Life on a college campus is full of action. Thousands of students away from home for the first time, drugs, sex, rock n’ roll. Oh yeah, and learning, too, I guess.
Well, it’s not only the students who have some drama going on behind the scenes: the professors and employees at universities are plugged in and know about a lot of wild stuff going on behind the scenes.
AskReddit users who work at universities dish the real dirt that students didn’t realize was happening on campus.
1. Schemers
“Professors were purchasing tricked out laptops with their budgets shortly before leaving the university. The university in turn would let the professors purchase the hardware for a song because it was “used”. We’re talking 2000-3000€ machines being purchased 6 months down the line for 500€. Someone finally caught onto to this scheme and now nobody can purchase the used hardware.”
2. Cold hearted
“I work for a prominent University in Japan. My Japanese colleagues tend to follow all rules very strictly and blindly follow manuals. One day an American professor had to rush to the US to see his dying mother. The staff members of class operations called him as he was grieving asking him to still teach classes and review reports.
Obviously, the lack of empathy and inflexibility lead the professor to take his bags and work for another school…students never knew the true reason why he stopped teaching..”
3. I like this guy
“Night shift janitor made some really good moonshine. Some of the professors and grad students would leave cash in our top desk drawers when we left work, and the next day, a mason jar of hand-made shine would be waiting there.
He’s since moved on from that department, but was good people.”
4. Drama
“I worked for the maintenance department one summer while in college, and got exposed to a lot of the drama in that department. Highlights include:
The school deciding that they didn’t want to deal with the union anymore, so they started hiring for all non-teaching positions as temps, then firing them after six months and rehiring them thirty days later. This was done because temps didn’t have to be union, and also because once a large enough percentage of employees were non-union, they could start hiring non-union employees on a permanent basis.
The entire third shift cleaning crew (except the team lead) was made up of people with disciplinary issues. This included a man who’s been caught multiple times stealing panties and setting up cameras in girls’ showers. At least once, the girl in question was underage. None of this was ever told to the students — the head of facilities and planning knew this was an issue and just did checks on all the bathrooms in the building this guy cleaned once or twice a month.”
5. Totally wild
“I worked at a large university and right before I started, the long time dean of the school went on sabbatical. I didn’t think anything of it until two months later when I found out that the university forced him to take time off because he blew almost all of the schools budget on fancy dinners with donors (were talking like $1000+ on alcohol heavy meals), showed up to official university events high off cocaine, and kept a second admin assistant as essentially his sex Slave.
He had a private bathroom with a shower installed in his office. He sent the school into a major budget crisis and was a PR disaster waiting to happen. It was a huge mess. The acting dean who stepped in got a lot of shit for how much damage control she had to do.
Ultimately he returned a few years later just as a part time faculty member. But still, totally wild.”
6. Did he hook you up with good grades?
“Only three student knew about this. My roommate made drug stops which was somewhat common knowledge. But we had something really weird happen. Our math professor hit us up a few times. I was with him at the time and he had a terrified look on his like he was caught for sure. But then he said “Can I get some of that?” He was then his best customer for the next two years. And we told no one, and no student to our knowledge found out.
To those asking my friend sold coke and meth But I’m not sure what he sold to our professor. Probably both.”
7. Stalker
“One of our male English professors was being stalked by a female student, to the point he had to get a restraining order against her. The only reason my class knew was because she saw him in the hallway, entered our classroom and made a huge scene the first day of class, and security had to be called to make her leave.
After that, the door was always locked for that class and whoever was in the back row were scouters to let in late students. He also had to cancel class to go to court for the situation at least once.”
8. Same department!
“Two professors arrested for meth production, one for murdering his wife with lab supplies, another stepped down quietly for embezzlement.
And that’s how we replaced half our chemistry department in a year.”
9. That’s rough
“When I was going through my PhD program, a buddy of mine had his professor DIE on him. Young guy, in his forties, got hit by a car. Boom.
Not-so-fun fact: when a professor dies, their grants go away. If a grad student is on the verge of finishing (just writing up their results), they can sometimes hop to another lab and get by. My friend, however, was only in his second year.
He had to start over with a new project in a new lab. Essentially lost two years of his life on a project that yielded absolutely nothing.
Woo, grad school, so uplifting!”
10. Time to leave town
“Prominent professor was sleeping with his students. Actually, he met his wife that way, and then had a huge issue with dating OTHER students after getting married. Lawsuits were threatened, he resigned and moved 1,000 miles away very quickly. No news, no public info released….it was all just known through the grapevine of staff.”
11. Disgusted
“Our heads of department or course directors would purposely keep dragging students (the act of pulling a student through their studies) even though they’d fail most classes. They’d purposely grade the student just above a pass even though the content of work was astonishingly bad because if they left or dropped out it’d look bad on the courses stats and drop out rate, not to mention the university not getting the student loan money.
From there, of course statistics would be ridiculously high for that particular degree so they’d then ‘sell’ this to prospective students and parents. This is currently still going on.
Source: am a lecturer at a university and yes it disgusts me.”
12. OMG
“A former health sciences lecturer and her husband were arrested for keeping a man as a slave, locked up in their garden shed for 4 years and making him do renovations on their house.”
13. A sad tale
“I knew a professor who was sexually harassing pretty much all of the women who worked for him. After all of them talked to HR, the university decided not to fire him (he had tenure), but instead simply banned him from campus. He was in research, so he wasn’t teaching classes. Instead, he worked from home and still was allowed to keep pretty much all of his benefits as a professor.
A year or so later, an audit of one of his studies showed that after he’d been banned from campus, he’d started forging consent documents and questionnaires for his study. That’s what finally pushed the university over the edge to fire him, not the groping of his employees.
Last I heard, his wife had divorced him and his daughter had found a memory care unit for him to move to, as he apparently had Alzheimer’s.”
14. Resigned
“I work at a college in the midwest. A few years ago, our president very quickly resigned. Turns out his son was growing weed in their basement and was selling out of their house. Whether the president knew or not is still being debated but he still resigned.”
15. Jailbird
“I dated a woman who worked as a professor in a near by college. After the end of her 2nd year working there, she quit and disappeared from academia completely. Apparently she had lied about her background, specifically that she had spent time in jail. The college was planning on updating how extensive their background check was and she was gonna be out of a job anyway.”
