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The Dean climbs a rope ladder to work in his office which is occupied by student protesters. The Chairman of the Board is secretly turning the University's Ecology Centre into a profitable business. Retired professors are hanging out at the local mall, teaching in their Convocation robes for handouts. Could this be Trent University, pictured in reverse on the cover of Virtual Freedom?

Cultural Studies professor Sean Kane, the book's author, is mute on the issue. After all, "This is a work of fiction, and resemblances are coincidental." But other writers and critics have been quick to see Kane's fabled "Avalon University" as "a thinly disguised Trent University" (Clara Thomas in Books in Canada). Andrew Pyper, author of the international bestseller Lost Girls and former Trent writer-in-residence, calls it "a hilarious intellectual Eden" populated with "dead-on caricatures and lovable rebels." Harvard English professor Gordon Teskey (Trent '75) describes the book as an "enchanting story of a community" where "young people and old discover eccentric personal forms of wisdom, together with the capacity for love." Even Farley Mowat, never one to care for universities, has praised the book: "Virtual Freedom is a revelation about the secret life of academe. I found it great fun and thoroughly recommend it to anybody who has the bad luck to have to spend much time on campus."

Sean Kane published an earlier version of the story with Peterborough's Ordinary Press, with the author selling copies out of his home by e-mail and word of mouth. One of those who heard of Virtual Freedom and read it was novelist Margaret Atwood, who wrote to Kane, praising the book. "Can I quote you?" asked Kane, who at the time was hard-pressed to package and mail copies from his dining room which he had converted into a stockroom. The book had been shortlisted for the Leacock Humour Award, and had become a minor cult classic at Trent, and Kane was considering a second printing. Atwood said she had a policy of not giving supporting quotes to books, but said she'd try to find a way for Kane to use his dining room again. "The next thing that happened," says Kane, "was Toronto publisher Kim McArthur on my phone, offering an advance royalty and the prospect of publication in the U.S. and U.K. as well as Canada." And now the story of a small university in a small Ontario city is being sold in national and airport bookstores.

Kane has already met two students who have transferred to Trent because of the novel, and there is evidence the book is being used as a handbook to the experience of higher education, especially by high school students in the "double cohort." This fulfils Pyper's expectation of the book: "There has never been a better time than now for a comic novel set on the Canadian campus," he says. "It should be required reading for those brave souls considering the at once absurd and worthy enterprise of a B.A."

Thanks to Molly Helferty '80, former Marketing Director at McArthur & Company Publishing, copies of Virtual Freedom are available at $24.95 to Trent alumni through the Alumni Affairs Office, with a deep discount on each copy going to the Alumni Fund. One proposed use of the proceeds is to buy a green-and-white striped awning for the large second-floor balcony of the restored Scott House at Traill College.

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