This paper draws on the findings of an autoethnographic study to discuss significant changes in the character of US institutions of higher education in recent decades. The autoethnography incorporates two forms of evidence: first, a dataset generated from the author’s experiences, observations, communications, and interactions over a 40-year career as a college professor in a wide range of academic settings, and second, a specific event that occurred just weeks before the author’s formal retirement from full-time academic employment. The latter event proved to be analytically important as a crystallizing experience for making sense of the larger body of data collected over the author’s academic career. The event serves as a dramatic illustration of profound changes in how various academic constituencies have come to define the meaning and value of academic books. The paper proposes that the changing meaning of books among key academic actors can be viewed as an important signifier of broader social-economic trends in higher education in the postwar era.

本文借鉴了一项民族志研究的结果，以讨论近几十年来美国高等教育机构的特征发生的重大变化。自传民族志结合了两种形式的证据：第一，是根据作者在各种学术环境中担任大学教授40年的经验，观察，交流和互动而生成的数据集；第二，是发生的特定事件在作者从全职学术工作中正式退休之前几周。事实证明，后一事件在分析过程中具有重要意义，可以使作者在学术生涯中收集到的大量数据有意义，这是一种结晶的经验。这次活动生动地说明了各种学术界如何定义学术书籍的意义和价值的深刻变化。本文认为，战后时代，主要学术角色之间书籍含义的变化可以看作是高等教育更广泛的社会经济趋势的重要标志。