DANGER HIGH EXPLOSIVES!

Kenneth Larsen, mild-mannered university president, is faced with a violent confrontation when SDS provocateur Martin Henley organizes an anti-ROTC riot and Dean Gorman's all too human "mistake" (he orders police to attack the students) causes naive young people like Jake Stuart (fall term editor of the campus Gazette) to call for a strike. The martyr/hero is Billy Kessler who invokes Gandhi and Martin Luther King after losing an eye in the melee and, supported by his wife Annette ("so delicately built that her flesh seemed a luminous sheath over her small bones"), calls for reconciliation with the administration. Meanwhile Kathryn Ellison, heiress to the Super Sweetstick candy fortune and fresh from revolutionary instruction in Cuba, has dynamited the ROTC buildings and Bill's apartment without so much as batting an eye, though (recurringly) "a pulse fluttered in her throat." Kathryn and Martin are blown up by her own dynamite in the end — providing a rough sort of justice for everyone except the perpetrator of this shoddy exploitation of recent events.