[This is a] serious comedy about college life. ... [The] English prof is Laurie Jameson, a '60s-style radical. She teaches ``King Lear'' as the tragedy of Goneril and Regan, independent-minded women saddled with a retro father who might as well be a DWEM, and a sister Cordelia, who is, from the feminist standpoint, a dishrag.

Third, who got a good education at Groton, is well grounded in Shakespeare, albeit a sociology major. ``Lear'' is his favorite play, and he will have none of Laurie's deconstruction. He hands in a paper that is a highly sophisticated Freudian interpretation, so publishable that Laurie, who already resents him as a supposed rich Republican, immediately smells plagiarism. He declares that he is neither rich nor Republican, and definitely not a plagiarist.

A bit improbably, with no hard evidence, Laurie hauls Third before a faculty committee, which comprises a cancer-stricken colleague, Nancy Gordon, who takes time out to read the disputed paper, and votes in Third's favor. Acquitted, he is nevertheless embittered.

...The point is that radicalism has its limits, conservatism its uses.