Downfall - Anonymous employee Excelsior University Employee Review

Newer courses are poorly designed with overworked instructors who teach somewhere else dumping their files form the 1990's wholesale into new courses they "design." Some program directors do not respond to emails for months or at all, unless they can get some immediate benefit out of you, e.g., get you to design a course from scratch and do it for free. Administration expects hard, unpaid work, like course design, citing lack of budget for it. Imagine something like this taking place where you work--the employer asking you to work and in the same breath asserting they cannot pay you for your work. This seems to border on the violation of the Thirteenth Amendment, if not some state and federal labor laws. After not raising the pay scale for many years, the administration instituted a massive pay cut for online faculty, based on the rationale that their surveys show that Excelsior faculty are overpaid compared to similar faculty at other institutions. They also eliminated a number of useful, general-applicability courses. They simply got rid of them altogether, while offering niche courses, like African-American Studies, almost each and every term. They also made it clear to faculty not to charge students with plagiarism on first plagiarism but to "counsel" students how to avoid plagiarism. Students are being treated like customers who are always right. Faculty is approached like an expense to be cut as much as possible.