In a now viral social media video, Dr Daniel McKeown, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), claims low pay has left him homeless, shocking many of his students and followers, according to The New York Post.
“Hi everyone, My name is Daniel, and I’m an astrophysics professor at UCLA. I’m only being paid $70,000 for this academic year,” McKeown said in the video. “Technically, I am homeless. I do not have a place of my own. I’m not on any lease,” he said.
He said that his $70,000 salary was insufficient to support him in Los Angeles and that his comments about the department head and the institution had put him on leave.
“UCLA has placed me on administrative leave; they’ve taken all of my courses that I am teaching this fall away from me without my permission,” McKeown said in a TikTok post on October 19.
“Chair Stuart Brown has retaliated against me for making my story public about how I wasn’t paid enough to afford to work at UCLA,” McKeown said.
“It’s because Brown has not approved an accommodation that I received from my doctor saying that I should be allowed to teach online indefinitely,” the lecturer said. “His offer was that I have to immediately teach in person starting (October 21), of which I am unable to because I was made homeless as a result of low pay.”
McKeown, who started working at the California university in September 2023, first went public with his financial and housing problems in September.
“I was paid so poorly last year and currently that I was forced to move all my belongings into a public storage unit, and I can no longer live in my one-bedroom apartment in Westwood,” McKeown said in the TikTok viewed over 1.6 million times.
