THEY DO IT TO EACH OTHER

I once worked in a stateside University, while still callow. Naive, in regard to the covert nature of career academics and the academy. I was unsparingly generous to my colleagues - who, in my jejune state, I thought of as mates.

I got this one's daughter a job at an art school, I got that one a valuable professional introduction, and so on. I believed, for a while, that the native value of mutually obliging 'social debt' pertained inside, as well as outside, the academy.

I was soon pulled up short. Waking up with my throat cut (figuratively speaking, of course) and bled out. My colleague's bloody footprints; all over the place. I went thereafter, in high dudgeon, to an old hand, who, while maintaining part time work at the school, kept the regular lot at arms length. Me, he unstintingly tolerated, due to my guaranteed quantum of amusement.

 We'll call him Dick. "Dick, said I, they've done me. Dick!" Submitting to him my petition of betrayed virtue.  Dick, to his credit, waited for me to run out of gas. Then - when I'd ceased abjuring former colleagues - my friend (he was and is a friend) took a long look at me and said - with plenty of air between each word -

  "They   do   it   to   each   other."