Entry- and mid-level staff are overworked and undervalued, while executive leadership collect salaries upward of $200K and get away with being incompetent, lazy, abusive, misogynistic, racist, and outright moronic. Many also seem to have unlimited vacation time, disappearing for weeks with little to no communication to their colleagues and employees they supervise. The higher your salary, the less actual knowledge you’re expected to retain. People who can’t even load paper into a printer are promoted to management positions and then dump every menial task on already overworked and underpaid administrative staff. Bad behavior, willful ignorance, and weaponized incompetence go completely unchecked. Don’t bother asking for a raise for taking on work that is above and beyond your job description—“that’s not how it works here.”
HR personnel are truly terrible. Processes are convoluted, disorganized, and move at a glacial pace. Managers are forced to interview internal candidates for roles that have already been promised to someone else, creating false hope and wasting everyone’s time. Positions sit vacant for months because HR takes forever to post a job. HR staff are routinely late, unprepared, or no-shows to their own meetings.
Flexible work wasn’t implemented until January 2025, after the college had already lost out on countless strong candidates due to the lack of remote work options. Although workplace flexibility was announced in May 2024, it took the so-called “Flexible Workplace Working Group” nine months to produce an “equitable” policy. The result was a supposed allowance of two remote days per week (except most staff are granted only one, if any.) On top of that, employees must “reapply” for flexible work every six months, as if they can’t be trusted to do their jobs from home, despite having proven exactly that during a year and a half of pandemic-era remote work. Ultimately, managers decide whether their staff get zero, one, or two days from home based on the optics of having “bodies in the office,” not on the actual nature of the work. Even roles that could be performed entirely remotely are forced into cubicles. How exactly is that an equitable policy?
Faculty can be pretentious, dismissive, and routinely disrespectful toward staff. Emails go unanswered, collaboration is nonexistent, and administration turns a blind eye to professors who refuse to work with staff. Instead, staff are expected to smile, stay quiet, and pick up the slack created by faculty’s arrogance and refusal to communicate.
Many alumni are perpetually unhappy with anything the college does and will harass staff endlessly about it (as if low-level staff members have the power to change college policies). They are entitled, abusive, racist, and genuinely unhinged. Leadership rarely addresses this, just as they refuse to take firm stances on important world events or unethical and illegal behavior within the community. There’s always some kind of “scandal” brewing, and the only thing administration ever says is that they are “investigating it” but “cannot provide further details.”
TL;DR: This place sucks. Don’t waste your life away working for an organization that couldn’t care less about you.
