Mark Falcoff

A Season in Utopia Mark Falcoff

The year is 1971 and America's long romance with higher education is coming to an end, provoked by worsening economic conditions and growing campus unrest. Unfortunately for Geoffrey Yawlings, 27 years of age and a recent Ph. D. in history from Harvard, the only job he can find is a shaky two year contract at a mediocre state university in the Pacific Northwest--geographically isolated, deeply provincial--in a state where it rains nine months a year but which insists upon calling itself "the Utopia where all Americans dream of living". Geoffrey's new colleagues resemble nothing so much as recently demobilized officers of a defeated army and his students are stoned on pot most of the time. Worse still, the only way the university can be rescued financially is if the state legislature decides to approve a lottery. Then and only then will Geoffrey have a chance to waste his life in the academic backlands. But even this may not happen, particularly if a certain radical sociology professor manages to "sharpen the contradictions"... A Season in Utopia is a hilarious send-up of academic life in America--its characteristic human types, its rituals, frustrations, self-delusions, and harsh realities. Anyone who thinks his or her life would have been happier as a college professor needs to read this witty, entertaining book.