What’s Going On at UAardvark? – an over-the-top satirical novel about the corporate takeover of colleges and a rebellion against it.
“Humorous, insightful. . . . A well-paced university novel, certain to provide . . . many knowing chuckles.”
--Kirkus Reviews
Filled with colorful, offbeat characters, What’s Going On at UAardvark? pokes fun at broad swathes of American society -- not only members of the campus community, but corporate leaders, top military officers, rightwing vigilante groups, cynical politicians, the FBI, and the mass media.
At the center of the novel is Jake Holland, an alcoholic, burnt-out, fifty-year-old professor of English at UAardvark and former political activist who is enamored of a leftwing member of the Women’s Studies Department. When she is fired for daring to investigate a mysterious campus New Technology Center, secretly scheduled to house debris from a nuclear weapons explosion, Jake pulls himself together and draws his poker-playing cronies into a conspiracy to topple the university administration. Gradually, faculty, students, building and maintenance workers, dining hall employees, and even the campus police are drawn into this madcap, tumultuous struggle. Inspired by events at UAardvark, workers and students on other campuses begin to depose administrators, taking command of their universities and opening the floodgates for the joyous pursuit of knowledge.
Lawrence Wittner is an award-winning author and professor of history emeritus at SUNY/Albany. What’s Going On at UAardvark? is based on his 43 years of full-time teaching at colleges and universities in the United States and abroad.