The Scholar's Survival Manual

Book excerpt: The product of a lifetime of experience in American universities, The Scholar's Survival Manual offers advice for students, professors, and administrators on how to get work done, the path to becoming a professor, getting tenured, and making visible contributions to scholarship, as well as serving on promotion and tenure committees. Martin H. Krieger covers a broad cross section of the academic experience from a graduate student's first foray into the job market through retirement. Because advice is notoriously difficult to take and context matters a great deal, Krieger has allowed his ideas to percolate through dozens of discussions. Some of the advice is instrumental, matters of expediency; some demands our highest aspirations. Readers may open the book at any place and begin reading; for the more systematic there is a detailed table of contents. Krieger's tone is direct, an approach born of the knowledge that students and professors too often ignore suggestions that would have prevented them from becoming academic roadkill. This essential book will help readers sidestep a similar fate.