Fresh Blood in Academia

Vampires want fresh blood. They want "new blood" to reinvigorate their hearts and allow them to continue their unchanging existence. They are not really interested in letting the new blood change them -- they only want to ingest it. Vampires are not interested in the post-use health of the donor.

Sweet Goth (AKA Leslie) has been playing with the vampire metaphor as used by Kipling, and others, and has had an "ah ha!" moment concerning academia and their search for "Fresh Blood," or an endless supply of part-time marginalized instructors to be used until their blood is no longer new. (Read blood as innocence concerning the reason they are hired, enthusiasm for the department that hired them, and ignorance of the price they will pay... "Oh the years we waste and the tears we waste/ and the work of our head and our hands/ belong to the [person] who did not know why..."(Kipling).

Or as William Rex phrased it in his 1909 "Laborers" version of "The Vampire:"

A fool there was and he lived a slave
(Even as you or I)
To a master who drove him remourseless to grave
(And the master did not heed the wounds he gave)

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Oh the miseries he lived for the crumbs he received
And the kicks which a dog would abhor:
He took from the man who cared not to know why --
And now we know he never cared why)
And did not understand.

I think maybe we need to begin opening our hearts and our minds to "understand."