Acronyms, committees and statistics abound at the University of East Midlands (known as EMU), a vast net to entrap the unwary ambitions of its hapless academics, who are forced to run the gauntlet of budgetary pressures and even management consultants before they can even begin the business of research and teaching. Sexual predators and lounge lizards are the least of the worries that afflict Professor Lydia Malinder and her colleagues; in the university of today they have to justify their existence on a daily basis, while the sinister and manipulative Vice-Chancellor, Sir Stanley Oxborrow, looks on.
Lydia has other problems, too. Should she allow her feelings for her lover, the sexy but ambitious - and married - Professor Krest, to stand in the way of her career? Is going to bed with the fresh young management consultant likely to compromise her fight to retain funding for her department? Can it really be possible that a supremely rational, intelligent and successful academic could begin to believe that she is being stalked - by a panther?
This is a dark comedy which lays bare the horrors of contemporary university life, and a wryly amusing look at the pressures which afflict men and women working in the academic system.
