"Naming begins the chaos," Ann Berthoff once said in describing her model for composing as a double helix. "Because they have the power of naming, [students] can generate chaos" (Making of Meaning, Boynton, 1981, 70). Chaos is desirable in Berthoff's formulation, a necessary condition for thinking, for making meaning. Naming is powerful, a way to shape experience and to claim it. Much of our work in the academy centers on a process of naming—of defining our terms, opposing them to others, renaming them to fit new contexts as they arise. Our fascination with naming generates a lot of chaos, a potentially productive tension that fuels our conference discussions about the role of the "personal" in the writing class, our teaching "theory" to undergraduates, and our departmental meetings about "interdisciplinary approaches" or about hiring for a "postcolonial" position.

Terry Caesar's Traveling through the Boondocks is all about naming. And his aim might be to do as Berthoff suggests, to "begin the chaos," to set in motion a process that would have academic institutions, and English departments in particular, bring to the surface those unnamed factors that circumscribe and limit our scholarly and teaching lives. "Boondocks" itself is a powerful bit of naming, for it refers not only to the mythical and parodied university in Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert's 1991 article in Critical Inquiry, "Masterpiece Theatre: An Academic Melodrama," but to Caesar's own very real university in central Pennsylvania, Clarion State. Caesar writes from the boondocks, and down in the boondocks nothing much happens that might interest the larger world, the not-boondocks world of elite academic institutions. Caesar calls his univer sity "second rate" in an earlier article from which this book grows, "On Teaching at a Second Rate University," originally published in the South Atlantic Quarterly. Not surprisingly, Caesar suggests, colleagues and university administrators were dismayed by the piece, not by his description of what went on at Clarion but by the name he gave it: "`I still don't understand why you had to mention Clarion,' my dean kept saying to me the one time we spoke, most agreeably, about my infamous article."

Academic etiquette, unstated but clear, prescribes that a school like Clarion can be mentioned only fictitiously, while a first-rate school—Harvard say, or Berkeley—can be and always is identified. Caesar's point, or one of them, is to show what difference that makes to academic institutionalism. Referring to the article, he says, "I wanted to reveal, specifically, how [Clarion's] unmentionable status is appropriated by the encompassing system of institutional hierarchies." That system functions by assigning status to the kinds of work academics perform and the kinds of institutions they work within, and by authorizing certain kinds of experience and ignoring other kinds. The members of institutionally elite schools write the most influential books, published by the most influential presses. They are organizers and speakers at national conferences that help determine academic interests and set institutional agendas. Their activity in these arenas reproduces and expands their influence and the influence of their institutions. And, yet, American higher education embraces an ideal, a dearly-held fiction, that it extends its discourse and its rhetoric to all institutions; its claim is in fact that there are no second-rate universities. Caesar remembers hearing a colleague remark that he would have saved himself a lot of trouble had he been politically correct and not called Clarion second rate but "differently rated."

In part, Caesar argues, the system of hierarchy replicates itself because of everyone's unwillingness to name names, to talk in real cases about the academic class issue that circumscribes academic life. "Everybody knows," one of his colleagues says to him, that some institutions have better students, more money, and better reputations than others. The implication is that it's unnecessary, even unseemly or embarrassing, to mention it. Talking about the boondocks as the boondocks might cultivate what a former U.S. president called a "politics of envy." Yet, Caesar's politics are not motivated by envy, but by clarity. "One reads about higher education today," he says, "amazed at how the names still have to be changed to protect the actual."

In Traveling through the Boondocks, Caesar illuminates the actual, rather than protects it, by telling tales of life in his own "differently rated" institution. The book is like a long Dennis Miller rant: witty, pointed, cranky. Like one of those rants, Caesar's is sometimes unfair, sometimes too narrow, and often wise. His stories about departmental decision-making, professional conferences, teaching and report making, grant writing, and job seeking will strike resonant chords for readers in any English department and in academic environments beyond English where presumably the same class distinctions and institutional authorization obtain. They are deliberately intimate stories, avowedly personal ones, but they symbolize the larger philosophical and practical problems that faculty, departments, and institutions face—especially if they're in the boondocks. And let's face it: almost all of us in the academy are in the boondocks, since the number of elite, first-rate institutions comprises but a tiny percentage of the total number of institutions of higher education. In naming his struggle within the hierarchy, Caesar names the conditions, traditions, and constraints that affect the scholarly and teaching lives of all who work in differently rated institutions: "What impels me most of all . . . whether attending conferences, applying for grants, or going on sabbaticals, is how the whole matter of hierarchy itself gets muffled, elided, and excluded—and, along with it, both my own institution and the story of my own experience in it."

Each story of his institution and of his experience uncovers, unmuffles, another facet of institutional hierarchy, one that is damaging to professional life and yet suppressed by the forces of what "everybody knows." One hierarchy that most readers will recognize in their own institutions is the perennial research-teaching division. "Everybody knows" that research institutions are better funded, more nationally visible and more prestigious than "teaching" institutions. Caesar remembers what he felt when his first book was published: "A book! This meant to me that I was no longer only, or rather merely, a teacher. It was as if I had been liberated from some vast, imperious, and intricately conceived system of subjection. If I remained at the same university, it felt as if I had at least risen in—what else to call it?—class." A teacher or a teaching institution that has no book or no research mission is definitely lower class. Caesar's discussion here will remind readers of Stephen North's The Making of Knowledge in Composition: those whose "research" consists of what North called "lore," teachers' stories, will always remain almost totally out of the knowledge-making loop in their fields. Recent calls from scholars at Research I institutions or among elite private schools to resuscitate teaching only document the power of those institutions and the powerlessness of those who have all along had teaching as their assigned primary enterprise. "There are those who hold forth about the wonders of teaching, and those who do it," Caesar says. The teacher-scholar, much touted recently (usually by those in first-rate institutions), is simply a myth for Caesar. "I never met one," he tells us flatly.

