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THE MAN WHO STOLE A UNIVERSITY by Phoebe & Todhunter Ballard

THE MAN WHO STOLE A UNIVERSITY

By

Pub Date: Feb. 10th, 1966
Publisher: Doubleday

Todhunter Ballard is a veteran western writer, and this time with the little woman by his side (a guess), they have typed out a novel with a certain mechanical momentum even though it's hard to believe that anything like this could, would or should happen. Midwestern Wellington University is in strapping financial difficulties and Emory Monck, their most enterprising alumnus, an organizer-operator, is given the Chancellorship in order that he, with his industrial connections, can raise a ten million dollar deficit. Cleverly calculating a two-way deal, money from industry integrated with research for industry, Emory seems well able to put Wellington back in business. But there are campus problems, among them Martha Yates, a radical spirit with red hair and a guitar who decides he's just ""too fab""; a student sleep-in; trouble with the trustees; and finally a wide-scale mobilization by the insurgent students. All of this goes to prove what happens to a university when big business takes over the academic life; but what happens when commercialism replaces literacy? And then there's the fact that between them the Ballards haven't been able to assemble a single character.... Any dropouts? Seems likely.