Content area
Full Text
Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt. 1999. Academic Keywords:
A Devils Dictionary for Higher Education.
New York: Routledge, 1999. $20.00 sc. xiii + 336 pp.
Michael Thurston Yale University
It isn't every academic book that comes complete with a page-flip cartoon, but Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt's Academic Keywords has one; in the upper corners of the pages, a little devil throws his pitchfork, runs over to retrieve it, and throws it again. This touch, along with the book's polemical tone and general irreverence, will make it easy (and has, in some cases, already made it easy) for critics and others to dismiss Nelson's and Watt's arguments about what ails American higher education at the end of the twentieth century. This is too bad, though, for flipbook and fun aside, Academic Keywords demands and deserves serious attention. Nelson and Watt diagnose with keen analyses and illustrative anecdotes a set of ills that threaten the health, if not the life, of the American university.
The authors take their title from Raymond Williams's justly famous Keywords (1976), the book in which Williams redefined for new times and new agendas such terms as "culture," "democracy," and "class." In our times, Nelson and Watt argue, "fundamental notions like what makes up a faculty can no longer secure shared values and commitments" (vii). Their book promises to catch us up on the new meanings of old and often taken-for-granted concepts. The subtitle, an allusion to Ambrose Bierce's 1911 classic The Devils Dictionary, announces not only the layout and structure of this book (its entries are alphabetically organized and provide phonetic pronunciation keys), but also its tone; this volume is intended to upset readers, to provoke and anger and awaken its academic audience. The title and subtitle's agendas are necessarily intertwined. Such provocation is required because those comfortable old words-"faculty," "tenure," and the like-do not mean anything much like what they used to, and because some newer terms-"sexual...