Fiction contest: No need to know what the fuck a limerick is

I've been inspired to become a novelist because of my thesis. It is going so poorly that I 1) know that I need a new aspiration and 2) have been procrastinating enought to write the following beginning to my first novel:

“Being this low on the academic ladder has got to be one of the worst jobs on earth,” Robert Doyle thought to himself. He took another sip of the bitter coffee he had bought from the department secretary for a quarter, and opened his manuscript. Manuscript—perhaps a word too noble to describe that limply structured collection of words that had persisted as his worst nightmare since graduate school. This weakly structured menace had somehow survived the earthquake of his marriage, and was now weathering the aftershocks with an apathy only surpassed by that of Doyle himself.

Some might say that Doyle wasn’t as low on the academic ladder as he thought. He was an associate professor at Nixon State University, and thus possessed power over all three of the assistant professors in his department, as well as one lecturer. And, though the assistant professors had learned better, the lecturer still occasionally came to ask Doyle to look over his manuscript. An alcoholic, Welch McGinnis would stumble in drunk, telling Doyle that he was thinking about sending it to a few publishers that very day. Doyle always responded in one of two ways: on the rare occasions when he was able to muster any self-respect at all he would read with pleasure, knowing with certainty that he was more intelligent than at least one person in the academic world. On days like this (the overwhelming majority), however, Doyle could only respect the man for his courage. If they weren’t equals in intellect, McGinnis at least had the self-respect to try.

The contest: write the next few parargraphs, or sentences, or sentence, of this virtuouso. Bonus points for somehow turning it into an optimistic story.