A philosophy lecturer at a London college is struggling with the gap between reality and fiction after his former employer asked him to withdraw a novel about strike action at a corrupt school.

According to his publisher, Stephen Grant’s A Moment More Sublime features a philosophy teacher who becomes embroiled in a union campaign to resist job cuts imposed by a “corrupt school administration”. The novel was “partly inspired” by the author’s time at Richmond-upon-Thames College, where he was a union representative and “he was one of the leaders in a labour dispute” over job cuts.

So when New York imprint Upper West Side Philosophers published the novel in August, Grant approached the college to explain that he “recognised the danger that the book may be mistakenly perceived as one which was about Richmond specifically and emphasised that any dealings I had with the press would stress the college’s virtues and that the fictional college depicted in the book bore no relation to Richmond”.

“Certain trivial background details were similar, and the dispute described in the novel drew vaguely on what I had seen and heard over the years,” Grant told the Guardian. “But the narrative is entirely fictitious, and the events described are unlike the disputes I went through at Richmond.”

He was asked to stop publication, he says, and that the publisher cease selling the novel, and that all publicity for the title be withdrawn. Grant says he was also investigated under the college’s disciplinary procedure, and facing “a formal disciplinary hearing to consider whether I was guilty of gross misconduct” he resigned with immediate effect from his position “due to reasons of ill-health and because I had no confidence in the fairness of the process”.

“I was completely shocked. Rather naively, I thought they might welcome having a published author on the staff,” he said this week. “I was then further shocked when they refused any sort of possible compromise. For example, I offered to remove references to the college from the various websites on which the book is publicised and to edit the book if it attracted a British publisher. But they said I should be doing that anyway and just carried on with the disciplinary case.”

Richmond-upon-Thames College declined comment on the situation, with a spokesperson saying: “Richmond-upon-Thames College is not willing to provide any comment, as this is an internal matter and bound by confidentiality.”

Grant’s publisher Michael Eskin at Upper West Side Philosophers, however, said that what the author has gone through “is unheard of in a western democracy: a writer of fiction should not have to fear persecution and prosecution from his employer in London in 2014”.

“That Richmond-upon-Thames College had the additional temerity of attempting to pressure us, Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc … to ‘cease sales’ of the novel and ‘remove it from any advertisement’ is not only preposterous in itself, but bespeaks a blatant overstepping of institutional and, potentially, legal boundaries,” said the publisher.

Eskin also pointed to “an indelible distinction between history and fiction”. “There were as many or as few links to real life [in the novel] as there are in Anna Karenina, Lolita, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, or Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex. In other words, like all stories we humans tell, A Moment More Sublime draws on and is rooted in real life. And this is as far as the link goes,” he said. “If one or the other reader decides to extrapolate or infer anything at all about the real world on the basis of a fictional work, that is certainly his or her right. However, it is not something that forms part of the fictional work itself.”

Grant said that he has since found another part-time lecturing position and hopes to be teaching full-time by early next year. Coverage of the controversy in the Times Educational Supplement has also, he said, led to a “sharp rise in sales”, and the novel is now being considered by British and European publishers for acquisition.