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Title: Academic Keywords: A Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education by Cary Nelson, Stephen Watt ISBN: 0-415-92203-8 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: April, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $20.00

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Average Customer Rating: 3.6

Rating: 1
Summary: Insufficiently devilish
Comment: For two authors who promise to shake things up a bit, cary Nelson and Stephen Watt really don't do much here except snipe at people with different politics then their own in a disappointingly unfunny heavy-handed style. They identify the stakes as being high, and promise to say much for the benefit of underemployed Ph. Ds, but in the end they seem mostly intent on settling old scores.

The book only becomes amusing (unintentionally) when Nelson and Watt go through all kinds of backbending to justify the secure positions of themselves and their close friends in the institutions--why should Stanley Fish be faulted for making so much money, they argue, when academics in the sciences or law, or prfoessional athletes for that matter, make so much more money than *he* does? It seems as if its other people's privilege Nelson and comapny want to put an end to--not their own.

Rating: 5
Summary: Wake up! Read this book *now*
Comment: 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.

Rating: 5
Summary: If you've ever been a grad student....
Comment: 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...