Carl Burns

Hartley Gorman College, in Pecan City, Texas, is hardly a bastion of serious scholarship. The little Baptist school is more interested in shielding its students from the evil influence of The World, The Flesh, and The Devil than in turning out future Nobelists. But its staff, by and large, is worthy of a more demanding institution; they are victims of a glutted market in Ph.D.s and they do the best they can.

But what Burns hasn't counted on is the Edward Street Seminar, a conference that Burns has been assigned to run, which honors one Edward Street, former HGC professor and, lately, Hollywood celebrity. When Street comes back to Hartley Gorman and proceeds to offend everyone in town, and then turns up dead in his motel room, there is no shortage of suspects and Burns really begins to worry!

Professor Carl Burns knew the new dean wasn't going to work out when she bought the two goats. And that was the least of the problems. Hartley Gorman College was being attacked - with a vengeance - by the forces of political correctness, and the new dean was an unreconstructed hippie. Courses would have to be rewritten, manners watched... and everyone knew Burns should have been the new dean, anyway.