In Medias Res

And you know what else? They think they can just do whatever they feel like to us. Like we don't matter and should just take scraps and crawl away saying, "Thank you sir, may I have another?" Like I haven't worked my rear end off earning degrees that make me qualified and then folks just want to throw me away. You now what? Kiss my grits!--

Oh, wait. You don't live in my head, huh? Let me explain my stream of consciousness type vomit of thoughts. I've just had this epiphany that faculty are the peons of the university setting.
As much as I'm trying to forget about how messy and just wrong my job loss is on a number of levels, my impulse is just to let it go (along with some money that is probably still owed me) and move on. In fact, I received two pieces of promising news lately, so perhaps I'll have somewhere to move to, at least in the short term. But when I think about the way that faculty are often cut out of the shared governance that is supposed to happen in higher education, it reminds me that continuing to work in academia anywhere means that I have to accept a certain lack of control over my own career. So much happens to faculty, from course load to course distribution to office space. Even when rules are followed--and they were not in my situation--it seems that faculty is at the mercy of students and administration, caught in the middle.

There are millions of other thoughts running through my head about the complexities of higher education, but I had this realization about being a worker bee. It feels like a veil being lifted. When I was a student, I had no idea that there was so much behind the scenes.