So my faculty is on strike! This means my classes are cancelled for the foreseeable future until an agreement can be met. And you know what? I’m happy. Why? My rich private university did the following:
- bought a mansion for a reason I cannot comprehend. Yeah. You heard me right: they bought a mansion. They spent 1.75M CAD on the purchase. Some funds were donated (1.4M CAD) but that’s still, again, millions.
- had 2 of our best financial years in around 100 years - with a 7.8M CAD surplus and a 11.5M CAD surplus over the last 2 years (this is a profit of 25% of their annual budget) yet they claim they can’t afford to get another place on campus for us to eat or pay for our professors to have T.As.
- started rebuilding the fucking parking lot a year after constructing the new science wing. In those 4 years, my dormitory’s heater quit working during a winter where there was -30 C and the plumbing stopped working constantly due to the dorm being 50+ years old
- We have had low quality cafeteria food for a decade that gave people severe food poisoning and no other place on campus. We also have a tiny ass cafeteria that cannot in any way accommodate close to the amount of students here. I think it’s a fucking fire code violation. But what gets rebuilt first? The parking lot, famously overcapacity and oversold every damn year.
My university is bottom of the barrel in Canada regarding how it pays their faculty when matched up against other universities across the nation.
Look it’s my fault for agreeing to do my university here and supporting these asshats but I went because I had to escape my narcissistic dad and I stayed because of how baller my English faculty is and the head of the LAS department is too good for this world. My faculty deserves to be paid way better.
TL;DR : my university bought a mansion and refuses to pay the faculty decent wages for their work