ACADEMICS THINK CAPITALISM IS CORRUPT BECAUSE THAT’S HOW ACADEMIA IS: Antitrust Suit Charges Collusion Between Duke, UNC:

Colleges and universities lure top faculty members away from competitor institutions all the time, and the practice is (generally speaking) entirely legal. But while some relish it, others consider faculty poaching, or actively recruiting faculty members from competitors, bad form and try to avoid doing it regularly — especially to institutions in the same geographic area.

A new antitrust lawsuit alleges much more than a neighborly understanding between Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, however. The suit, brought against Duke by a medical faculty member there, rather alleges a binding no-hire agreement between the two Research Triangle institutions prevented her from getting a job at Carolina that otherwise would have been hers. The faculty member alleges there are others like her, and she’s proposed a class action.

Danielle Seaman, an assistant professor of radiology at Duke, says she’s been trying to get a job at Carolina for three years. She allegedly interviewed and was told by Carolina’s chief of cardiothoracic imaging in 2015 that her otherwise strong chance had been rejected because the respective deans of the medical schools at Carolina and Duke had a few years earlier formally agreed to not hire faculty members between institutions at the same rank, in order to control faculty salaries.

The emails are pretty damning.