A graduate student teaching assistant was fired this week after her snarky auto reply vent viral.
The graduate student is still enrolled, but won’t be able to make rent due to losing her university job.
Here is the full text of the auto reply which went to all of her students, including the nephew of the Dean of the Graduate School who forwarded it to him:
Dear Students,
If you are receiving this autoresponder you have probably emailed me even though I told you I am caring for my husband and daughter who are both sick with Covid and cannot reply to emails this weekend.
Your assumption that I am available at all times and am a privileged servant who should respond to your every whim may be based on the extremely high tuition your parents pay.
Perhaps that large sum of money, which may represent how rich your parents are and can afford, or may alternately represent a terrible hardship to them, seems like enough to cover the cost of my services as your personal tutor.
Perhaps you are going into debt yourself to pay for your education, and your own hard work and the prospect of a life of crippling loan payments fills you with a sense of entitlement.
Either way, understand that the money you pay in tuition does not come to me, your graduate student teaching assistant.
That money goes to vanity building projects, inflated administrator salaries, insanely stupid conferences that exist solely to pad the resumes of the organizers, boondoggles and kickbacks and that beautiful leather couch in the overpaid President’s office, along with all his dine-out expenses and a car service for his wife.
Fred’s University, like most universities, is not a teaching entity, it is a funnel to direct money and privileges to a very few.
If you have done a back-of-envelope calculation of how much each hour of class costs you, you have fallen for the lie that you are here to learn. You are here to pay.
In the unlikely event that you are receiving enough financial aid to cover the true cost of your tuition, room, board, fees, supplies and equipment, you may think you are not paying.
Everyone pays. Whether you are being used as a diversity token whose value is traded in the institutional legitimacy needed to keep up enrollment and receive grants, or whether you are being exploited for your special talents in the lab or the athletic field, know that there is no such thing as a free college education.
Ask yourself if it is possible that the fact that you feel comfortable emailing me over the weekend is influenced by the fact that I am a young woman and you expect young women to serve you.
Ask yourself if you expect that as a college student you have entered the class of people who are waited on.
Ask yourself if you assume that your education will soon place you significantly above me, a lowly TA whom you know to live in a “bad” neighborhood.
Ask yourself if your mother took care of everything for you and now you expect me to take care of everything for you partly because you know I am also a mother.
Ask yourself if you cannot figure out how to click the link that says “CLICK HERE FOR THIS WEEK’S READING” to find that supposedly missing reading.
And maybe I should ask myself why I am doing a job that requires stellar credentials but which a back-of-envelope calculation shows pays less than $6/hr. if I answer all your emails.
Sincerely,
(Name Removed)
Teaching Assistant
Fred’s University
According to her most recent auto reply, since her takedown of Fred’s University, the graduate teaching assistant has contracted Covid, and cannot be reached for comment.
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