{"id":7817,"date":"2020-02-27T01:05:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-27T07:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=7817"},"modified":"2020-03-03T12:29:30","modified_gmt":"2020-03-03T18:29:30","slug":"serfs-of-academe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=7817","title":{"rendered":"Serfs of Academe"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/2020\/03\/12\/adjuncts-serfs-of-academe\/\">Charles Petersen<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Adjunct, a novel by Geoff Cebula, is a love letter to academia, a self-help book, a learned disquisition on an obscure genre of Italian film, and a surprisingly affecting satire-cum-horror-comedy. In other words, exactly the kind of strange, unlucrative, interdisciplinary work that university presses, if they take any risks at all, should exist to print. Given the parlous state of academic publishing\u2014with Stanford University Press nearly shutting down and all but a few presses ordered to turn profits or else\u2014it should perhaps come as no surprise that one of the best recent books on the contemporary university was instead self-published on Amazon. Cebula, a scholar of Slavic literature who finished his Ph.D. in 2016 and then taught in a variety of contingent positions, learned his lesson. Adjunct became the leading entry in the rapidly expanding genre of academic \u201cquit-lit,\u201d the lovelorn farewell letters from those who\u2019ve broken up with the university for good. Rather than continue to try for a tenure-track teaching gig, Cebula\u2019s moved on and is now studying law.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>The novel\u2019s heroine, Elena Malatesta, is an instructor of Italian at Bellwether College, an academically nondescript institution located somewhere in the northeast. Her teaching load\u2014the number of officially designated \u201ccredit hours\u201d per semester\u2014has been reduced to just barely over half-time, allowing the college to offer minimum benefits even though her work seems to take up all of her day. Recently, the college has been advised to make still deeper cuts to the language departments, which are said to not only distract students but to actively harm them by inducing an interest in anything other than lucre. Elena responds with a mixture of paranoia and dark comedy: after the cuts there will be only so many jobs in languages left\u2014maybe the Hindi teacher, anxious about her own position, is conspiring to bump her off? Then Elena had better launch a preemptive strike: this could be a \u201ckill or be killed\u201d situation.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Charles Petersen: Adjunct, a novel by Geoff Cebula, is a love letter to academia, a self-help book, a learned disquisition on an obscure genre of Italian film, and a surprisingly affecting satire-cum-horror-comedy. In other words, exactly the kind of strange, unlucrative, interdisciplinary work that university presses, if they take any risks at all, should exist [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7817"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7817"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7817\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7829,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7817\/revisions\/7829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}