The Chronicle of Higher Education
May 6th, 2015
For a scholar ignored or condemned by almost everyone in his discipline, a career adjunct unable to secure job interviews much less a tenure-track position, Jonathan Gottschall is unusually prominent.
A "distinguished fellow" at Washington & Jefferson College (he doesn’t teach or get paid, but he does get to use the campus library), Gottschall has had his work cited in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Chronicle Review, Nature, Science, Scientific American, and The New York Times, which in 2010 ran a photo of him under the headline "Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know That You Know."
Today he characterizes his academic career in a different way: "Dead in the water."
His new book, just out from Penguin Press, is The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch, for which he traded an adjunct’s cubicle for boxing gloves, stunt journalism, and the brutal world of mixed martial arts.