Luke Slattery is a Sydney-based journalist and editor. He has spent most of his career in newspapers writing about the world of ideas for a wide audience. He has served as higher education editor at The Australian, The Age and the Financial Review, and has been the recipient of the Higher Education Journalist of the Year Award, the European Union journalist award, and the Australia Council's Keesing writing fellowship in Paris. His journalism and writing have been published in the main Australian metropolitan newspapers and internationally at the International Herald Tribune , the LA Times , the London Spectator, The Scotsman , and the US Chronicle of Higher Education ; a number of his articles have been republished online at the Arts & Letters Daily web portal. Slattery is the author of Crisis in the Clever Country- Why Our Universities are Failing (with Geoffrey Maslen), Dating Aphrodite- Modern Adventures in the Ancient World , and Reclaiming Epicurus- Could an Ancient Philosophy of Happiness Save the World? He is a doctoral candidate at the University of Technology, Sydney. The First Dismissal is his fourth book.