June 12, 2017

First Thing We Do, Let's Kill All the Deans @chronicle

Ms. Mentor, channelled through Emily Toth, Professor of English and Women's Studies at LSU, offers her annual-ish list of academic list of novels for summer reading here for the Chronicle of Higher Education. This year, the theme is nasty deans. I wouldn't have thought there were all that many to choose from. I am so naive.








  • Alfred Alcorn, Murder in the Museum of Man (1997).
  • Saul Bellow, The Dean’s December (1982).
  • Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (1925).
  • David Fleming, It’s All Academic (2000).
  • John Gardner, Mickelsson’s Ghosts (1982).
  • Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Devil and Webster (2017).
  • Bernard Malamud, A New Life (1961).
  • Bourne Morris, The Red Queen’s Run (2014).
  • Cathy Perkins, The Professor (2012).
  • Joanne Rendell, The Professors’ Wives’ Club (2008).



  • Kim A. Smith, The Cora Crane School of Journalism: a Novel of Academic Shenanigans (2016). 



  • To the list I suggest looking at film and tv deans: check out the Dean Bitterman trope in TV Tropes.  See also the Perry Mason episode The Case of the Decadent Dean (s7, ep. 5).

    From my own wonderful dean, Tom Galligan, (definitely not a candidate for literary extermination and who provided the title for this post: "Out, out, damned deans!"

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