It’s 1972, and Dr Howard Kirk, self-described Marxist and Freudian lecturer in sociology at the University of Watermouth, is bored. Four years after the explosion of 1968, he’s finally come to terms with the fact that the promised revolution didn’t take place. Instead, he’s decided to “make things happen” himself.

So begins an insurgent campaign from Dr Kirk — he organizes a revolt by his adoring students against a nonexistent lecture by a respected geneticist. He orchestrates the persecution and expulsion of a slow-witted right-wing student who wears a university tie and blazer. He plots the seduction of an attractive new lecturer, Annie Callendar, a Scottish “nineteenth-century liberal.” And most of all, he organizes parties, encouraging indiscretions by less right-on colleagues that he can then exploit in his quest for power.

“For all intents and purposes, I am sociology,” he tells one of his students. But to his colleagues, Kirk is a “history man” — someone who identifies historical progress with his own person.