How can academics think about the limits of the academy without reproducing academia? The authors of this experimental, exploratory and sometimes angry book use autofiction and imagined dialogues to express their experiences of the “edu-factory", seeking to breach the routine registers of academic talk, and to provoke awareness of how we apprehend (or don’t) what is going on around us. The department meeting, conference and classroom will never feel the same again.

Alan Finlayson, University of East Anglia

There are many books which stridently claim that the university is dead, but few that show what it is like to stumble around inside the corpse. This beautifully written and clever volume will provoke laughter and despair in equal measure, and perhaps make readers wonder how smart people end up doing such stupid things.

Martin Parker, professor of organization studies, University of Bristol

It is easy to be wise after the event, in 2033. The University in Crumbs is both banal phenomenology of everyday academic life and provocative auto-ethnographic dramaturgy by critically trained pedants and textualists, more and/or less hoodwinked and impotent. If your University has a ‘forward together’ strategy at the basis of its ‘divisional restructuring’, this is the book for you.

Stella Sandford, professor of modern European philosophy, Kingston University