Completely toxic - stay far away from University Advancement
Pros
This was truly the worst professional experience of my life and the only positives were the friendships I made via trauma bonding. Like most universities, benefits are good compared to corporate, however, actually issuing your time off is actively discouraged.
Cons
Villanova seems like a decent place to work. It has a good reputation and they are excellent at selling their story during the highly orchestrated and rehearsed interview process. They push the idea of community, a family-friendly environment, and that everything is based in love. It certainly is a family environment - a family led by a narcissist with all of the typical things that one might find in that kind of toxic situation - there are scapegoats and golden children, manipulation, toxic positivity, ridiculous forms of gaslighting - truly the gamut of emotional abuse. Most people are there for just a few weeks, or many many years, because the only people who can manage to function in the environment are people with unhealed childhood trauma who don’t know to expect better, and healthier people quit right away. The turnover is so high that management began deleting announcements of staff departures from the community message board, I assume to hide the sheer volume of departures from all the new employees as they were hired. I think you see that same behaviour here on glass door. I noticed most of the recent reviews are from student workers and part time employees, and many are short and non-descriptive. There are problems in every workplace, but you’ll notice many of the reviews say that everything is great, even in the cons section. I would not be surprised if they were encouraging or even fabricating these reviews to cover up the constructive and honest ones. Finally, I have never seen such rampant and unhidden displays of racism and sexism. It is truly stomach-turning.
