Marshall Welch

Academese Marshall Welch

Academese is a useful and humorous look into the language and culture of higher education. It is designed as a hybrid technical reference tool and a light-hearted resource in the form of a glossary with terms and topics organized alphabetically. It also serves as a kind of travel guide for doctoral students and new faculty exploring the land known as Academia. As a memoir of a confessed "recovering academic," the book presents an array of topics ranging from the profound to the mundane and the unexpected. This includes examining things such as academic freedom, cultural competence, and tenure to "real issues" such as parking and office space. Euphemisms such as "load" and "tenure clock" are unpacked. New and emerging terms and concepts such as "spray and pray" and "severe spoken simile syndrome" are introduced. While the format and voice may not be scholarly in the traditional sense, the book is most definitely about scholarship and scholars. The book is both factual and accurate yet irreverent and self-effacing. It is, indeed, the information doctoral students yearn from their dissertation committee chair over drinks in a bar at a professional conference. The postscript invites the aspiring doctoral student and professoriate to reframe the transactional paradigm of higher education into a transformative process of "deeper education." This book is ideal for new faculty orientation workshops and doctoral student seminars.