Our precious employees are our most expendable resource

The president of our struggling career college emerged from the cyberspace hinterlands last week to send us an email. As I clicked on it, I thought, oh, maybe this is an early holiday greeting. Surely he has something interesting to share about his recent activities. (Where has he been, anyway?) Nope. The purpose of his email missive: to tell us that he has instituted a freeze on salary increases. And oh, by the way, our employees are our most valuable resource.

Really? I don't feel all that valued.

Actually, the freeze on salary increases doesn't surprise me. I'm not blind. I can see the empty asphalt in the parking lot. I hear the occasional voice echo in stairwells that used to be crowded with students. Class enrollments are diminutive. I feel like a tutor, not a teacher. It's pretty hard to assign a team project to a class of one.

My boss came to my Professional Development class to do a classroom observation as part of my annual performance appraisal. Seven of nine students were present: not bad. But not enough to play the Networking Bingo game I developed the night before the class. I didn't know for sure my boss would show up, but I suspected he might, in spite of the salary freeze announcement. Maybe we could just skip it, like, why bother. But no, he arrived five minutes after class started, interrupted a couple times with mostly relevant stories, and watched the five minutes of the Bingo game fizzle into an utter debacle with a bemused expression on his face. Oh well. Nothing ventured, etc. I muddled gamely on. Eventually he left and I wrapped things up. I won't get a raise, but maybe I'll get to keep my job a few more months.

Rumor has it the college has invested in a truckload of new servers. I am guessing the equipment is for the online division we are supposedly launching (soon, so they keep saying). It is a completely separate operation, developed by some Midwest company, and apparently taught by people somewhere else. Probably robots in cubicles in the Midwest. I don't know. I wouldn't mind being one of those robots. Except not in the Midwest, thanks. Too red for me. No, I wouldn't mind trying to teach from the comfort of my own home. Such as it is, total stinky squalor, but as long as I'm not skyping, who needs to know, right? Except, how would I teach keyboarding? Well, it could all happen in the cloud—you wouldn't even need an instructor. At last, nirvana for the career college. Replace all the instructors with software, and eliminate labor costs, their biggest expense. I can imagine the owners drooling.

Some months back there was a small invasion of men in suits: venture capitalists. Rumor has it we wooed them. Apparently they left us at the altar. Since we haven't seen our college president in weeks, except from a distance, all this is gross speculation. Shameless rumor-mongering. In the absence of real information, bored people like me will make up stuff. To stir the pot, shake the status quo, rock the dinghy. I'm just demonstrating my value as a precious resource.