The Mad Professor

Book excerpt: The Mad Professor is the story of one man's battle in the 1960-70's Pacific Northwest against institutionalized bureaucracy and the strangulating effects of academic politics. Leo Bauer is first encouraged and then destroyed by the academic machine. The novel is literary, not easy to pigeonhole. The Mad Professor is a divergent novel, a confession of sorts by a man subversive to the organizations governing his life while remaining committed in his dedication to the natural world of Wisconsin, Utah, and Washington whose natural history is contemplated and analyzed. Bureaucracy represented by a community college is explored through hallucinations, stream of consciousness and magical realism. While Leo Bauer searches for authenticity life hammers him and he suffers losses of his profession, wife, reputation and assets during the Vietnam era, the time of sex, drugs, rock and roll, oil crisis and recession. Despite the somber nature of his struggle the novel has a great deal of broad and satiric humor. Leo Bauer's fantasy world becomes wilder and wilder including his exploration of a huge DNA Helix, the prophecies of a lobotomized fellow teacher, and the Curriculum of Death in which students are bombed and attacked with strafing airplanes. This digressive narrative resists linearity. Leo Bauer commences life in Wisconsin where he experiences paradise among the lakes and forests. Throughout this man searches for authenticity in a culture of false values. Librarians and booksellers should classify it as community college satire.