rhea harmsen

Red sweatshirts, tailgate parties, Badger mania, beautiful lake Mendota, State Street, and lots of beer. Some people experienced the University of Wisconsin-Madison this way. Not African American Ph.D. student Maddie Hawkins; her experience is colored by a marathon of deadlines, endless lab hours, competition, neglect, and walking through ill-lit parking lots in the dead of night. Maddie enters the male-dominated field of Plant Breeding to find new genes for disease resistance and to vindicate a daring research hypothesis. She thinks graduate school is a level playing field. She thinks she has what it takes. She is naïve. The political world of academia is a minefield of sexism, racism and egoism.

During her three year hurdle-race to get her Ph.D. the disturbing presence of blue-eyed graduate student John Pitts provides the adrenaline. Like an irksome burr, he is everything she disapproves of: a cocky genius, an individualist and a total party animal. On the other hand Craig Berry, the president of the Black Student Caucus, is a fine, righteous brother. The characters in their world are the professors, both the feudal and the enlightened; the grad students, messed up and die-hard, and “the system,” entrenched yet evolving.

The heart leads where reason would forbid. This face-off of race, class and even religion threatens a bitter harvest. But “when the fire of love is ablaze” it burns “to ashes The Harvest of Reason.”