Our new neoliberal chief administrator is a hoot. He informed us that from now on hiring anybody for any position be it faculty, graduate assistant or staff will require us to fill out an online form he’ll personally have to approve. In the form we have to explain “what is the potential return on investment based on filling this position.” I copy-pasted this exactly as is.
I did my Cassandra bit back when he was getting interviewed and I ran around screeching, “he’s a neoliberal! There will be austerity! Budget cuts! Hiring freezes!” And people told me I had to be wrong because the candidate was from California, so it had to be all right. I have no idea what that was supposed to mean other than people seem not to understand that being a raging leftist makes one more, not less, likely to be a neoliberal.
Since then I have accepted that we can’t avoid this neoliberal fellow doing a number on us but the less attentive colleagues are now waking up to the horror we have inflicted upon ourselves.
To think that instead of this “potential return on investment” corporate drone we could have had a candidate who actually went to school here and talked to us about his family, his church and his work on behalf of Down’s Syndrome children.
At this point in my rant, people invariably interrupt me to say, “yeah, but the candidate they chose is black!” Which drives me nuts because they were all black. But one was neoliberal and another human. It’s really weird that people were right here, saw all the candidates and still haven’t caught on.
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