to the dining hall, as well. But what I was, and the rest of the Lyndon RA staff are, getting for a stipend is half of that original amount.
We were told that there was a typo in the contracts we signed and that the stipend we were promised per semester was actually supposed to say per year. I wish this “unfortunate series of events” was merely a singly typo re-printed in some contracts. This is the story NVU has told, but it’s not the full one. For months, through fliers, e-mails, posters, links, in-person conversations, and job interviews, first-year RA’s were told our stipend would be $2,400 per semester.
This is not a story about a school putting some numbers in the wrong spot. This is a story of an employer leveraging its most vulnerable employees at the bottom of the totem pole to cut costs. Go back to the first sentence in this article: “Imagine opening up an e-mail from your boss on your off day informing you that your yearly salary has been cut in half.”
This is what happened to the Lyndon RA staff, except it’s not our “yearly salary” because most of us need to work two, three, or four jobs on top of being full-time students to be able to go to NVU. This would never happen to a top-ranking administrator at NVU; if the VSC is cutting Provost Nolan Atkins down to five figures, it’s not with zero notice in an e-mail that doesn’t even address him by name.
The RA staff at Lyndon was promised a pay rate, consistent with prior years’ RA staffs. We were informed of the change, and after committing our lives for the next year, we were leveraged into working for half the stipend we signed for, over e-mail, and conveniently, while we were separated from each other as a unit.
The RAs are Lyndon’s student leaders and every residential student’s primary resource on campus. Instead of empowering them and backing them financially, NVU has chosen to pay them half of their counterparts from prior years, create distrust through its actions, and force some of the staff to over-extend themselves by working more jobs. The NVU RA staff deserves to be paid what they were promised. And beyond that, it’s concerning that NVU has been quietly cutting the pay of RAs. Are student workers the primary reason for the VSC’s financial struggles, or are they just the easiest employee demographic to exploit?
Northern Vermont University’s treatment of the RA staff this year has been an unfortunate, and unsurprising, series of events. There is callous indifference from the administrative officials at NVU to the impact of cutting student workers’ yearly pay in half. Overworked students making $4,800 per year is not where we should start our cost-cutting, and decisions like this are why I’m worried about the upcoming VSC merger. Do better NVU. Give the RA staff this year, and in future years, the pay they deserve and stop making the most vulnerable people at the bottom pay for decades of mismanagement at the top.
DISCLAIMER: Pat Hamilton is a former executive board member of The Critic. This is an Op-Ed article. Opinions expressed by Hamilton in this piece are his own and are not shared by The Critic.