How many of us have spent a dreamy evening watching “A Room With A View” and vowing to find a way to get a teaching gig in Firenze where we can prattle on for a few hours and then spend the rest of the day enjoying the view? I’m sure it’s half of America.
On the flip side, how many students have watched the Amanda Knox trial and thought, “Gosh, I need to get over to Italy pronto before they put a stop to all of those fun evenings filled with marijuana and sex?” I’m sure it’s half of America.
The universities recognize this lust for la Dolce Italia and they know how to get the two groups together and profit from both. Call it lust arbitrage, if you like. It’s very lucrative.
How lucrative? Thanks to the reporting of DD Gutenplan working a similar game in London for the NY Times, students at NYU routinely pay between $32k and $38k for a semester in Italy. How much does the instructor get? Under 3900 euros. BTW, that’s not 3900 euros per student but 3900 total! Memo to parents: you could hire your own private instructor for baby snookums and save a huge bundle.
Why do we know this? Because some instructors got cheesed off and asked to be made full time. Nothing happened for years but finally a clever scamp got the Italian government involved. Now NYU must pay benefits and give contracts. What did NYU do? Gave the ingrates the benefits but then deducted the price from the contracts. After all, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, even under the boundless Tuscan sun, despite what the movies want you to believe.
So the professors got annoyed and started to talk union. Bingo. NYU decided not to renew their contracts. Suddenly the curriculum changed and whatever those union agitators wanted to teach wasn’t so important. DD Gutenplan writes again in the NY Times:
In January, Mr. Pascuzzi was involved in efforts to form a union for Florence teachers. In February, he found that none of his courses had been scheduled for the spring semester. “They didn’t fire us,” he said. “They just didn’t give us any more work.”
At the end of the day, when the sun sets over the rolling Florentine hills, the laws of supply and demand still hold just like the other immutable laws of physics. There are plenty of people who will do Pascuzzi’s job, perhaps for even less than 3900 euros.