We have faculty members who routinely teach individual study courses to help students graduate faster or learn material that would be individually useful. These courses are uncompensated.
What does this mean? It means that a professor works with 1-3 students per semester completely for free. Creates a syllabus, assignments, everything, completely for free. As a gesture of kindness and caring, such a professor donates free work in order to be helpful. Of course, students still pay for these courses. The price is exactly the same as for a regular course.
This sounds extremely profitable to the university, right? Get the students to pay while spending nothing on labor. The neoliberal university should love such professors, right?
Nope. Not right at all.
These professors are now being singled out for firing. They are being told gleefully that they deserve whatever they get for teaching these low-enrolled courses.
“But I did it to help! I only did it to help!” bleats a poor confused professor.
This is how the system works. Anybody who works for free is a sucker, a loser. Anybody who is kind, charitable and helpful is the worst of suckers. And suckers must be punished.
Money is not the main object of desire. Instead, the goal is to weed out the remnants of the previous era who still think in terms of community, helping others, and all that outdated, unnecessary stuff.
Clarissa's Blog 
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