College, Expensive and Absurd (and great fodder for a novel)

Take a second rate college with an inane administration, add a number of irate and eccentric teachers of the arts, add curricular and campus dysfunction and you've got the kind of novel English teachers love: the academic satire . . . it's a fairly narrow genre but-- typical of my profession-- I have read too many books of this ilk and I have a number of favorites (Moo by Jane Smiley, Straight Man by Richard Russo, Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon, I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe,  White Noise by Don DeLillo, Giles Goat Boy by John Barth are a few) and I'm going to add Julie Schumacher's epistolary novel Dear Committee Members and the traditionally written sequel The Shakespeare Requirement to the list; The Shakespeare Requirement, like it's predecessor, is mainly very funny, though it tackles some serious issues as well-- especially if you're a parent or student, shelling out 50,000 dollars a year for your education-- Jay Fitger, the unhappily divorced and always irate Creative Writing Professor, is now department chair and he needs to garner consensus on a statement of vision, so the college doesn't prune his worthless non-STEM department down to nothing; he's teaching a "Literature of the Apocalypse" class in an antediluvian science classroom that is literally (and inadvertently) apocalyptic: " a faintly illuminated bunkerlike enclosure . . . this windowless chamber had an emergency showerhead in one corner and presumably, at the time of the first atomic explosions, been a science lab" and he informs his students that they "should leave all gleaming gewgaws at home and take notes by hand," and he's not just talking about cell phones," Fitger-- though his face is swollen from several wasp stings-- more apocalypse-- says he is talking about everything: "iPhones, iPads, laptops, desktops, earbuds, tape recorders, DVD players, Game Boys, minifridges, pocket pets, laser pointers, calculators, e-readers, slides rules, astrolabes and-- unless they could supply a note form a medical professional-- iron lung or dialysis machines," which is pitch perfect tone for a sardonic professor in a slowly dying department in a system that has become too expensive for the students, too bureaucratic for intellectual pursuit, and too pragmatic for the arts and there is the battle between liberals and conservatives-- and though the liberals outnumber the conservatives, their departments are being starved, while Econ has the fund-raising ability, the new digs, and the blessings of the dean-- the school is going to weed out less successful departments, departments that can't pull in "customers," and this is based on some real facts-- college students are shifting their majors to studies that seem more practical--so less students are majoring in English, History, Philosophy, etc and more students are majoring in STEM (science, technology engineering and math) thought he research doesn't really show that majoring in these means you''re more likely to find a career but it does feel that way . . . if you're spending so much money on college, than perhaps you should study money, not something silly like literature or philosophy or art . . . or Shakespeare; Schumacher also satirizes the whole "coddling of the American mind" situation, the micro-triggers and the overly liberal feel-good campus zeitgeist of the bulk of the students, in sharp contrast to the tactical advances made by the various teachers and administrators . . . this may be the last book in this genre I read until my kids graduate from college, for obvious reasons.