Being an academic is something that is often bound up with a fair amount of mysticism and misperception. In movies and books, academia and campus life can be portrayed as some kind of halcyon idyll, with young people willing to learn, experiment, and have fun under the benevolent guidance of wiser men (and they very often are assumed to be men – a Google image search of ‘what does a professor look like’ displayed 29 white men in the first 22 images returned by this search in June 2021). However, in more recent times this has changed, with academics portrayed as ‘the bookish but socially challenged swot or the egomaniac self-publicist that communicates his or her elevated status at every available opportunity’ (Back 2016: 68). Les Back goes on to say ‘Academics themselves don’t much like other academics, and often feel a deep estrangement from their colleagues as people. Perhaps part of the problem is that our forms of self-presentation are tied to the modern academic desire to be taken seriously – that is, the embodiment of entrepreneurialism, “being smart” and “world-class” braininess.’ Back, along with other commentators and researchers, blames the shifts seen in the ‘modern academic’ on the neoliberal university, which captures academics’ dispositions towards hard work and achievement and overlays them with demands.