Gon' Knock John Booker to the Low Ground

The plan was to entirely flip American higher education so that the HBCU's were on top and the Ivies, the Big Ten, and the liberal arts colleges were all on the outside looking in. If they wanted to have any traction in the future, they'd have to come begging. Reeling from a disastrous first job teaching in a middle school, Gunnar Daw was thrilled when he was offered a job teaching English at a Black college. The only catch was that he had to agree to attend a training session and to teach in SNATCH, an experimental program. Instead of finding himself in an ivory tower, Gunnar Daw finds that he is right in the middle of the heated struggle between integrationists and black nationalists. And the program is staffed by desperate consultants determined to get the half-educated Southern faculty to use a pedagogy they don't like or understand. Right upon arrival Gunnar is befriended by the hyperactive, cowboy-yogi Cole Ranshaw who forces Gunnar to submit his poems to a major editor who is one of the consultants. Gunnar also crosses paths with his new colleague Brenda Drummond who takes exception to him because she suspects he is either a Black Panther or a COINTELPRO agent (or both) and vows to wreck his life to protect the students from him.Once he is on campus, Gunnar must work hard to avoid the many pitfalls of a school that is threatened by the new pedagogy but wants the vast sums the government is dumping on the school to install the radical courses. Looking only to produce the data that will show the SNATCH program is highly successful, Gunnar is pressured to enthrall his students with a succession of disturbing classroom exercises. Gunnar's poem is anthologized and he is unwillingly propelled into the literary limelight as a black poet, just as campus shootings across the nation propels his school into a violent crisis. Knock John Booker to the Low Ground is a satirical comic novel set in the stormy year of 1969. The writing draws on the tradition of Evelyn Waugh, George Schuyler, and Percival Everett.