Yana Weinstein-Jones brilliantly lampoons and ridicules the climate in one fictitious University academic department over the course of one calendar year, with special attention to workload issues, leadership style, the tenure process, and the absurdity of academia.The endless faculty meetings are fraught with tense, passive aggressive discussions, fuelled by an ingenious mechanism for bringing anonymous grievances to the table: During meetings, faculty are to scribble their 'concerns' on pieces of paper - one each, even if you don't have a concern, please! - that are then gathered and read aloud by the department administrator, who sometimes comically and other times tragically stumbles over the bad handwriting and obnoxiously overwrought vocabulary of the woe-stricken faculty.By the end of the academic year, two faculty members have quit, two are actively looking for other jobs but have not been able to secure one, two more are planning on leaving in the long run to escape the vortex of absurdity known as Academia. One is writing a book about it.
