17.09.2026
Why complain? It will impact your career and potential employers (Suffer the injustice).
Never call it out.
Just now, travelling home from visiting my girlfriend, I saw a post by a working class student with a PhD. He was complaining that his supervisors had never told him about the hidden curriculum in a PhD, how to become part of the academia industry. He saw them as irresponsible. He couldn’t get any work, research related or not. He was living on benefits.
And underneath? Someone, probably an academic, had told him to shut up because it might affect his chances of employment.
Shocking. Academics are supposed to tell the truth. Not suppress it. They are supposed to be ethical. Not characterless.
But what I read is not surprising. In my culture, as I am half Sikh, we are taught that it is just as much of a sin to stomach injustice as to be unjust. And here we have this advice from these so-called academics, this advice to be silent and silenced by oppression, discrimination and prejudice. To stomach the injustice. To never attempt to call it out and change it.
What is this evidence of? That education in this country is an education of exploitation. They see working class (and male, ethnic) doctoral students like I was as cash cows and nothing else. To have our cash extracted out of us and then discarded. One could trace this to when they started charging students for fees in this country. One sees it in how they treat foreign students that come here in the hope of having a better life.
I will point out that I did everything that I was supposed to do to become a university professor. I had four degrees including my PhD. I published my doctoral thesis as a book. I went to several postgraduate conferences and presented. I organised a postgraduate conference. I wrote for websites for English Literature, including one run by the university. I taught in after homework clubs, with refugee and migrant adults learning English, in primary schools and secondary schools as a doctoral student. Yet all they wanted from me was free labour and my money. They didn’t want to give back anything in return apart from the piece of paper with the qualification which didn’t amount to anything and could not get me any work.
Because this is the tragedy. They take our hope and monetise it for their own benefit. Without caring for us. Knowing that they are going to crush all of our dreams because we are not like them.
And if you say it? Then it is us that are the villains, not them. It is us that are unjust. Not them. It is us that should be shunned. Not them. It is a system of injustice and exploitation. Because in an education of exploitation, if you do not exploit, then you are not worthy of joining the gang. Yes, they see us as unworthy, rather than them. This is the education of exploitation.
