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just got out of the zoom meeting equivalent of a pink slip, in which i learned some ugly details about the institutional shock doctrine underway, so it's time to put my soon-to-be former employer, johns hopkins university's carey business school, on blast. a thread:
up until this year, carey has been populated by 90+% international students, the vast majority of which are from china. i've been employed as instructional staff for 4 years, teaching, tutoring, running workshops, & revising curriculum, especially to support their writing skills
in part because carey has opted to remain unranked for 10 years in order to get away with this racket - tuition is $74.5k per year - they've made a "pivot to the domestic market" that has dovetailed with the vast expansion of online instructional delivery caused by the pandemic
of course, now that international students are being criminalized by ICE/DHS, its board of corporate leaders with zero experience in education sees an opportunity for austerity. 10% of staff were privately cut on Thursday, along with much of the Student Services division+programs
including ESL & Student Success Center. instead of employing people who know the institution, curriculum, faculty, & student body, these will now be replaced with for-profit web services like, no joke it's really called this, http://tutoring.com . highly doubt this will save $
meanwhile, they're moving forward on raising tuition for fall by SEVEN percent, or $5000/year. turns out tuition is not always a great metric for 'supporting teaching expertise & salaries of instructors' in this new era of higher ed. sometimes it's just "cost-cutting" as profit
I've been asked to write a resistance memo outlining the work I do & why sustained skill-building relationships are especially essential in online learning conditions, which I will do to dignify students and their learning & because I'm the most senior person there
but we all know the fate of the strongly worded letter. so tl;dr: JHU leadership is firing workers, raising tuition, & reducing+outsourcing instructional resources to for-profit companies. it's a formula. one that is anti-relational & suppresses group agency & organizing. beware!
also none of this surprises me as a higher ed researcher and i live super cheaply so i'll be fine for a little while, but if anyone knows of some jobs opening for writing and communication skills instruction, curriculum development, global education programming, etc please hmu 
wow did not expect this to become such a loud blast! thanks to you all for engaging/amplifying. I'm in the middle a shift & the worst part of this process which is informing the students I work with. will follow up with you all, tbc soon--
(one student just brought me an essay arguing against budget cuts at JHU in the form of faculty pensions and for spending down on the endowment and cutting campus police and real estate acquisition! using a corporate governance framework no less, oof, this is where things are--)
(just told one of my most regular students, an Egyptian immigrant and working mother of three, who was very stressed and upset to learn of this, and responded "ok they really need to legalize marijuana now" 
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