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Conspiring with Forms: Life in Academic Texts. By Terry Caesar. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Pp. 224. $20.
Writing in Disguise: Academic Life in Subordination. By Terry Caesar. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1998. Pp. 188. $25.
Traveling through the Boondocks: In and Out of Academic Hierarchy. By Terry Caesar. Albany, NY: sUNY Press, 2000. $19.95 pb.
In the summer of 1991 a professor at Clarion published a piece in the South Atlantic Review boldly titled "On Teaching at a SecondRate University." It lambasted his own English department and exposed the hypocrisies and handicaps of equally undistinguished departments across the nation. His colleagues, he tells us, have never gotten over it. What might well be worse, though, is that he's never gotten over it.
For the last decade, Terry Caesar has been recycling the argument that won him overnight notoriety. He has published three books-one of which reprints the original article, all of which extensively analyze its reception, embellish its claims, and tout its virtues. One would be hard-pressed to find a text with as many footnotes to its author's own earlier writing as Caesar's most recent publication, Traveling through the Boondocks: In and Out of Academic Hierarchy. His career, one might say, is what happens when a man is not happy with the fifteen minutes of fame accorded him for a particular idea and works to inflate them into fifteen years.
"The relation to professional hierarchy possible at a Clarion University is the remorseless subject of my considerations," Caesar announces in the introduction to Boondocks. Remorseless indeed. This is not to say that the subject is unimportant. It is extremely important; moreover, it is disturbing and easily avoided for academics no matter what their rung on the university ladder. Caesar argues that for all America's "pull-yourself-up-byyour-bootstraps" mythology, if you're an academic and get stuck teaching at a lesser-known university, you are stuck for good. You are judged, forever, by your institution, not your work. You don't get grants. You don't get respect from your colleagues at better universities. You don't get invitations to their conferences. You teach at least twice as many courses as they do, which, as Caesar observes "does not leave time-especially if one is teaching English and half the...