100 Semesters: My Adventures as Student, Professor, and University President, and What I Learned Along the Way (review)

100 Semesters is the most recent of the post-University Presidency volumes to appear. Most in this genre take the form of analyses of what has gone wrong in higher education, interspersed with advertisements for what the author did right and injunctions as to what universities need to do going forward. Other examples of the genre are collections of earlier, usually uplifting, speeches by the former president. A few, like the volume in hand by Bill Chace, the former president of Wesleyan and Emory universities, are fundamentally autobiographical. Chace deals with the question of why otherwise sensitive and intelligent people enter academic administration. The title of his chapter on the subject—"Exchanging Reflection for Action"—gives him away. He defends his choice to leave scholarship for administration by criticizing faculty members for their increasing narrowness of focus and argues that it is the virtue of deans that they can see the whole educational picture in a way that they could not when they were professors. The job, in other words, makes the man. Chace became a dean at Stanford, where he had long taught English and American literature; and he liked the switch: "I knew I wanted yet more administrative experience and challenge. Out of such odd yearnings are careers in midlife made." He doesn't seem to know quite why he made the choices that he did and also makes it seem as though boards of trustees are fundamentally clueless in choosing university presidents. In this I think that he is right. Chace himself was selected first to be president of a liberal arts college (though Wesleyan styles itself a university), an institution for which he felt well suited since he so valued his undergraduate experience at Haverford College. But he was defeated by the late emerging political radicalism and narrow confines of Wesleyan. I would say that he escaped when he was recruited by the trustees to the more corporate environment of Emory. Although his past experience seemed unlikely to help, Chace proved an adept leader of higher education in the urban New South. It would have been fascinating to learn why Chace succeeded better at Emory than at Wesleyan, but he seems to think that his terms at these institutions were equally successful. This is a charming and intelligent account that tells us more about its author than about what makes higher education in the United States work. I suspect that, in any case, university presidents are not the right people to tell us.