Academic Keywords: A Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education

I picked up _Academic Keywords_ during the 2000 meeting of the American Historical Association. It looked intriguing (when's the last time a book with "dictionary" in the subtitle had a glossy depiction of Satan on the cover?). Not one to judge a book entirely by its cover, I flipped through _Academic Keywords_ and was overcome by the feeling that I had better buy it. I am so glad I did. Remember Plato's "Allegory of the Cave"? I feel as if I have seen the sun, and now I want to shout in the "cave" of higher education, "Read this! React! Refuse to be assimilated into the corporate university!"For the past two years, I have heard fellow graduate students in the humanities and the social sciences moaning about the job market, university administration(s), health insurance, and what a raw deal teaching assistants get. I hoped they were overstating things, but Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt backed up the litanies with not only further anecdotal evidence but with facts and figures. I challenge all undergrads going on to graduate school, all graduate students, all adjuncts, all untenured and tenured full-time faculty, and all university administrators to read _Academic Keywords_.Grad students, it's time to organize, unionize, and refuse to allow ourselves to be exploited. Full-time faculty, it's time to refuse to profit from the exploitation of your students and colleagues. It's time to break the codes of silence and complicity with university administrations. Sure, scholars stay in academia because we love our disciplines; we're not in this for the money. However, as Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt argue, one cannot eat prestige and drink respect.

Anyone who has ever experienced the uniquely sado-masochistic experience of graduate school--especially in the humanities--who has ever dreamed of becoming a (tenured) professor only have those hopes dashed...this book is for you! It sheds light and helps you at least understand the nature of the beast (no pun intended). While you're reading this, try see if you can an EXCELLENT pair of student documentary films that make nice companion pieces..._University, Inc._ and _Subtext of a Yale Education_. They were part of the so-called McCollege Tour this past year and the brilliant student filmmakers (one of whom I met in person) were very well aquainted with Cary Nelson & Michael Berube and their sharply critical books about the state of modern academia. Basically, a typical grad student's chances of landing a secure assistant professor's job at a major university is about the same as your typical college baseball player joining the major leagues after school...more than likely this person is going to stay in the minor leagues forever...translated to the academic analogy that means endless, untenured/temporary lecturer/instructor positions, jostling between several teaching gigs at different junior colleges, etc, living at near poverty level in the process. The light Nelson sheds on this reveals injustices that are truly scandalous...and you thought public school teachers aren't paid enough! (They aren't--but compared to the peons of Higher Ed...)I laughed very hard (and often bitterly) reading this book and got my monthly fix of moral indignation. As someone who attended grad school at Rice University, I can definitely relate. The president of Rice recently issued a manifesto that essentially argued for running the university like a business. Funny, I thought a university was an institution of higher learning, not a business... Cary Nelson elucidates very effectively the coming prominence of the "University, Inc." mentality among university administrators...

Once again the prolific, visionary critic of the academic job system, Cary Nelson, and his astute colleague Stephen Watt have the courage to tell it like it is. They expose the false consciousness that permeates higher education: the rhetoric of "apprenticeship," buzzwords like "excellence," the fiction of "academic freedom"--everything that keeps us from recognizing the constructed nature of the academic job crisis. Contrary to what the corporate managers of our universities and their bloated allies among the tenured faculty would have us believe, the job crisis is not about supply and demand; rather, it is about seizing capital from the weakest members of the profession (graduate students, part-timers, and adjuncts), who have become a disposable commodity, enabling universities to provide their student-customers with cheap instruction while an ever-diminishing academic elite promote themselves bewailing the plight of oppressed people with whom they have no contact. Nelson and Watt's "Devils Dictionary" is the perfect resource for a profession that's going to hell. Every exploited worker in higher education should own a copy of this book, along with Nelson's Manifesto of a Tenured Radical, Will Teach for Food, and Christina Boufis' On the Market.