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Zombies in the Academy: Living Death in Higher Education by Ruth Walker (12-Jul-2013) Paperback
Zombies in the Academy taps into the current popular fascination with zombies and brings together scholars from a range of fields, including cultural and communications studies, sociology, film studies, and education, to give a critical account of the political, cultural, and pedagogical state of the university through the metaphor of zombiedom. The contributions to this volume argue that the increasing corporatization of the academy - an environment emphasizing publication, narrow research, and a vulnerable tenure system - is creating a crisis in higher education best understood through the language of zombie the undead, contagion, and plague, among others. Zombies in the Academy presents essays from a variety of scholars and creative writers who present an engaging and entertaining appeal for serious recognition of the conditions of contemporary humanities teaching, culture, and labour practices.
- GenresEducation
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First published May 15, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 16, 2015
Terrific. I love a stroppy, snarly, pointed and punchy discussion of what is going wrong in higher education. Some of my favourite books are located in the 'look at the state of our bloody universities' genre. This edited collection is a strong addition to this genre. There is brilliant attention to the automation of online learning, the toxic state of academic publishing and the crazy accountancy that passes for transparent auditing in university financial management.
This book is filled with righteous rage. Read it. Then have a nice lie down to start the battle again tomorrow ...
This book is filled with righteous rage. Read it. Then have a nice lie down to start the battle again tomorrow ...
April 17, 2014
Zombies in the Academy is a collection of essays regarding the current state of higher education using the zombie trope as a metaphor. The authors seemed to have much leeway in using the zombie metaphor to explore the particular changes that they have seen in their respective fields, as one will find critiques on academic life, curriculum, textbooks, students, and peer review. This provides a diversity of perspectives that helps the reader gain a broader picture of academia.
One recurrent theme throughout the book and specified in the introduction is the shift from the traditional Enlightenment ideal of the university as place of higher learning to that of the university as a service-oriented private business subject to market pressures. This has implications for the “audit culture” which is discussed in several essays, as well as the global marketplace
Another theme implied throughout many of the essays is the transition from the university as a place of learning for the sake of edification, typically only for a select few, to that of the university as a repository for credentials that is available to anyone who can jump through the appropriate hoops to get them.
These two themes lend themselves to discussions of Romero’s zombie series and of the original Haitian zombie. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) takes place in a shopping mall and pits humans’ consumerism against the zombies’ desire for consumption. Night of the Living Dead (2009) is the story of survivors trapped within a structure in the woods in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. The Haitian zombie was controlled by a voodoo master, known as a bokor, who steels his subject’s soul. The Haitian stories arose out of fear of de-humanizing, enslaving labor.
The book has four sections. I’m interested in the politics of higher education and how technology intersects with society, so there were certain essays that caught my attention in each section of the book. I will only mention a few essays that stood out to me based on my interests, but I recommend the book as a whole because people from different academic backgrounds will find various essays helpful for understanding the trends in higher education.
“First as tragedy, then as corpse” by Andrew Whalen was a particularly astute discussion on Jeremy Bentham’s influence on the modern-day academy. Bentham’s utilitarian principles in his work on educational reform, Chrestomathia, are realized in the modern-day bureaucratic university. Accounting, competition, and the audit culture, Whalen argues, are relics of Bentham’s influence.
“The Living Dead and the Dead Living: Contagion and Complicity in Contemporary Universities” by Holly Randell-Moon, Sue Saltmarch, and Wendy Sutherland-Smith provides a thoughtful critique on the university audit culture. The authors conducted a study in which they interviewed academics from various disciplines and at various points in their careers on their views of the bureaucratization of the university and the impact of evaluation and benchmarks. This essay discusses how, in an effort to make academics more productive, the audit culture actually subverts productivity by creating more administrative work. It also critiques the academics, themselves, as perpetuating the audit culture.
“The Journal of Doctor Wallace” by David Slattery stands out as a fictional narrative, rather than academic essay. Slattery cleverly weaves a story in which the narrator may or may not be turning into a zombie and everyone around him may or may not be zombies themselves. The students are obviously zombies from the narrator’s perspective while the faculty is not. However, in the classic style of the “untrustworthy narrator” the reader finds that the narrator displays the classic bodily signs of ‘zombification.’ At the end of the narrative I was left asking who were the real zombies in the story, or was everyone a zombie?
“Zombie Processes and Undead Technologies” by Christopher Moore discusses technology and the university from a philosophical point-of-view. Moore identifies zombie processes, a term dubbed by Unix programmers to mark an operation that has completed its task but continues to use the resources allocated to it. There are several zombie processes in higher education that remain in order to cultivate a veneer of the rituals of higher education, but are devoid of their original meaning. In reality, higher education has changed because of technology and accessibility. Moore also discusses intellectual property and the “plagiarism war” in higher education as another zombie process.
“The Botnet: Webs of Hegemony/Zombies Who Publish” by Martin Paul Eve addresses the researcher-publisher-university library triumvirate of dysfunction that perpetuates a broken peer review system. The problems with peer review and debates over open access have been hot topics lately. I appreciate that Martin Paul Eve address how all three players contribute to the system, rather than focusing solely on researchers, as the media is apt to do.
