
I know what it’s like to have a story living within you. Academics writing novels don’t always qualify as Dark Academia, but Kathleen Kelley Reardon’s Shadow Campus does. Continuing my current kick of that genre, I eagerly read of the skulduggery taking place at the fictional Pacific Coast University and found myself nodding with recognition. Higher education is highly political. I have to wonder if where two or three are gathered politics will inevitably be in their midst. Perhaps thus it has always been, but it seems to me that when universities decided to model themselves on corporations, it grew much worse. In any case, Meghan Doherty is a business professor up for tenure. Her only family is an estranged brother in Connecticut. Then one night someone attempts to murder her on campus and make it look like a suicide.
Shamus, her brother, flies to California to see her in the hospital and soon begins to suspect things are not as they seem. I don’t want to give away too much here, in case you want to read it too. I can say that sometimes life on campus is like this. I’ve made the claim to have lived Dark Academia, and I’ll stand by it. After the unpleasantness at Nashotah House, I was hired for a year as a replacement professor at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. I really enjoyed teaching there, apart from having to leave my family in Oconomowoc; I stayed with a former Nashotah House student to whom I’m eternally grateful. The department chair and colleagues liked me. I was a good fit. There was talk of making this a full-time position for which I’d be the inside candidate. Then one of the other professors began to dislike me (long story).
I was called into the department head’s office and told that my eight courses for the next year had been reduced to one. Permission to hire had been granted, but it had to be a specialist in women’s studies. I was welcome to stay on as an adjunct, of course. I’m a blue-collar guy and I recognize a boot when I see one. And that was only the second time something similar had happened to me, and it wasn’t the last. I’ve paid my dues to academia and yes, it is often dark. So I enjoyed reading Reardon’s fictional account of underhanded dealings at Pacific Coast. In my own experience guns were never brandished, but then, you can’t have it all.