On My Way Out

Today was my last day at York College.  My experience of today mirrored, in many ways, what is happening in America:  I, an honest person who worked hard and didn't make a lot of money, was treated as a criminal by folks who have been ripping off the institution, and those who have aided and abetted them.


Now, I'm sure that what I experienced isn't so different from what other people experience as they leave jobs, whether voluntarily or not.  However, the office manager in the department in which I'd been working said she never knew of any adjunct who was made to jump through hoops as I was.


I was given a form that listed eight different departments.  I had to get a signature from each one had to indicate that I did not have any of its equipment or property in my possession, and that I did not owe any money.  Some of those departments are the ones one would expect:  the library, educational technology and buildings and grounds.  (The latter department issues keys.)   However, there were at least departments with whom I'd never had contact in the nearly seven years I spent at York.


The thing is, when I received my letter saying that I wasn't re-appointed, I was not told that I had to do what I was doing today.  In fact, nobody told me I had to do it until I went to the human resources office to take care of another matter.   It was well past four-thirty in the afternoon; all of the offices I had to visit would soon be closed if they weren't already.  


For the record, after I received my letter of non-reappointment, I checked all of the written material regarding employment and termination policies and found no reference to what I was told I had to do today.  I know of professors--including one who had tenure for about thirty years and was the former chair of the department in which I taught--who were denied their last paychecks because they actually or allegedly had keys or other college property.


In one of the departments I never heard of until today, someone with some pretentious title said the person who could sign wasn't in and wouldn't be until after the New Year.   I was just about to start screaming when someone else told me to go to the Office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs, a.k.a. the Provost.  Since I wasn't in the mood for another runaround, I told the clerk in that office that I couldn't come back tomorrow because I was moving out of the country.  "That's a shame," she said. 


"No,that's not the real shame."


"You're right:  They didn't re-hire you."


In any event, she got the signature I needed and I managed to get back to the human resources office just as the woman in charge was about to leave.  


Now, if I wanted to be charitable, I could believe that I had to make a mad eleventh-hour sprint through the college's bureaucracy that no other adjunct has ever had to make because I was a full-timer, albeit on a temporary appointment.  However, I found out that most other full-timers haven't had to do what I was forced to do today.  And I know that the former department chair whose last check was held for ransom was not popular with the college's administration. Nor, for that matter, was I.  I don't know the particulars of that other prof's story, but I'd bet that she criticized people and things that needed it.  I have heard, from reliable sources, that she also spoke up when she experienced mistreatment from superiors.  Not to aggrandize myself, but if what I've heard is true, then her story and mine have at least two common denominators.  


Plus, I just happen to be a member of a minority group that routinely experiences discrimination, and that York has a continuing history of discrimination against the group in question.  Now, I'm not saying it's the reason I was made to jump through hoops.  But I can't deny the coincidence.


Oh well.  I'm not going to cry over any of it.  I plan on being out of the academic world in two years anyway.