In a year when higher education saw numerous retirements, resignations, and ousters of high-profile college presidents, 2023 might also be remembered as the year of the college president memoir.
This year has brought remarkable books from five former presidents, each of whom headed up prestigious institutions and enjoyed long, distinguished careers in academia. While they focus on different portions of the authors’ lives – some dwelling on the early, formative years, others concentrating on experiences in the academy itself – the books all highlight noteworthy examples of the influences shaping these leaders’ lives.
It’s hard to ignore the coincidences in two of the memoirs, written by women whose lives involved several firsts. Born just two years apart in the segregated South of the 1940s, Ruth Simmons became the first African American president of an Ivy League school when she was chosen to head up Brown University, and Drew Gilpin Faust was the first woman to be president of Harvard University.
Simmons’ memoir recalls her early life as the youngest of 12 children raised by Black sharecroppers in the deep poverty of rural Texas. In Up Home:One Girl’s Journey (Random House), Simmons writes, “I was born to be someone else. Someone, that is, whose life is defined principally by race, segregation and poverty. As a young child marked by the sharecropping fate of my parents and the culture that predominated in East Texas in the 1940s and ’50s, I initially saw these factors as limiting what I could do and who I could become.”
Much of Simmons’ book explores how she was helped to become the person she is today, rather than the person she was expected to be, “because of the people I knew when I was young.” Family, friends, and community “intercepted” her modest expectations, boosted her confidence, and “sent me on my way with all the support they could muster.”
And her way was historic, with Time magazine once referring to her as “America’s Best University President.” After earning her undergraduate degree at Dillard University and her PhD in romance languages from Harvard, Simmons was named president of Smith College in 1995. In 2001, she was selected as Brown University’s 18th president, serving until 2012, In 2017, she came out of retirement to be president of Prairie View A&M University until 2023.
Drew Gilpin Faust’s Necessary Trouble; Growing Up At Midcentury (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux) tells something of a parallel story but from the other side of the socioeconomic tracks.
Faust grew up in a privileged white family in conservative, segregated Virginia where it was easy – even encouraged – to overlook inequalities associated with race and limitations assigned to gender. She accepted neither and, instead of becoming the “well-adjusted” lady her circumstances directed, she resisted and became committed to the social causes of the day, including the civil rights and antiwar movements.
Faust chronicles how she went on to become an activist and historian, researching the same conflicts she rebelled against as a youngster. She’s remained a champion of racial and gender equality, including a spirited defender of affirmative action.
After receiving her undergraduate degree at Bryn Mawr, Faust earned her PhD in American civilization from the Univeristy of Pennsylvania. She went on to be the Annenberg Professor of History at Penn and then founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The author of six books, including the award-winning This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008), Faust was named president of Harvard in 2007, serving in that capacity until 2018.
In Higher Ground: My American Dreams and Nightmares in the Hidden Halls of Academia (Amplify), Linda Katehi, Chancellor Emerita of the University of California at Davis, traces her academic career, starting with her childhood on Salamis Island in Greece that eventually led to a UCLA PhD in electrical engineering, followed by a climb up the ladder of university administration, including stints as a faculty member at the University of Michigan, dean of engineering at Purdue University, Provost at the University of Illinois and then chancellor at UC Davis.
Katehi tells an emotional story, laced with nostalgia for her home and family in Greece, alternating with anger over her tumultuous seven-year tenure as chancellor at Davis, where she faced student protests, and charges of nepotism, conflicts of interest, and misuse of funds. Those allegations ultimately led to her forced resignation in 2016. According to Katehi, now a professor at Texas A & M University, “my life at UC Davis was like sailing the Aegean in August; a few days of blue calmness followed by weeks of blustery blows and growling waves.”
Among the culprits, Katehi blames sexism, unfair media, campus politics, over-zealous politicians, and student demonstrators, but she takes particular aim at then UC System President Janet Napolitano, who she describes as “unique, idiosyncratic, and self-centered…thirsty for power.. and uninterested in learning about the campuses.”
Katehi aims to settle scores with this intense account, which is likely to split readers into two camps: those who view it as a poignant illustration of the problems women change-makers encounter in academia, or those who find it an over-wrought venting of personal frustration and grievance.
Diana Chapman-Walsh, President Emerita of Wellesley College, has written an uplifting memoir, entitled The Claims of Life (forthcoming in November from MIT Press). Warm, tender, and honest, it’s a book as much about living a meaningful live as it is being an effective college president.
Walsh, who was Wellesley’s president from 1993 to 2007, enjoyed a very successful career at her alma mater (a 1966 graduate, majoring in English), after several earlier positions, including academic posts at Boston University, where she earned her MS and PhD, and Harvard.
From beginning at Wellesley with the “belief that I wasn’t smart enough, that I had to work especially hard to hold my own,” through a series of leadership opportunities and challenges, all shared with Chris, her (recently deceased) husband of 57 years, Walsh learned five lessons for being a trustworthy leader – question yourself, establish partnerships, resist the use of force when in power, value differences, and cultivate communities of self-support.
Among this crop of books, Brian Rosenberg’s Whatever It Is, I’m Against It”: Resistance to Change in Higher Education (Harvard University Press) is the one most concerned with first-hand observations about the state of the academy, particularly its stubborn aversion to change.
President emeritus of Macalester College and now a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Rosenberg offers a pointed critique of higher education’s entrenched policies and practices. Those are forces strong enough to stifle most reforms even at institutions facing serious threats to their financial and educational models. He takes on many factors – faculty tenure, an over-reliance on lectures, runaway tuition discounting, an outmoded academic calendar, and shared governance – that he believes are hamstring U.S. colleges and universities from trying new approaches to improve affordability, access, and equity for students.
What’s most appealing about the book is that Rosenberg, a respected scholar of Victorian literature, provides his critique with an obvious affection and respect for higher education, rather than with the hostile, anti-education perspective so many elected officials appear to believe make for good politics. But his appreciation does not diminish his hard-nosed appraisal.
According to Rosenberg, “for years I have pondered the question of why an industry so widely populated by people who consider themselves politically liberal is so deeply conservative when it comes to its own work; why scholars whose disciplines are constantly evolving are so resistant to institutional evolution; why colleges and universities that almost always speak in their mission statements about the transformative power of education find it so difficult to transform themselves; why virtually no fundamental practice within higher education — calendar, tenure processes, pedagogy, grading — has changed in meaningful ways for decades, if not centuries.”
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