front cover of Raised at Rutgers
Raised at Rutgers
A President's Story
McCormick, Richard L
Rutgers University Press, 2014
In Raised at Rutgers, Richard L. McCormick tells what it is like to run a major state university and vividly portrays the often contentious environment in which a university president operates today. He unsparingly recounts his decade of leadership, including his own missteps—those we know about and those we didn’t—as he strove to obtain adequate resources for the university, to overhaul the often confusing organization of the New Brunswick campus, to manage the growth and success of intercollegiate athletics, and to deepen Rutgers’s acceptance of its obligations as the state university of New Jersey.

With understandable pride, McCormick recalls and relates Rutgers’s academic achievements during his presidency, including a renewed focus on undergraduate education and a significant increase in funding for research. Most dramatically, he chronicles the University’s protracted efforts to reclaim Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (and ultimately to acquire most of UMDNJ), a goal that was finally realized with crucial help from Governor Chris Christie and former governor Tom Kean.

Among the most honest accounts ever written of a college presidency, Raised at Rutgers takes the reader inside one of the best, and liveliest, public universities in America and highlights many of the most critical issues facing higher education today.
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Remembering Ezra Vogel
Martin K. Whyte and Mary C. Brinton
Harvard University Press, 2022

Ezra F. Vogel (July 11, 1930–December 20, 2020) was one of America’s foremost experts on Asia, mastering the Japanese and Chinese languages and contributing important scholarly works on both countries, and on their relationships with each other and with the world. Starting from modest roots in an immigrant family in a small town in Ohio, he came to Harvard in 1953 to train as a sociologist. He then shifted his focus to Asia, spending almost the entirety of his life at Harvard.

Vogel had a dramatic impact around the world, not only through his scholarship and the students he trained, but also through his friendship and mentoring of journalists, diplomats, business executives, and foreign leaders as well as through his public policy advice and devotion to institution building, at Harvard as well as nationally and internationally. Active until the end, his sudden death provoked outpourings of gratitude and grief from countless people whose lives he had affected. The present volume, containing fond reminiscences from 155 diverse individuals, conveys what was so extraordinary about the character and life of Ezra Vogel.

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Richard Hofstadter
An Intellectual Biography
David S. Brown
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Richard Hofstadter (1916-70) was America’s most distinguished historian of the twentieth century. The author of several groundbreaking books, including The American Political Tradition, he was a vigorous champion of the liberal politics that emerged from the New Deal. During his nearly thirty-year career, Hofstadter fought public campaigns against liberalism’s most dynamic opponents, from McCarthy in the 1950s to Barry Goldwater and the Sun Belt conservatives in the 1960s. His opposition to the extreme politics of postwar America—articulated in his books, essays, and public lectures—marked him as one of the nation’s most important and prolific public intellectuals. 

In this masterful biography, David Brown explores Hofstadter’s life within the context of the rise and fall of American liberalism. A fierce advocate of academic freedom, racial justice, and political pluralism, Hofstadter charted in his works the changing nature of American society from a provincial Protestant foundation to one based on the values of an urban and multiethnic nation. According to Brown, Hofstadter presciently saw in rural America’s hostility to this cosmopolitanism signs of an anti-intellectualism that he believed was dangerously endemic in a mass democracy. 

By the end of a life cut short by leukemia, Hofstadter had won two Pulitzer Prizes, and his books had attracted international attention. Yet the Vietnam years, as Brown shows, culminated in a conservative reaction to his work that is still with us. Whether one agrees with Hofstadter’s critics or with the noted historian John Higham, who insisted that Hofstadter was “the finest and also the most humane intelligence of our generation,” the importance of this seminal thinker cannot be denied. As this fascinating biography ultimately shows, Hofstadter’s observations on the struggle between conservative and liberal America are relevant to our own times, and his legacy challenges us to this day.
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The Rise of Roosevelt University
Presidential Reflections
Theodore L. Gross
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005
Underscoring professional and educational issues pertinent to higher learning at universities across the country, Theodore L. Gross’ s memoir of his years in academia chronicles his successful fourteen-year presidency at Chicago’ s Roosevelt University, a period of leadership that resulted in an upsurge of fund-raising, sharp increases in enrollment and endowment, and the transformation of an urban campus into a metropolitan university.

 

Beginning with a description of his childhood and adolescent education and experiences, Gross recalls his years as a faculty member and academic administrator at the City College of New York from 1958 to 1978, when the college was moving from selective admissions to open enrollment. He also served in administrative positions at Penn State University and SUNY Purchase before accepting the Roosevelt presidency in 1988. Focusing on the tension between the promise of open admissions and aspirations of academic excellence, The Rise of Roosevelt University: Presidential Reflections relates Gross’ s perceptions of the failure of open admissions at CCNY and his resolution to learn from those mistakes while at Roosevelt.

           

Drawing on private correspondence and conversations, essays, university documents, and other archival materials and research, Gross re-creates the highs and lows of his quest to make Roosevelt distinctive. His strategic plan included the appointment of senior executives and deans, the creation of a performing arts conservatory, the development of an educational alliance with other universities, online instruction, an honors program, a Chicago School of Real Estate, an MBA for Chinese students, the Partners in Corporate Education program, and the implementation of a second comprehensive campus. He describes the creation of the Albert A. Robin campus in Schaumburg and the realization of Roosevelt as a metropolitan university, creating a vivid portrait of the suburban culture, the educational context of large community colleges throughout the northwest suburbs, the development of a community advisory board that helped secure funds, and the improved morale of faculty and administration.

 

Gross’ s fund-raising efforts increased the endowment from $3 million to $33 million, and a capital campaign surpassed the goal of $45 million. In this volume, he describes meetings with major donors, the successes and failures of contributions, and the development of greater alumni support in the context of fund-raising throughout Chicago. He also analyzes the highly publicized legal dispute between the Auditorium Theatre Council and Roosevelt University over ownership of the world renowned theatre, pointing out how the case epitomizes issues that all universities confront: the university’ s need to control its entities, detrimental publicity, sectional and regional conflicts, and a split in the arts community. Throughout this narrative, Gross juxtaposes his personal life and professional career, dramatizing how the two are related.

 

More than a retelling of anecdotes and statistics, the volume provides a rare perspective on the intersection of higher education and politics in Chicago. Gross analyzes the different public and private universities in the city and in surrounding Cook County to describe their relationships with ethnicity, religion, class, and with city hall. He also covers the Daley political machine’ s influence on higher education, the politics of university governance, the spectacular growth of the western suburbs, and city versus suburban identities.

 

A personal road map of the development of higher education through the post– World War II decades, The Rise of Roosevelt University: Presidential Reflections mirrors the social climate that affected the country’ s universities at large, from the open admissions policies and student rebellions of the ’ 60s and ’ 70s, to the urban blight and suburban sprawl of the ’ 80s, to the strategic planning and expansion of the ’ 90s and the new century. The result is a captivating account of the issues involved in presidential transition and leadership, the strategic development of metropolitan universities, and the future role of Roosevelt and similar institutions.  

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