My latest offering is the the third and last in this trilogy of 'tributes' to the HCT's women's colleges. I do most sincerely hope that anybody considering taking up 'employment' (or incarceration) in The Evil Empire will read this former employee's glowing account of the years that he wasted there and make the necessary turnabout.
***
The
main problem in criticising this particular HCT Women’s College is – where to begin?
Regarding
the management, most dealings with this
college’s leadership are characterized by fear and accusations that stem from
an obvious lack of professional and academic experience. Almost without
exception, our local college ‘leaders’ prefer to view suggestions as attacks,
and therefore respond negatively and with a total lack of professional
etiquette. This aggressive incompetence is typically a result of a marked lack
of confidence in their own abilities (i.e., they know that they are useless,
but have no idea what to do about it) and stretches its inept tentacles all the
way up from the chairs to the deans to higher level authorities.
One example of this college’s general torpor
and incompetence is the last-minute planning and rule-changing that would have
been prevented if thought and effort had been made much earlier. As such, the
college entirely fails to communicate a strong direction to its faculty and
other staff, and perhaps even revels in its ability to contradict itself and
leave the staff ever more bewildered. All of this indecision and confusion
serves to create an unscholarly environment that simply exposes staff to additional
criticism and the assignation of irrelevant work by the ‘superiors’.
Many faculty members here admit that the good lecturers
end up leaving the college far too soon, sometimes within as little as a year
or two of their arrival. Freshly recruited instructors soon start to suffer in the
toxic environment here, which displays a notable aversion to necessary change
and a total lack of understanding and respect for established ‘academic’
practice. HCT is, after all, a mere college, despite its cringe-worthy attempts
to pass itself off as something approaching a proper institute of higher
education.
Perhaps the worst feature of this particular
women’s college in the HCT empire is the way that management tends to
prioritize how teaching looks on paper rather than in actual practice. In most
cases, faculty members are praised for awarding high grades and punished for
failing students, and may even be threatened for enforcing the college’s own rules
on absences and poor academic performance. Meanwhile, teachers and lecturers
wait in fear of a negative word being said about them by disgruntled students,
as even the smallest amount of negative feedback from a darling princess can
result in dismissal.
In short, this HCT
college only serves to achieve a sad and unedifying corruption of the notion of
‘education’. Whereas most institutes of higher education around the world are
regarded as centers of change and innovation, this place prefers to instil
blame and fear into its practitioners, and is therefore widely regarded as a complete
fraud.
And that is exactly what this HCT women’s college really is.
