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

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.

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.

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.

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 aca

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.