Traveling through the Boondocks

Wry and honest essays on the everyday conditions of professional life at a second-rate university, with implications for our understanding of higher education in general.What is it like to be a faculty member at a university in the United States that enjoys no reputation or distinction? Traveling through the Boondocks discusses this situation not from the top down but from the bottom up, where the experience of exclusion ranges from that of departments where scholarship gets to count in hiring decisions to conferences where only individuals from elite institutions get to appear on stage. This book reinvigorates our understanding of higher education by illuminating the everyday conditions under which academics work and the hierarchical distinctions in which they are always embedded.Before taking a position as Senior Professor of American Literature at Japan's Mukogawa Women's University, Terry Caesar was Professor of English at Clarion University. He is the author of several books, including Conspiring with Forms: Life in Academic Texts, and Writing in Disguise: Academic Life in Subordination.