Option Three : A Novel about the University

When Acting Visiting Assistant Professor L. Circassian is fired and rehired in the same week (with a 35 percent pay cut), he is only at the beginning of a cycle of abuse and professional debasement at the university. Joel Shatzky has created an hilarious novel about the corporatization of higher education - a book filled with blowhard deans, corrupt politicians, grasping CEOs, inept union officials, inappropriately dressed students, and scholars in donkey ears."Option Three is an imaginative, funny and sometimes all too realistic account of life in today's colleges and universities. Shatzky tells it like it (unfortunately) is in today's academic world." -Del Janik, Professor Emeritus, Department of English, SUNY, Cortland"Joel Shatzky gives us a tour of a public university where the present vogue for competition and privatization has been taken to a logical extreme. The results are highly entertaining - and terrifying."-David Koistinen, Associate Professor of History, William Paterson University of New Jersey"Option Three explores drastic takeovers of academia by corporations, in which the mantra becomes the bottom line of making money under a strict umbrella of profit only. Joel Shatzky's bizarre, most humorous and onerous odyssey confronts these changes with keen insight and most fearless fantasy."-Louis Trakis, Professor Emeritus in Art, Manhattanville College"While much is written today about the failure of the schools, nowhere is there such a lucid account of the effect of this conspiracy on the genuine educators who are first, forbidden to do what we do best - create the lessons that develop the thinking skills that underlie all learning - and then punished and ostracized for standing our ground. I laughed at the cynical dialogue and outrageous administrative shenanigans, but when I finished, I wept like the teachers in the novel . . ." -Susan Lee Schwartz, winner of the NYSEC "Educator of Excellence Award"