A Sixty-Year Ride through the World of Education (review)

Memoirs come in as many shapes and sizes as do their creators. This compact autobiography sweeps the reader almost immediately into both Dr. Weingartner’s personal academic odyssey as it transpired over three score years and also into his well-honed attitudes and values as they pertain to the seasonal rhythm of his experience. His dual intent—imparting to the reader not only his autobiography, but also his reflections on the function, process, content, economics, and politics of academe—illustrates not only the serendipitous nature of a successful career but also the philosophical foundations upon which that career was built.

Weingartner juxtaposes throughout his book two-to-four page chapters that detail his life with chapters of a similar length that muse on the philosophical, structural, processual, or elemental object of his autobiographical lesson. The narrative technique is not only fascinating but beckons the reader to take the occasion to contemplate the issue at hand. Thus, the reader who accepts the invitation toward reflection will take more time in reading it than he or she might imagine, considering that this book is short.

True to his title, Weingartner begins his autobiography as he starts school in Germany in 1933. Just as the reader is introduced to some of his first teachers and to the intricacies of German primary education, the first page needs to be turned. One is faced with the heading of the second chapter on page 3: “Expulsion and Departure.” The reality of 1933 and the context of Nazi Germany situate his familial and educational experiences to the social environment. Weingartner maintains this technique of situating his experiences in education throughout his memoir, which supplies a rich insight into events that have impacted higher education through most of the decades of the twentieth century.

Frequently academics who become deans or provosts, as Weingartner did, are viewed by casual observers as individuals who possess no personal history and few trials. In this autobiography, the reader is beckoned to identify with a man’s perseverance through his immigrant status, through educational tracking, and through the broadening horizons and new opportunities resulting from military service.

The author’s reminiscing winds through his family’s struggle with language, his technical secondary education, his service in the U.S. Navy, and finally his entrance into the doors of Columbia University opened as a result of the G.I. Bill. Again, with every chapter that reveals his personal life, Weingartner interjects a companion chapter in which he explores relevant themes. Reflections on the meaning of high school education, on the purpose of undergraduate liberal education, and on the different orientations of sciences and humanities coax the reader to pause to consider these purposes and processes.

This memoir is a primer on the characteristics, operations, and significant events of 20th-century higher education. It serves as a prompt to those of us who lived through many of the same events to reconsider how the 1960s affected higher education: the influx of the baby boomers, the reactions to the Vietnam War, and the civil rights and women’s movements.

Weingartner also provides an insightful historical narrative about higher education operations through those years and the rest of the century for younger students: the informality and closed networking that controlled faculty recruitment and placement, the salient variations in faculty and administrative life in institutions as mixed as San Francisco State, Vassar, and Northwestern, and the variances in and political nature of administering a department, a college, and a university, dependent so enormously upon the relationship crafted according to the style and concerns of a supervisor. The political mechanisms that he exposes in relating his successes at Northwestern and the hierarchical obstructions at Pittsburgh speak volumes about the differences between authority and power, between the ability to transform and the necessity of transaction.

Although I might not have agreed with all of his views on academe, Weingartner has pushed me to contemplate the enormousness of some of...