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Sounds like an enticing read, even if by an outsider. Usually academic novels are by disgruntled academics. It's a vicarious kind of airing of grievances in fiction that have no institutional venting mechanism in reality. The only thing that didn't ring true to me was the approach to age. Any campus of any size certainly has some hangers-on till death do us part. I aspire to this myself, since many of the boomers in academe weren't hired until later in life, which saves money on retirements and other luxuries for academic labor... In decades of higher education, I've never seen any particular sensitivity about age discrimination, unless it's about an aging administrator that they really, really, really want to hang on to. It's always seemed to me to be rampant and almost unabashed when it comes to faculty, secretarial or maintenance staff. In terms of faculty, it often seems as though there is an institutional obsession with getting some really new people (the so-called "newly minted PhD") as a means of papering over the almost unvarying institutional hostility to any really new ideas. :-) ML ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com