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.

Introduction ix
Academia 1
Amateur 3
Art 4
Audience 5
Bibliography 6
Canon 7
Citation 8
Committee 10
Critique 11
Department 12
Dialectic 13
Dictionary 14
Discipline 15
Discourse 16
Education 17
Emancipation 19
Epistemology 20
Erudition 22
Excellence 24
Experience 25
Expertise 26
Field 29
FTE 31
Genre 32
Graduate Student 34
History 36
Humanities 40
Intellectual Labor 43
Interdisciplinarity 45
Interpretation 46
Irony 48
Knowledge Production 49
Medium 50
Metaphysics 52
Method 53
Methodology 55
Model 57
New Criticism 59
Object 61
Occupational Hazard 62
Peer Review 63
Practice 66
Profession 67
Progress 69
Reading 70
Regulation 71
Rigor 72
School 74
Science 77
Significance 81
Subject 82
Symposium 84
Teaching 85
Text 88
Theology 89
Tradition 90
University 91
Vocation 94