If you've ever felt like academia might harbor its own absurdities beneath the lofty ideals, this book is an eye-opener that's biting and witty. Its sharp critiques and candid observations about the quirks of the university world could provide a refreshingly blunt reality check, feeding your craving for an insider's perspective that doesn't shy away from controversy or humor. It's the academic satire likely to spark rich debates with every term it cleverly dissects.

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An irreverent critical lexicon of academic life and cultureThe university: The very name evokes knowledge, culture, and the magnificently universal ambition at the heart of this essential institution. Bastions of free inquiry and a free society, engines of social transformation and economic progress, enclosed gardens of ennobling reflection and creation, universities encompass the wisdom of the past and the hope of the future. Or do they?This critical glossary--written by a group of Princeton graduate students and faculty--defines fifty-eight terms common to academic life in a style that will prick both egos and consciences. From "academia" to "vocation," "canon" to "peer review," "discipline" to "methodology," the book scrutinizes the often stultifying structures of modern disciplinary life, calls out a slavish devotion to "knowledge production" as the enemy of thought, and even dissects the notion of "academic excellence."Feisty and darkly funny, passionate and deeply insightful, this book raises hard questions about teaching, research, theory, practice, and academic labor. The result is a must-read dispatch from today's academic trenches--one that is sure to provoke discussion and debate.

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