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"Moo" by Jane Smiley (set at an Auburn-like land-grant agriculture college nicknamed "Moo U.")
"White Noise" by Don DeLillo (near-future sf in which the protagonist teaches in the Department of Hitler Studies)
"Waking the Moon" by Elizabeth Hand (fine fantasy novel about a goddess cult on the Washington, D.C., campus of the University of the Archangels and St. John the Divine, which makes Davies' College of St. John and the Holy Ghost look as mundane as Moo U.)
"To Say Nothing of the Dog" by Connie Willis (the funniest of her various sf novels and stories about time-traveling Oxford dons; another is the downright grim "Doomsday Book," about the Black Death)
One surreal short story that comes to mind is John Kessel's "The Lecturer," in which a campus landmark is an imposing lecturer on a pedestal, who has been lecturing, day and night, rain and shine, for generations.
I don't believe there's any science or sci-fi content, but Richard Russo's "Straight Man" ('97, I think, on Vintage) is one of the funniest academic satires I've read.
It's about the stuck-forever-as-chair of an English department in a small northeastern college. Although he professes rationalism (his dog is named Occam), Dr. Devereaux goes on local television, wearing a fake nose and glasses, threating to kill a duck a day (while actually holding a goose) if he doesn't get his new budget. Any teacher (or anyone who's been in a writing workshop) should appreciate the moment when the good professor is pushed to offer this advice to a student: "Always understate necrophilia."
A close second is John Irving's early novel "The Water-Method Man," with Fred "Bogus" Trumper's Sisyphean task to finally graduate from graduate school, translating the lost Old Low Norse epic "Akthelt and Gunnel." (sort of like "The Odyssey" meets "Beowulf" meets "As the World Turns"). Like Deveraux's, most of his wounds are self-inflicted, well-intentioned though he may be. Bogus just has a little trouble with the truth. And lust. And, interestingly, now that I think about it, another dead duck. Good times."
+++++++++
Andy Duncan's recommendation of Connie Willis' novels reminds me of other academically oriented novels of hers, especially the farce "Bellwether", in which a researcher who analyses trends (while hating them) is constantly thwarted by supervisors and fellow workers. This is set in trendy Boulder, Colorado. A much longer work, "Passage", is told from the point of view of a medical researcher on near-death experiences, who again has to wend her way through bureaucratic mismanagement and a chaotic personal life. 'Safe' near-death experiences are induced chemically but no one wants to talk about what they see, so the researcher tries the drug on herself. As the novel progresses, satire falls away and the reader is led to think about some very disturbing ideas.
None of these satires focus on geologists or paleontologists. It seems to me that we were portrayed mainly as boring professors or evil oilmen until "Jurassic Park". Any examples?
Andrew K. Rindsberg
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