Most readers will have heard this hierarchy discussed—and decried—at conferences, or in promotion and tenure decisions in their departments, or in casual conversations in the hall. It's a hierarchy that carries special poignancy for composition teachers, who've embraced the role of practitioners, sometimes to their own detriment. Likewise, the hierarchy of influence that Caesar exposes in applying for grants or finding jobs or presenting at conferences is acknowledged, if only tacitly, by many academics. Caesar has trenchant observations to make on all these suppressed truths about how influence is peddled in academic life.

But in his story of a hiring decision at Clarion, Caesar uncovers a hierarchy that few academics have confronted even indirectly—although, as he demonstrates, it's one that strikes at the heart of the life of a department. It's the blurred line between a department seen as a professional organization and as a social one. Caesar's story is about the process of hiring for a tenure-track position in his English department where the final two candidates represent the tension between the insider and the outsider. One is a long-time adjunct member of the department who is also the lover of one of the professors in the department. The other is an outside candidate. Both perform admirably in their interviews; the outside candidate is better qualified by training, but the internal candidate is known as a good teacher. Those in support of the internal candidate would never agree that the insider applicant is finally being considered primarily for social reasons; and in many departments where internal candidates apply, professional reasons are sometimes primary rather than secondary. What's interesting about the story is that the social reasons remain unspoken. There must be a pretense and a denial of the social imperative in departmental decisions because the social is simultaneously crucial and suspect. At elite institutions, the division between the social and the professional is less a problem, Caesar maintains, because of the primacy of the research model. As a former Harvard dean quoted by Caesar says, "Harvard staffs its departments according to who is the best in the world in any field." In less lofty environments, however, local favorites constitute a primary feature of the department, where adjuncts, part-time staff, faculty spouses, or recent graduates of the program, perform necessary work and often admirably. And even when local favorites aren't the issue, competing interests and agendas of departmental favorites often result in particular decisions about who and how to hire. Whether we admit it or not, "the department finally is this division between the professional and the social." Because of departments' inability to admit to the pressures of the social, the process of hiring—or deciding what kind of person to hire—is always attended by bitterness or unexpressed resentment and often by destructive factionalism. Like the other hierarchies Caesar meditates on, this one gathers strength in the silence that surrounds it. And because it occurs most often in departments in the boondocks, it's a hierarchy that is never part of the academic conversation.

Caesar unsettles our categories of institutional life, and the experience is uncomfortable. Readers might tire of the constant rhetorical questions—his favorite stylistic move—but those questions finally don't seem rhetorical as much as ones that require an answer. "Why write all of this specifically?" he asks. "Exactly what unites a group?" "Why has this obvious state of affairs gone unremarked upon?" "Is it the fate of non-elite institutions either to be effaced in loftier considerations of marginality or to be caught up in rhetorical operations of critics from not-quite elite institutions?" Throughout the book, the questions arise again and again, as much a demand as a frustrated lament. And readers will ask questions in return. "What does Caesar want?" might be one. He wants to be heard. And he wants more voices to be heard along with his: "The discourse about American education badly needs not so much more voices as voices from different institutional positions." We've begun to deal with marginality based on gender, race, and ethnicity, and those differences have led to productive discussion and changes in our institutional agendas. Caesar would have us talk about institutional marginality for the same reasons. "The nature of anyone's marginality changes, depending upon how many voices (some similar to yours, some not) you can hear."

There's something refreshing about this voice that lets the cat out of the proverbial bag, that refuses to ignore the elephant in the room any longer. And, yet, precisely because the book can open eyes to some disquieting truths, I want more. It deserves to be much more than a rant, and for that Caesar would have to look harder at his subject. What about the persistent hierarchy that English departments all fall prey to, the one between literature and composition? Perhaps it's one Caesar can't tell a good story about because he's heir to it. Speaking of the requirement to observe a peer's classroom and comment on it, he notes, "Far worse, she was teaching freshman composition, a course I hate to observe possibly more than I do to teach." He writes his reports even as he mocks "some of my colleagues in composition classes for fashionably deeming their dull charges to be members of `writing communities.'" And what about those "dull charges"? Caesar speaks of his students in many glancing references, but seldom with a sense of their class positions in the institutional hierarchies he defines and even less often with any understanding of how students' feelings about their position might mirror, or at least connect with, his own.

If, as he admits, CCCC and NCTE might be different conferences from the MLA, where, colleagues have told him, there are many more opportunities for speakers from second-rate schools to speak and where "there are even high school teachers about," he might begin to imagine some possibilities for institutional change from the margins. He suspects that "the counter-narrative each of these organizations provides to the MLA begins with a presumed banishing of hierarchy that only proceeds to get reconstituted in different ways" (and his suspicion might not be entirely unfounded), but only his hard look at alternatives can tell him whether there might not be ways to mitigate against the stagnant hierarchies he so dramatically describes.

"God, how I love chaos, Terry. It's all we can hope for," one of his retired colleagues tells him. Chaos is too much to hope for when we can't articulate the institutional ties that bind us. But when we can put names to the truths we know about our academic lives, we begin the process of making meaning from those ties, perhaps even begin the process of breaking them. Whatever the limitations of Traveling through the Boondocks, Terry Caesar has helped the profession by generating a little chaos.