Jeremiah Dentorp has a sunk cost: the years he’s invested to get from abused student to abusive professor. All he has left now is two years at Gilded College, one of America’s most exclusive Italian language graduate schools. A degree guarantees vindication.

Jeremiah’s first day turns out to be less rigorous erudition than inept bureaucracy. But he doesn’t so much as think twice about it until he meets Eduardo Valentini. The veteran student mocks Jeremiah’s obsequiousness, claiming the tedium is pointless and the school stand to be improved.

Jay Strozzacane, Gilded’s new president, doesn’t refute Eduardo’s slander. Instead, Jay’s broken Italian declares that anyone who doubts the school, or him, has no future there. So Jeremiah better decide how important his education really is and pick a side, either unbending loyalty or anything else.