Of course, some would say we’re already there.

Last week the hot topic in higher education was Dracula. This week it’s zombies. What’s next?

Serena Golden of Inside Higher Ed reports.

‘Zombies in the Academy’

It may sound like a joke to say that higher education has been the site of a zombie apocalypse, but Andrew Whelan, Ruth Walker and Christopher Moore aren’t just kidding around. The three are the editors of Zombies in the Academy: Living Death in Higher Education  (Intellect Books, distributed by University of Chicago Press), a new volume in which the figure of the zombie serves as a way to examine the current state of academe.

The book’s contributors find zombies lurking around every corner: students concerned solely with getting through and making the grade; faculty members deadened by the corporatization of the university and the erosion of traditional faculty jobs; systems and processes within the university that have long since outlived their original purpose but that endlessly perpetuate themselves. What does it mean, the editors wonder, if the zombie apocalypse has already taken place, and we are living — or undead — within it?

Whelan, lecturer in sociology at the University of Wollongong; Walker, lecturer in academic writing at the University of Wollongong; and Moore, lecturer in media and communication at Deakin University, answered e-mailed questions about the volume and the essays that each contributed. Though the authors are all at Australian universities, the trend toward zombification, they say, is global.

Q: Where did the idea originate to produce a volume on zombies in the academy?

Walker: I had just sent what I thought was a rather snazzy abstract for a paper about the zombification of student literacies to a plagiarism conference in the UK. Sadly, it was rejected, with the referees’ comments basically, “Oh dear, you can’t call students zombies.” I was disappointed that they had misread the point of my paper, but resigned. That is, until I realized that the majority of accepted papers were all pretty much saying the same thing about plagiarism (“it is bad”) and that the solution was plagiarism detection software (“amazing silver technological bullet”).