Customer Reviews

One Hundred Semesters: My Adventures as Student, Professor, and University President, and What I Learned along the Way

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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.

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.

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.

Anybody associated with higher education, students, parents, faculty, administrators, trustees and even a few university presidents would benefit by reading this lucidly written insiders view on higher education. It would open the minds of students and parents myopically focused on grades and who think that university is an extension of high school. Faculty would benefit from reading Mace's balanced account about the problems that plague administrators in trying to run institutions in an orderly and solvent manner. Adminstrators, presidents trustees should meditate on Mace's contention that faculty are the intellectual captital of the institution and not mere labor (faculty will cheer this notion, of course). Chace clearly and objectively articulates the vision of higher education and comments on the changes (some good, some bad) that have taken place in the last 40 years. The topic may seem dry to some, but Mace's prose is so good (he is an ex English professor, after all) that his story and commentary is compelling.

I have known Bill Chace since I was a freshman in his English class, so I am hardly objective. But I still can see with a clear eye that this is a great book. It helps us understand what education is about in our culture. What he says about the threats to liberal arts education from fundraising, athletics, tech transfer, careerism, and pressure to make all research applied and goal oriented should be read by anyone who claims to be an educated American with a care about our culture. The book moves effortlessly through his life, propelled by humor and strange incident, from his own funny and poignant undergraduate days, to his liberal bewilderment at Berkeley, to his experience of racism in the South of the 1960's, to his days teaching at Stanford, and then on to his presidencies at Wesleyan and Emory.
Chace is brutally honest in his look back on our times and unsentimental about the challenges of his life's work. He vividly describes the challenges of being a college administrator--trying to lead in an ambiguous situation where power is elusive. His soft spot and where he is most eloquent is about the rigors and joys of teaching.
The most important thing about Chace's work is that he helps us see the delicacy of the university as an institution. If we keep pushing it to make money and to do sports and to solve every problem in our culture and economy, we will kill it. After reading 100 Semesters, I feel inspired to fight for the right to study and learn philosophy, classics, basic science, or whatever my heart desires in an age where terms like knowledge management,intellectual capital, and applied research are all the rage. Let no one manage my knowledge!
Chace is weakest when he writes of the student activism of the 1960s and 70s. He seems unable to explain his own reaction as a liberal to this, and cannot go beyond a disapproving literary frown. Still, the rest of the book is such a tour de force, so honest and so funny and so profound in thought, that its impossible to critique this part. He is simply incomprehending of his own reaction to student activism, as if he feels that there was a tension between the attraction of activism and his intellectual ambition.
It is a page turner, a hard to put down book. I spent the better part of a night reading it, underlining, reflecting and rereading parts. I also spent a lot of time laughing out loud as he uses humor and self mockery to make light of his own life, kind of like listening to his lectures at Stanford.

In this witty and thoroughly engaging memoir, William M. Chace looks at the big issues in higher education today, all through the filter of his personal experience over a half-century, first as student, then professor, and finally university president.

Professor Chace's personal story is so warm and funny, and told so modestly, that you almost forget you are reading about a truly distinguished American life. A respected scholar of James Joyce, an oft-awarded teacher, and an administrator who reached the top post at two major American universities, Chace has been a leader in the field of education throughout his career.

From the first chapter you are hooked, as Chace describes his personal struggles as a student--the confusion and drift so typical of a young person entering college--and contrasts the academic environment in which he struggled to grow up with the supercharged, competitive environment of today.

All the important issues in higher education---high costs, testing, academic freedom, the clashes between curriculum and culture, the higher purpose of it all--are tackled with Chace's clear perspective and insight.

This engaging memoir is a must-read for anyone with loved ones heading to college, or anyone interested in the future of American higher education.

A delightful and instructive read. More than just a memoir, Dr. Chace's college career parallels the significant changes that occurred in American higher education in the last half of the twentieth century. I found this book insightful and sometimes brutally honest without being cynical. I especially appreciated Dr. Chace's discussions about the inherently conflicting attitudes of academicians and trustees and the impact on university governance as well as the discussions about how we as a society have come to view higher education as a business with consumers, instead of students. I recommend this book for college administrators, trustees, and students of higher education.

