Thursday 28 November 2019

HCT - "unethical and dysfunctional"

The two 'recommendations' reprinted below are recent arrivals from a couple of recently departed HCT faculty members. To those HCT inmates who are leaving the desert gulag soon, please send me your own personal stories of salvation and redemption!

***
I have worked in many educational institutes around the world, but without question, HCT is the most unethical and dysfunctional organization I have ever seen. I can swear in total honesty that I personally witnessed the following: 
  • contracts and written policy "directives" arbitrarily and constantly being changed without notice, resulting in employees losing jobs, being demoted or given reduced wages without warning 
  • faculty not being provided with enough sick leave for effective medical care (to the point where one individual was forced to return to work one week after cancer surgery with visible stitches) 
  • employees being essentially forced to take overtime, but then not being paid the promised resulting wages 
  • students being unable to graduate due to sudden policy changes that were enacted without notice, and then rescinded later 
  • continually shifting calendar dates, registrar requirements, physical spaces, HR policies, management positions, platforms, resources and staffing 
On a more general note, undertaking any type of research is impossible due to the high number of teaching hours and the many mind-numbing repetitive processes that faculty are expected to do. Even the simplest academic systems, which at other organizations are set and functional, become convoluted and incomprehensible at HCT. 
Sadly, the people who remain here happily are often those who originate from even more chaotic parts of the world, or who thrive on regimentation. This may sound like a surreal exaggeration to anybody who is considering taking an offer from HCT, but I assure you that this description is actually an understatement. My sincere advice after surviving the abysmal HCT trenches for several years is for you to read all reviews carefully and then decide whether this place could possibly work for you; but ONLY in the short term.
The key issue here is that the current senior management and associated government stakeholders appear to believe that the organization is actually functioning. That misconception is evident in most quarters. The unspoken and hidden tragedy, however, is that the students, local communities and nation as a whole are lacking the enriching stimulus of a first rate federal academic organization.
·        ***
HCT treats trained academics like janitors and worse. It is the most demoralizing company I have ever worked for. Academics are not valued. The entire "school" is a scam. There is no education taking place here. It is all smoke and mirrors: People who pretend to be professors pretending to teach people who pretend to be students. If you are truly an academic, have any self-worth or integrity, and if you care about your career in academia, then DO NOT accept a job at HCT. You will be lied to, abused, cheated and in the end no other institution will take you seriously because HCT is a joke. If there were a special Olympics for academia, HCT would not be rigorous enough to qualify. It's that bad. HCT does not honor its contracts, so do not expect your compensation to in any way reflect your contract. HCT will simply modify your contract whenever and as often as it likes. In five years, my contract has been modified over a dozen times. I am currently earning roughly half of what I earned when I started. HCT not only slashes your salary once you come on board, it also slashes benefits and allowance (housing, travel, schooling...). HCT promotes Emiratis and Jordanians based on nepotism and wasta (contacts) rather than merit or qualifications. All of the directors are Emirati, and most only hold a bachelors degree (from HCT!). It's sad. If you complain in any way, management threatens you and you become a target for harsh discriminatory retaliation. UAE is so expensive that it takes at least three years to break even once you move here. So you end up getting trapped.