Education Quote by David Eddings

A lot of writers learn capitalism the same way they learn plot: by watching who gets rewarded when the work gets done. Eddings’s line lands because it’s almost aggressively plain. No soaring indictment, no lyrical grievance. Just a clean before-and-after: he taught, time passed, administrators got richer, faculty didn’t. That blunt sequencing is the point. It mimics the institutional logic he’s calling out - a system that can describe exploitation in a single sentence and still run smoothly.

The intent isn’t just to complain about a stingy employer. It’s to expose a familiar academic ritual: the people farthest from the classroom receive the clearest material proof that the institution values them most. “All the administrators” versus “the teaching faculty” isn’t accidental phrasing. It frames campus labor as a caste system, where teaching is treated as mission-critical branding but not mission-worthy compensation.

The subtext is also about the author’s own origin story. This isn’t merely a memoir detail; it’s a justification for leaving. Many writers have a moment when the “respectable” path stops looking respectable. Eddings distills that turning point into an anecdote that indicts the bureaucracy without needing ideology. In the late 20th-century U.S., colleges were already drifting toward managerial growth and away from faculty power; his sentence reads like an early, personal snapshot of that shift. It works because it’s not theory. It’s the punchline of lived experience.