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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An insider's view of Higher Education, September 8, 2006
This review is from: One Hundred Semesters: My Adventures as Student, Professor, and University President, and What I Learned along the Way (Hardcover)
This charming and insightful educational memoir manages to tell us more about what's happening in higher education than could a truckload of educational studies. And Chace does it simply by telling his story.
Leaning toward West Point (a big place that trains warriors and engineers) over Haverford (a small place that focuses on the humanities and nonviolence), he can find no appointment to the academy and so winds up at Haverford. Almost despite himself, he soon becomes awash in the humanities -- and that perhaps makes all the difference.
Feeling his way uncertainly at first and then with more awareness, he moves from graduate school at Berkeley to professorship and young deanship at Stanford. From there he takes on the presidency of Wesleyan (in many ways a disaster zone) and then to preside over -- and admire -- Emory, the multi-purposed and distinguished Atlanta university.
It is a remarkable and instructive journey, and it tells us most when Chace is in the middle of the action, explaining his victories -- and his failures -- in prose both lucid and compelling.
Anyone on his or her way to a college presidency must read this unusual book. everyone entering the world of higher education -- student or parent or teacher -- should read it, those of us interested in seeking truth, a task the university is uniquely suited to do, need to read it.
Chace both honors the university as the best thing civilization has produced and warns us that its best qualities may be slipping away. And he makes clear that such a loss -- no matter our politics, our religions, our passions -- would diminish us all.
This disarmingly candid academic memoir is one rich in detail and long in wisdom. It may be one man's story, but it is one from which all of us should learn.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Best of Its Kind, September 17, 2006
This review is from: One Hundred Semesters: My Adventures as Student, Professor, and University President, and What I Learned along the Way (Hardcover)
A disarmingly brave and revealing academic autobiography by a man whose peripatetic career on five college campuses (two where he was President) uniquely qualifies him as an observer of the academic scene. William Chace tells us at the outset, "[g]iven my experience, none of the rooms where the work of a college or university occurs is now a secret to me." True and unsurprising. What astonishes is that Chace actually invites his reader into those rooms where we observe, under the firm hand of his fine prose, the absurdities, the evasions and self-deceits, and the triumphs of courage that make up the variegated texture of modern American university life.
By telling his story (and he is a great storyteller) he manages to convey the peculiar dilemmas that face the contemporary university and to express his own strongly held views on a number of important issues facing the academy (the role of big-time sports, a university's ability to offer moral guidance to its students, the high cost of education, etc.). He also touches on other follies and oddities of the world he affectionately embraces as his natural element that are less often treated in such books: the strange ignorance of Trustees and the way institutions (probably rightly) protect them from real knowledge of the places with whose stewardship they are entrusted or the quaint way that faculty extend professional courtesy even to the most undeserving of their colleagues. The reader is also, sometimes painfully, invited to witness private agony, when events turn horribly astray, as when at Wesleyan his President's office is firebombed or later when an Emory student commits suicide and Chace must confront a father's grief. The result of all this frankness is truly extraordinary. This may be the first really honest book about academic life that I've ever read (and I have read quite a few).
Chace looks unflinchingly not only at his colleagues and bosses over the years (he may lose some friends); he also subjects himself to merciless evaluation, reflecting in shame for example that he was unable to get Emory to revise their disciplinary procedures so as more effectively to control academic dishonesty. The ur-moment in the memoir (as I suspect it must have been in Chace's life) for such self-scrutiny lies in his suspension from his undergraduate college, Haverford, for stealing silverware from the dining hall: "I had done poorly in my courses," he writes; "more importantly, I had abused my parents' trust and had squandered their money; Mr. Shaw [one of his professors], seeing me walk to the train station on the day I left, said: 'Chace, you have made an a** of yourself." From such hard experience comes knowledge and growth.
Indeed, thus we find the grounding principle of this exceptional book: An honest account of an academic life, a life undertaken with high expectations but also a tolerance for frailty, may point the way to knowledge and growth for oneself and others. Everyone involved in academic administration SHOULD read this book for its moral compass; others will enjoy it too for its stoicism and life-sustaining humor.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The full title summarizes this book very tidily, March 25, 2007
This review is from: One Hundred Semesters: My Adventures as Student, Professor, and University President, and What I Learned along the Way (Hardcover)
With distinguished cogency, Professor and President Emeritus Chace commingles memoirs of his first fifty years in American academia and scholarly "lectures" on the historical and current state of higher education. Assured, methodical, and tactful, Chace's 100 SEMESTERS must surely mirror its author who navigated the halls of learning at Berkeley as a grad student during the Vietnam war campus turmoil, taught and entered administration at Stanford, and presided over diverse and sometimes chaotic Wesleyan before assuming the presidency of well-endowed Emory for nine years.
Chace shows himself to be a teacher and leader of conscience, deliberation, and pragmatism. He holds staunch liberal/progressive views, yet acknowledges the value of tried-and-true basics. For example, although he supported vigorous integration of colleges and universities when such was controversial, Chace, unlike some, valued diverse student bodies as a means to enrich the entire institution, not as a means to radical political and social ends. And in English curriculum debates, he saw the merit of broadening course offerings to include women's studies and black literature, but he also believed abolishing core book requirements would weaken quality education.
This volume scrutinizes the growth of universities into, typically, large corporate-like entities and Chace, ever the teacher at heart, takes on some of the deficiencies he has observed in this. He states, "Research should not lead to monetary profits, but to further learning." Chace adds, "What makes some schools better than other schools is one thing only: the quality of the faculty." He also deplores the skyrocketing inflation of university presidents' salaries, urging that they be adjusted; four times top tenured professors' salaries is too much of a gap, he maintains.
For all the wealth of discussion of higher education's trends, triumphs, and systemic problems; the most interesting sections of 100 SEMESTERS are those focusing on Chace's experiences as a student and a young professor. Most absorbing are his discussions of meeting the doctoral requirements (among them a three-hour oral exam on all of English literature, but not among them an oral defense of the doctoral dissertation), his favorite and not-so-favorite instructors, and then his own methods of teaching and the books he thought should be studied and taught. Would that 100 SEMESTERS had contained more of this material than it did.
Chace writes that "none of the rooms where the work of a college or university is done is now a secret to me." His 100 SEMESTERS conveys his acquired knowledge of these rooms with crisp, reasoned intelligence and genuine and appealing personal imprint. Very worth reading.
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