Merridith Winters, Associate Lecturer at Berkeley University, is fired and expelled during the Great Education Revolution because of his reactionary views. He flees south for hundreds of miles to the settlement of Cactus Valley Estates. He becomes the roommate of Travis (one name only), a poorly educated, unemployed man in his mid-twenties. Merridith, "Professor Winters, realizes that it is his duty to educate the wait/dolt, to give him the advantage of the traditional humanities at a time when "education" itself is being phased out. The "dolt" is almost unteachable. For a time, Merridith struggles for control of the dolt/waif with Professor Crystaleen Bloomer of Cactus Valley University. Professor Bloomer seizes the doit for a time and attempts to educate him in her nigthly advanced ideology, as well as to make him into her lover. Bloomer's project fails. Travis, the waif/dolt, rejoins Professor Merridith in his dilapidated bungalow at the edge of Cactus Valley Estates: Bloomer reacts by hiring members of a youth delinquent gang to burn the bungalow. Meridith and Travis (their relationship is not homosexual) are forced to live in ever more reduced dwellings until they are sleeping on the desert floor itself. At the end, Professor Merridith launches his project of Culture Recuperation", an attempt to restore the traditional humanities at a time when telescreen has replaced art, scholarship, and philosophy.