Last Semester takes place during and after a period of violent upheaval on a university campus known as the Education Revolution. Assistant Lecturer Meredith Winters becomes an early casualty of reform when he is dismissed from his post and nearly killed by a student-led mob. When open violence subsides, it is replaced by a calmer but more durable form of ideological control, leaving Winters professionally ruined and intellectually stranded.

He finds temporary refuge as a housekeeper in the home of his friend and former mentor, Professor Arnold Fezwig, a celebrated Nobel Prize–winning academic whose reputation shields him from the worst excesses of reform. That protection proves fragile. When Fezwig is persuaded to join a fashionable environmental crusade promoting radical “toilet reform,” Winters realizes that even private life has been absorbed into institutional politics. His shelter, employment, and access to intellectual work are once again threatened.

The novel treats academic reform not as a conspiracy but as a social phenomenon driven by fear, conformity, and moral display. Its satire is dry and often understated, focusing on how language is used to erase dissent and recast coercion as progress. Last Semester examines what happens to intellectual life when institutions no longer tolerate skepticism, and when resistance must operate quietly, obliquely, and at personal cost.