The Academic Tribes

Author: Hazard Adams
The classic satire on the idiosyncrasies of academia
Paper – $22
978-0-252-06000-7
Publication Date
Paperback: 01/01/1988
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About the Book

In The Academic Tribes, an English professor who has survived stints as a dean and a vice-chancellor "takes a gentle, satiric sideswipe at academia, its foibles, follies, and myths" (ALA Booklist). Hazard Adams' parody of anthropological analysis describes the principles and antinomies of academic politics, campus stereotypes, the various tribes divided by discipline, the agonies accompanying each stage on the way to full professorship, and, of course, the power struggle between faculties and academic administrators. This first paperback edition also includes a new preface looking back at the decade since the book's original publication and an appendix that adds three relevant essays.

About the Author

Hazard Adams is professor emeritus of comparative literature at the University of Washington. His many publications include Blake and Yeats: The Contrary Vision, The Interests of Criticism, and Critical Theory since Plato, as well as two novels, The Truth about Dragons: An Anti-romance and The Horses of Instruction.

Reviews


Blurbs

"A delicious chowder of quips and ironies. One may have heard individual lines at faculty cocktail parties, but listening to all the disparate voices of the university together, one realizes how much we sound like a thousand Franz Kafkas trying to sing a madrigal."--Chronicle of Higher Education

"An enjoyable description (and vivisection!) of the various people in Academe. Essential for anyone who extracts his livelihood from the forests primeval of Academe and who periodically suffers fits on the meaning of it all."--Choice