#the protagonist somehow picked up multiple languages at her tiny liberal arts college but has not even studied abroad?

[oldshrewsburyian]

I’m about halfway through Katy Hays’ The Cloisters and I’m so annoyed by its treatment of academia/academics. Currently, I’m most annoyed by the plot point that claims professors "thought nothing of throwing out material they had already incorporated into their research.”

...Before I checked her author bio, I immediately assumed that Hays had never met an academic or peeked inside an academic’s office. One does not simply throw away material! Okay, I culled my grad school folders full of offprints, but they still take up a shelf. And throwing away material central to one’s research topic?!? Never.

Maybe this seems nitpicky, but I often feel as though books of this kind, though belonging to a subgenre allegedly celebrating such things, have contempt for the substance of what it is that scholars do and how they (we) do it. And this irritates me, not least because I don’t understand why.

#the protagonist somehow picked up multiple languages at her tiny liberal arts college but has not even studied abroad? #make it make SENSE #i managed to have 3 solid languages by the time i graduated from a similar no-name school #but latin AND greek? and medieval vernaculars before she's even started grad school? come on #put the academia in dark academia challenge #katy hays #the cloisters #currently reading