Wahoo Meade is a graduate student at Stanhope University and the ringleader of a small group of graduate teaching assistants in English. They are all about to graduate and are faced with bleak job prospects. The MLA Vacancies List this year, they say, is a No-Vacancies List. There seems to be no hope. Ph.D.'s are parking cars for a living. Then one day, one of the old dusty tenured professors in the English department is killed in his office when a whole wall of his books falls on him.

He is not missed for several days. When the accident is at last discovered, Meade is struck by a promising thought, "Anything can happen to these eccentric old professors and nobody would think anything about it.".

Meade sets about systematically studying the eccentricities of individual professors in the department and scheming their demises - thereby creating the much-coveted vacancies. All goes well until he strikes up a romance with the wife of one of the newest eccentric professors, and she begins to see through "The Meade Solution."