A mathematician's survival guide

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There are several mentions of math courses in this thread, so I'll bring up some examples of academic politics found in the book A Mathematician's Survival Guide: Graduate School and Early Career Development. http://www.amazon.com/Mathematicians-Survival-Guide-Graduate... The author, a math professor, points out that a department has to keep up its enrollments to maintain departmental resources, and those resources include funding for more professors. He tells the story of one state university system that had a main math department in university's main college of arts and sciences (whatever the exact name was) and a set of first-year calculus courses for forestry majors taught by the School of Forestry. By university rules, all first-year calculus courses were deemed equivalent, and by reputation of the courses reported by students, the c…