University, a vocational charnel house?

Joseph Gora and Andrew Whelan have written an amusing piece for The Australian under the title Invasion of Aca-zombies (as in, invasion of the Academic Zombies).

UNIVERSITIES are increasingly populated by the undead: a listless population of academics, managers, administrators and students, all shuffling to the beat of the corporatist drum … Academic zombie speech is peppered with affectless references to DEST points, citation indices, ERA rankings, ARC applications, esteem factors, FoR codes, AUQA reviews and the like. […]

The most curious aspect of this zombie plague, though, is … the pockets of resistance it fails to quash. A tutorial here, textbook marginalia there, crack squads of indomitable postgrads, secretive cells of idealistic academics and even the odd public intellectual: all scattered signs that intelligent life persists. Occasionally it is necessary, as in Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead, to pass as undead to survive.

Of course, I like to think of myself as belonging to one of the secretive cells of idealistic academics in this vocational charnel house. So, I am probably a zombie and deluded.