This memoir, like most, attempts to put the best face on the professional work of a controversial administrator, with prior service at Stanford, Wesleyan, and Emory Universities. As a faculty member associated with two of the three universities mentioned above, I had hoped to read a more honest account - but I guess I should have known better. While Chace writes a good story, he soft-pedals his many shortcomings, even leaving out some of his most egregious failures. Early in his narrative, he describes witnessing the termination of a tenured colleague in the English department at Stanford (a man who had incited students to violent acts in opposition to the Vietnam war), yet Chace wrote not a word about his insidious activity in terminating a successful, highly ambitious business school faculty member at Emory whose crime appeared to be desiring a deanship at Emory, and then seeking the corresponding position at cross-town institution Georgia Institute of Technology. Chace and his goons on the Emory police force wired the professor's building with a spy camera which caught the faculty member knocking his shoe against a wall. The charge was trumped up into vandalism and not only was the faculty member coerced into quitting, but then Chace contacted his counterpart at Georgia Tech and that offer was withdrawn, basically sidelining a successful business professor from the academic track for several years. On a less serious note, Chace fails to note that several deans left or were pushed out of Emory during his term as president, leaving several of the schools in the less-than-capable hands of interim or acting deans who had little power to shape curriculum or policy. It is no secret that the faculties of both Wesleyan and Emory Universities were relieved and happy to see him leave their respective presidencies. Where is any of that in his book?

So if you want to read an uncritical book by a man who has a high opinion of himself, this one's for you. If you're looking for more facts, that book has yet to be written.

This is one of the best books on contemporary higher education, even though it consists largely of autobiography rather than analysis. That is not to say that there is no analysis. Chace has done his homework with regard to the education literature and he introduces salient facts and statistics along the way. He also names names. When he discusses radical faculty behavior, e.g., he speaks at length of the doings of H. Bruce Franklin and when he talks about failed academic presidencies he cites actual people and quotes actual chapters and verses, not reverting to pseudonyms or abstractions.

He is equally honest with regard to himself, noting that he wanted to attend West Point but instead went to the Quaker/pacifistic Haverford. Then on to Berkeley for graduate school and Stanford for his first job. He took the Wesleyan presidency without having ever visited the campus and was surprised to discover the institution's ways. When his office was firebombed, he got the point, and he was clearly saved from a difficult situation by the offer of the Emory presidency. His comments on the schools' differences are very instructive. I particularly liked his remarks concerning the heated air of the liberal arts college campus and the ways in which it recirculates and recycles rumor, innuendo and paranoia, while the sprawling university replete with professional schools and a humongous medical center results in a free flow of air that is ultimately fresher and more liberating. At the same time he immediately perceives the budgetary (and other) threats posed by a medical center (4/5ths of Emory's budget). As he makes his decisions and discoveries he is guided by key members of the various institutions' Boards of Trustees, whose identities he reveals and whose attitudes he analyzes. He also recognizes the fact that of all the constituencies on campus and off (faculty, staff, students, alumni, and so on), the trustees generally are the weakest link, with a general lack of understanding of the enterprise for which they have fiduciary responsibility. While this is not a great revelation, Chace vivifies it by giving explicit examples of trustees' thoughts and behaviors.

Certain aspects of his personal profile position the author in special ways to analyze the situations in which he found himself. A self-confessed liberal and agnostic, he saw how important or unimportant this was at institutions whose foundations were religious. An English professor, he was able to see the manner in which his field had, as he says, `lost its way'--a matter of considerable importance, given the central role of English within the humanities and the fact (he doesn't dwell on this much) that `letters' broadly conceived have traditionally been at the heart of liberal education. Weakness and indirection in this area have a deleterious effect well beyond the confines of the specific department.

Most important, he is able to track the impact and effects of the 1960's on higher education because of his personal immersion in those days and his positioning at Berkeley and, later, Wesleyan. In short, he knows whereof he speaks. The book is thus instructive, but also poignant. He is yet another of the well-meaning people subjected to the swirl of events of the time. He admits that he can be stubborn and his inaugural address at Wesleyan (from his account of it) appears to have been a bit more confrontational and `substantive' than such events generally involve. The difficulties of `leadership' are here displayed in direct and personal ways.

The book is well-written and very engaging, particularly for those who lived through those times in comparable settings. As a presidential memoir there is less pontificating here than is usual, more honesty than usual and, thankfully, less cant and eduspeak than usual.

Highly recommended.

I wondered if I should read a 375-page book by a guy who never got out of school. He never left it because he thinks higher education is the best thing we've got. He also knows what the flaws are, like pandering to the money sources at the expense of teaching. This is a fun, funny, wise, insightful analysis of the whole spectrum of college and graduate school. Everyone would profit from it.
Especially all those other professors.