This morning as I parked my car at the health sciences university where I work, I pondered the value of the bright orange sticker attached to my rear window: my parking pass. I pay about $1200 a year to park behind and down the street from my building on the far south side of campus, which equals about $5 per working day. No other hospital in town charges nurses for parking. No other university in town charges faculty for parking. Ours justifies it by reminding nurses, faculty and other employees that our location makes adding more parking spaces impossible, which is mostly true, but fails to satisfy me. A part of me cannot help suspecting that parking is a sign of another kind of subtle discrimination, a lack of respect for diversity that is subtle enough to be enforced without attracting much attention.

This other type of diversity that goes all but unmentioned is respect for diverse disciplines. We have schools of medicine, nursing, dentistry, dental hygiene, and engineering, but it is plain that the medical school and medical doctors are the privileged. The medical school is referred to by upper management as "The School."  Medical students receive free priority parking, while nurses and nursing faculty (including those of us with PhDs) can wait 5 years or more to claim one precious parking space on campus. Then we pay dearly for the privilege.

Medical residents are happily given free meals in the cafeteria, while RNs like me carry on our persons just the minimum needed to buy lunch and a coffee during our shift. Going to a locker would waste 5 precious minutes of break time. And there is no way I'll carry a wallet in my scrubs, risking contamination by who-knows-what body fluid.

The university's executive leadership group consists of the CEO, an MBA, and three MDs. One of these MDs is the president, another is the dean of The School, and the third is the Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer.

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