My Dysfunctional University
How corporations turned education into wealth extraction.
It started the day after my job offer.
My department chair called me. "They want you to sign a new contract," he said. The first one offered me too much money.
It was already signed, in the mail.
That didn't matter.
You're right, I probably could've sued them. I probably should've found another job. Before we go any further, you have to understand something. Universities do a lot of unethical, illegal stuff. They get away with it for one simple reason. The vast majority of us who work for universities start out as naive idealists. We enter academic professions seeking refuge from the soul-crushing cultures of the corporate world. It takes us a while to realize that corporations have gotten their fingers into universities, ruining most of them.
So, I signed the new contract.
It offered me about two thousand dollars less. It felt like a small concession for my dream job, a tenure-track position at a fairly major university. In reality, they were already testing me to see what I'd put up…