The Daily Pennsylvanian caught me unawares and uncaffeinated this morning. I read almost all the way through the lead article about how Penn would be tearing down one of its monstrous high rise residences before I realized that it was April Fool's Day and that I had been duped by a former student (I nearly said that "I had been had by a former student," but such phrases are dangerous in the era of sexual harasssment and I have thus edited accordingly).

Admittedly, I thought some of the quotes from Penn administrators were a bit casual. For example, the article quotes David Brownlee, Penn's dignified and impeccable director of college houses, on how the demolition will make for cramped quarters in Penn's remaining dorms: "I mean frankly, as many people have said, the high rises are just too big for the traditional college house definition. When you have three people sharing a room the size of a 1967 Volkswagon Beetle, they really have to develop that warm, happy, loving, academic and ultra-dorky environment that we're looking for." Wow, I thought. Satire as administrative strategy! In my bleary-eyed state, I admired Brownlee's honesty. After all, it came across a lot better than the usual insincere platitudes administrators tend to offer in moments like this.

My awe at Penn's new policy of preventive self-mockery only grew when I read President Judith Rodin's announcement that she will move into a penthouse atop the replacement high rise that will be built where Hamilton College House now stands: "I want to be above it all .... My office is on the first floor of College Hall. My suburban house is at street level. None of this gives me the commanding position that I need. I'm the president of this university, not some mere peon!" This is it, I thought. A new era is born. Academe will be humorless no more! Maybe now we can lose the speech codes and the moral policing and the therapeutic pedagogy and move forward into a better, funnier future. I caught on to the article when it reported that parts of the new building proposal had been plagiarized from history professor Thomas Childers' book, The Wings of Morning. But by that time it was too late. Tristan Schweiger had tapped into my latent optimism, unleashing the motive force of unreconstructed hope and belief.

Thus was it doubly hard to read over this week's Chronicle of Higher Education. The only funny thing about the current Chron is that it reads like an April Fool's edition even though it is not. There is, for example, news of bidding wars at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Stanley Fish offered the poet Rita Dove $200,000/year plus perks to join the English department there, and Rita Dove has refused. $200,000??? When most junior faculty in English make less than $50,000, and even full professors are lucky to make $80,000? When raises are typically lower than the cost of living increase? When there are only two official opportunities for professional advancement in the entire career--promotion to associate professor and promotion to full? When, if you want a decent raise, you have to prostitute yourself--apply for jobs you don't really want, flirt with the folks at other institutions until they make you an offer, and then either jump ship for money or use that offer to extort more pay from your home institution? Ouch, ouch, ouch!! If it weren't so damned true it would be funny.

Likewise with the column by a history Ph.D. who is throwing in the towel after an unsuccessful, seven-year job search. Chris Cumo candidly confesses that in seven years of searching, he has only landed one campus interview, and that, he acknowledges, came not because he was a top candidate for the job, but because he lived so close to the hiring institution that they could interview him without having to pay for his plane fare and hotel. Chris Cumo has published two books, but is not bitter. He takes responsibility for his situation, acknowledging that he didn't plan for this contingency when he was in grad school, that he could not be bothered to consider non-academic career routes because he was so blinkered by his desire to join what he calls, without a trace of irony, "the club." I don't know what's worse about this column, the rotten experience it describes or the placid, almost lobotomized equanimity with which it recounts that experience. Cumo's article should be a satirical parody of the lemming-like fatalism with which academic departments continue to greet the impossible, intractable job market for newly minted humanities Ph.D.s. It should be a send-up of how Ph.D. programs keep churning out students despite the lack of jobs, of how they routinely do nothing, or next to nothing, to make students aware of the extent of the problem or to prepare them for alternative careers, and of how grad students too often screw themselves by putting starry-eyed dreams ahead of practical preparation. But it is instead a devastatingly matter-of-fact account of one historian's trip through an all-too common professional nightmare. Ouch and ouch again.

Likewise, again, with Maurice C. Taylor's article about being a defendant in a sexual harassment suit. Taylor was falsely accused of harassment when he was a provost at St. Augustine's College in North Carolina, and he writes the column with some helpful tips to all those who find themselves in similar situations. Be aware, he points out, that your institution may not have the same goals you do--you want to prove your innocence, but your institution will want to protect itself against liability. Be aware that between the slowness of legal proceedings and the eagerness of the media, you will most likely be convicted in the court of public opinion long before the facts of the case are assembled. Be aware that even if you are innocent, your reputation will suffer. The list goes on. Like Cumo's piece, this one is haunting for its lack of outrage, for its strangely passive way of reflecting on a devastating chapter in a person's career. Taylor even comes right out and says that his primary emotion during the two years he was being investigated was indifference. If the essay were satire, it would work: it would point out how ridiculously mundane academic sexual harassment cases have become, it would get its humor from the suggestion that being accused of sexual harassment is becoming a rite of passage for academic men, like tenure review or membership in the faculty club, and it would get its power from the self-help format, the list of mentorly tips from one who has been there and done that, to those who still have false accusations to look forward to. But it is the furthest thing you can get from satire: a deadly serious, earnest essay about something that ought to be laughable, but just isn't.

Every day is April Fool's Day in academe, it seems. And it is so not funny.