The Mason Gross School of the Arts in New Brunswick, New Jersey, stands as a memorial to one of Rutgers University’s most influential leaders. Gross started teaching at Rutgers as an assistant professor of philosophy in 1946, but quickly rose through the ranks to become the university’s provost in 1949 and finally its president from 1959 to 1971. He led the university through an era when it experienced both some of its greatest growth and most intense controversies. 
 
Free Spirit explores how Gross helped reshape Rutgers from a sleepy college into a world-renowned public research university. It also reveals how he steered the university through the tumult of the Red Scare, civil rights era, and the Vietnam War by taking principled stands in favor of both racial equality and academic freedom. This biography tells the story of how, from an early age, Gross came to believe in the importance of doing what was right, even when the backlash took a toll on his own health.
 
Written by his youngest son Thomas, this book offers a uniquely well-rounded portrait of Gross as both a public figure and a private person. Covering everything from his service in World War II to his stints as a game-show personality, Free Spirit introduces the reader to a remarkable academic leader.

THOMAS W. GROSS is a retired firefighter, military officer, and emergency physician who earned his MD from the Rutgers Medical School in Piscataway, New Jersey. His award-winning weekly medical column appeared in the California newspaper The Marin Independent Journal from 2004 to 2009.

— Rutgers Today/Rutgers Alumni Association

— G. Kurt Piehler, NJS Journal

— Thomas J. Frusciano, Rutgers University Archivist, The Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries

— B. Robert Kreiser, author of Miracles, Convulsions, and Ecclesiastical Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris

— Chris Rasmussen, Associate Professor of History, Farleigh Dickinson University