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is to weed out the remnants of the previous era who still think in terms of community, helping others, and all that outdated, unnecessary stuff.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 
I don’t know whether faculty at your university is unionized. At unionized workplaces, union members are typically not allowed to work for free. At mine, for instance, the collective bargaining agreement forbids it. It also forbids students being added to a class if the enrolment limit has been reached – even if the instructor would grant a waiver. (I was such an instructor, early on.)
Places were saintly union workers work for free are places where management and ownership use the examples of these workers to exploit all the rest. Workers who work for free are enemies of Labour. They are no saints.
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We are unionized. I agree with you completely, and I tried for years to make these very points. As we now know, I failed.
The union has been very supportive. I’m meeting with the leadership on Wednesday to see what they propose.
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Addendum: Universities like Harvard back before WW2 paid their humanities faculty in particular almost nothing. This was more than a cost-savings plan. Rather, it insured that only wealthy people could be faculty. In the early years of my career, the publishing profession operated on a similar model, particularly in New York.
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I think publishing hasn’t changed. Still pays almost nothing on the lower rungs of the ladder.
Amanda
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Being part of a group generally beats being an individualist. This is a major difference between SA and Zimbabwe, where it was easy for Mugabe to target individual farmers. In SA, we have much larger groups such as cities where the national government has a hard time imposing itself.
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2025-03-27-cape-town-politics-shift-ancs-banele-majingo-joins-da-foiling-no-confidence-motion/
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