AUTHOR’S NOTE
Love, Theoretically is, by far, the most “academic” book I’ve written. I’d been wanting to tell a love story set against the backdrop of academic politics for a while, and for this one I really let myself get into the weeds. Maybe a little too much? Sorry! But as usual, lots of elements were inspired by my own experience in the slightly cesspooly mess of the academe.
Academic job interviews can be just as exhausting, long winded, and soul crushing as Elsie perceives them to be. The feuds within disciplines, just as petty. The power mentors have over their mentees, just as absolute. The adjunctification of higher education, which strands instructors with no job or financial security, just as terrifying. The bogus article Jack wrote is very loosely modeled after a real event: the Sokal Hoax happened in 1996, when an NYU physics professor wrote and submitted a “nonsense” article to Social Text, a leading cultural studies academic journal, to make a point about its editorial sloppiness and lack of intellectual rigor. The article was accepted, and the controversies, implications, and academic infights that followed are history (and documented in the Wikipedia entry, if you feel like busting out the popcorn).
Either way, I hope you enjoyed this story. And if you’re wondering why anyone would want to pursue a career in academia after all of this . . . well, there are tons of academics out there, loving their jobs—and yet wondering the very same!