“Infectious Textbooks” by Gordon S. Carlson and James J. Sosnoski looks at how textbooks often promote “zombie” learning rather than critical thinking. The authors liken the textbook authors, who are teachers, to the voodoo bokor who creates a type of zombie by controlling what his subject thinks. Similarly, the textbook authors present their pet subject as though it was uncritical fact and devoid of context. While they pinpoint a pervasive problem with textbooks, their solution may not work in certain subject areas, such as the sciences.
Section 3: Zombie Literacies and Pedagogies
Ruth Walker’s “Undead universities,1 the plagiarism2 plague,3,4 paranoia5 and hypercitation6,7” is an essay that is all footnotes. The structure of the essay itself, as well as the content, informs her critique. There is a particular obsession with proper citation that seems to be getting to the point of being out-of-hand and almost useless.
Overall, Zombies in the Academy was an informative and, at times, entertaining read that addresses some of the problems and concerns with higher education.
One recurrent theme throughout the book and specified in the introduction is the shift from the traditional Enlightenment ideal of the university as place of higher learning to that of the university as a service-oriented private business subject to market pressures. This has implications for the “audit culture” which is discussed in several essays, as well as the global marketplace
Another theme implied throughout many of the essays is the transition from the university as a place of learning for the sake of edification, typically only for a select few, to that of the university as a repository for credentials that is available to anyone who can jump through the appropriate hoops to get them.
These two themes lend themselves to discussions of Romero’s zombie series and of the original Haitian zombie. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) takes place in a shopping mall and pits humans’ consumerism against the zombies’ desire for consumption. Night of the Living Dead (2009) is the story of survivors trapped within a structure in the woods in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. The Haitian zombie was controlled by a voodoo master, known as a bokor, who steels his subject’s soul. The Haitian stories arose out of fear of de-humanizing, enslaving labor.
The book has four sections. I’m interested in the politics of higher education and how technology intersects with society, so there were certain essays that caught my attention in each section of the book. I will only mention a few essays that stood out to me based on my interests, but I recommend the book as a whole because people from different academic backgrounds will find various essays helpful for understanding the trends in higher education.
“First as tragedy, then as corpse” by Andrew Whalen was a particularly astute discussion on Jeremy Bentham’s influence on the modern-day academy. Bentham’s utilitarian principles in his work on educational reform, Chrestomathia, are realized in the modern-day bureaucratic university. Accounting, competition, and the audit culture, Whalen argues, are relics of Bentham’s influence.
“The Living Dead and the Dead Living: Contagion and Complicity in Contemporary Universities” by Holly Randell-Moon, Sue Saltmarch, and Wendy Sutherland-Smith provides a thoughtful critique on the university audit culture. The authors conducted a study in which they interviewed academics from various disciplines and at various points in their careers on their views of the bureaucratization of the university and the impact of evaluation and benchmarks. This essay discusses how, in an effort to make academics more productive, the audit culture actually subverts productivity by creating more administrative work. It also critiques the academics, themselves, as perpetuating the audit culture.
“The Journal of Doctor Wallace” by David Slattery stands out as a fictional narrative, rather than academic essay. Slattery cleverly weaves a story in which the narrator may or may not be turning into a zombie and everyone around him may or may not be zombies themselves. The students are obviously zombies from the narrator’s perspective while the faculty is not. However, in the classic style of the “untrustworthy narrator” the reader finds that the narrator displays the classic bodily signs of ‘zombification.’ At the end of the narrative I was left asking who were the real zombies in the story, or was everyone a zombie?
“Zombie Processes and Undead Technologies” by Christopher Moore discusses technology and the university from a philosophical point-of-view. Moore identifies zombie processes, a term dubbed by Unix programmers to mark an operation that has completed its task but continues to use the resources allocated to it. There are several zombie processes in higher education that remain in order to cultivate a veneer of the rituals of higher education, but are devoid of their original meaning. In reality, higher education has changed because of technology and accessibility. Moore also discusses intellectual property and the “plagiarism war” in higher education as another zombie process.
“The Botnet: Webs of Hegemony/Zombies Who Publish” by Martin Paul Eve addresses the researcher-publisher-university library triumvirate of dysfunction that perpetuates a broken peer review system. The problems with peer review and debates over open access have been hot topics lately. I appreciate that Martin Paul Eve address how all three players contribute to the system, rather than focusing solely on researchers, as the media is apt to do.
“Infectious Textbooks” by Gordon S. Carlson and James J. Sosnoski looks at how textbooks often promote “zombie” learning rather than critical thinking. The authors liken the textbook authors, who are teachers, to the voodoo bokor who creates a type of zombie by controlling what his subject thinks. Similarly, the textbook authors present their pet subject as though it was uncritical fact and devoid of context. While they pinpoint a pervasive problem with textbooks, their solution may not work in certain subject areas, such as the sciences.
Section 3: Zombie Literacies and Pedagogies
Ruth Walker’s “Undead universities,1 the plagiarism2 plague,3,4 paranoia5 and hypercitation6,7” is an essay that is all footnotes. The structure of the essay itself, as well as the content, informs her critique. There is a particular obsession with proper citation that seems to be getting to the point of being out-of-hand and almost useless.
Overall, Zombies in the Academy was an informative and, at times, entertaining read that addresses some of the problems and concerns with higher education.
January 18, 2014
I give this book five stars for the simple reason that I have an essay in it, which - if I say so myself - is brill. I wrote a horror short story for this collection. It is not a metaphorical, political, intellectual or academic reflection on the state of academia but a simple zombie story.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews