In her latest critically acclaimed novel, On Beauty, Zadie Smith skewers academia for its pomposity. But the award-winning British writer can’t seem to leave the university fold. She’s an adjunct professor at Columbia. This past spring, Smith taught a writing course called Sense and Sensibility, in which, according to the syllabus, students “read a selection of very good 20th-century novels (and one book of poems) concentrating on whatever is most particular to them, in the hope that this might help us understand whatever is most particular to us.” And next fall, she’ll join NYU’s Creative Writing Program as a full professor. The university also recently signed up celebrity authors Jonathan Lethem and Jonathan Safran Foer to be writers in residence.