Who killed Professor Pyke McKenna? Or was it suicide? He was certainly beloved by many in the college community, but he also had plenty of enemies. In this novel, his colleague Bruce Cahill attempts to reconstruct the mystery through an examination of his life, interviewing and reminiscing with his students, lovers, and associates. The drama plays out on the stage of a small town in the middle of wild prairie country, at a small college populated by an assortment of misfits, strivers, and disillusioned scholars.

Set in the turbulent 60s, Degrees of Freedom records the lives of small college science teachers as they come to grips with the novel challenges of the time - Vietnam, sexual freedom, drugs, and the increasing push to produce a new generation of scientists and engineers to combat the rising Communist "menace." Unlike the typical scientists of popular culture, the teachers at Cimarron State College are neither mad nor monastic, but have lives full of ecstatic and tragic incident. Their responses to a faculty colleague's mysterious death are revealed in a montage of multiple narration.

A native of America's heartland, Richard A. Larson is a chemistry researcher and teacher who has spent many years at a large public institution of higher education in the Midwestern United States. He has edited or authored several technical books in the field of organic and environmental chemistry. This is his first novel.