This is the Wild West here Maha. Everyone fears the president, including the board of directors and of course the staff and faculty. The first thing he did on being appointed president was to fire the staff and faculty union reps and tell all the instructors they would be replaced by online contract people who he would hire as he fired them.

The person who actually fired me had just taken over as coordinator of our office. I trusted her because she had created and helped run a thing called the HOPE Certificate for teaching hope strategies to people like me who were suffering from depression as a recovering heart patient. I volunteered months to help them develop the program for online delivery and trusted her with comments. Stupid idea.

I was actually the VP of the staff union when I was let go and the person I was mentoring was he president. Again, foolish trust.

What I said to the president was to point out the policy he was defending (placed on us by the provincial government) was in direct conflict with our previous mandate. I just if there was no way to re-negotiate a deal that served our students better.

It wasn’t even a challenge but that doesn’t matter. And anyway, my job was casual and coming to the end of term in 5 weeks. I guess given how rough this place is being dumped early was the best option.

There’s a lot of fear and uncertainty in education and I guarantee there a lots of tyrants heading institutions who take advantage of this. Where I worked is a small community college whose enrollment and course quality is collapsing and no one seems to care, or dare care. And to be fair, I was never suited to working in education anyway.