Academic Animals

About the Book

Academic Animals

A Bestiary of Higher-Education Teaching and How It Got That Way

Profiles of eighteen ubiquitous faculty types, most of them tenured, including:

Beaver, democratically leveling the curricular landscape;

Boar, bullying his students and rooting out traitors among his colleagues;

Mule, supportively training her students how not to pull their weight;

Moose, making his way alone through the culture-war blizzards that have ravaged his department;

Snapping Turtle, refusing to poke her head out of her impenetrable ‘60s-style shell;

Walrus, stolidly defending his herd against the cold implacable currents of reality;

Shark, voraciously deconstructing colleagues and departments so as to free his students from the elitist trammels of the past; and more.

This is a Field Guide.

From The Key Reporter, Winter 2003:

Lois Roney´s hilarious meander through our strife-torn zoos parades 18 prototypes of academic fauna that run from the armadillo to the walrus. They include a wonderful teacher and an awful one; a bully intimidating his dead white colleagues with racist anti-racist attacks; learning-disabled students in quest of B´s, terrorizing teachers; learning-disabled profs impressing students and peers who know no better; and a remedial education specialist cashing in on the tide of illiteracy that swells over the campus.

The only species missing from Roney´s menagerie is the Mock Turtle with her account of lessons called lessons because they lessen from day to day. Keen-eyed readers will spot students (not their own) and colleagues (not their own) preening, professing, convening, caucusing, theorizing, swathed in prejudice or imbibing it.

When she hauls the ethics, economics, intellect, and wonky professionalism of academe over the coals, Roney is ruthless, acerbic, sardonic, sometimes unjust but most of the time right on. Subversively funny, serious, sparkling, this is a deeply reactionary book. All deep reactionaries should make a beeline for it.

by Eugen Weber. Copyright 2003 by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

About the Author

Lois Roney has spent more than twenty years teaching medieval literature and writing on all levels in the academic world, from teaching assistant to tenured full professor, at universities in Wisconsin, Missouri, Texas, and Minnesota, and has published on both medieval topics and classroom teaching techniques. She earned her B.A. at Stanford University (Phi Beta Kappa), M.A. at the University of Chicago, and Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She now lives in the real world in Duluth, Minnesota.