Well, you've done it… you've finally pestered me enough to crit your article. Hope this is what you wanted, bud….
Grammar checks first:
"She got her masters at an RPC-funded college, though."
I'd change the 'though' to 'however', just to make it sound a bit more professional.
"A table with legs that seemed to rotate around the table to always appear to be facing her was between two silver chairs."
Very awkward wording. Here's an alternative:
"She came upon a table whose legs, no matter from what direction she viewed it, always appeared to be facing her. Flanking it were two sleek silver chairs."
"In one of them Professor Tyler Sarkoz sat, reading what must have been the only non-anomalous item in the area, a newspaper."
Again, awkward wording. Here's a fix:
"In one such chair sat Professor Tyler Sarkoz, holding perhaps the only non-anomalous item in the area - a newspaper."
“I’m glad that busy happened to bring you back here.”
The blatant destruction of grammar here eliminates any possible wittiness this could have. Try not to word dialogue like a Kroger ad, especially when your character is supposed to be someone educated.
Possible alternative(?):
"I'm glad that with all your important business you could still spare some time for this little ol' place."
"And that merit, however meaningless, did not make him valued above any of his peers here once he was recruited. It wasn’t popularity that brought him to this campus, and he reveled in that.'"
What?
This excerpt is confusing at best. When you say "however meaningless", you're leading into a contradiction. It makes it so the reader expects you to say something along the lines of "however, meaningless, still made him valued above his peers". The reason he wasn't valued above his peers was BECAUSE it was meaningless, so the phrasing 'however meaningless' doesn't work. Not only that, what this sentence is referring to ("that merit") is something that was discussed in an earlier paragraph, not the current one - by this point the topic has already moved to how he hates his own work. To rerail the topic back to his fame, you'd want to say "And the recognition that he received," rather than "that merit", a phrase which directly contextually points to the previous sentence.
That out of the way, more general tonal/story things are harder to pick apart one-by-one, so here's an examination.
Overall impression:
3/10
I'm not terribly impressed by this. The dialogue reads kind of like a quirky young adult novel and it's a bit tryhard. The professor's dialogue is especially disappointing in this regard because you're trying to do a "smug witty professor" voice but without the appropriate linguistic complexity or thoughtfulness, substituting it with laboured tropes, over-the-top alliteration and unnecessarily unusual words inserted pointlessly. When he says he 'waxed poetic' it's jarring, because what he said didn't sound poetic - it sounded like someone's high school paper. His description of the motivations of Mychu is very simplistic and clumsy and lacks the nuance that would make it interesting. The character writing here is generally hackneyed and cartoony, although it's passable in places.
Good choice of quote at the end though. And Klee is one of the better 'modern artists'…. although I much prefer his early work. His "Menacing Head" is one of my all-time favourite pieces.
"In classic paintings, I look for the sub-conscious - in a Surrealist painting, the conscious."
-Sigmund Freud