“I left Wesleyan with relief and elation,” said Bill Chace, the University’s 14th president, in his recently released memoir, “100 Semesters: My Adventures as Student, Professor, and University President, and What I Learned Along the Way,” an examination of American higher education over the past half century.

Chace, who was succeeded by current president Doug Bennet, held the position from 1988 to 1994. His tenure was marked by pervasive student unrest and fervent political activism that reached its peak when several Molotov cocktails were thrown into his office in South College.

Chace recently gained attention for a frank New York Times op-ed. His “honest talk,” addressed to incoming freshmen at a fictional university not unlike Wesleyan, touched on the central critiques in his book, including skyrocketing tuition rates, underpaid faculty, and the changing demographic of student bodies across the country.

According to Chace, the trends he saw in the University’s incoming classes are symptomatic of private institutions across the United States. He predicts that “[the] single greatest absence at schools like Wesleyan [is] not, in fact, going to be racial or ethnic minorities, but rather, students without money.”

Although much of the book’s reflections on the University are based on an institution markedly different than today’s, many of his revelations speak to current campus issues, such as the role of diversity on campus and the power of the Board of Trustees.

He also candidly details the “elaborate dance of ‘the presidential search process,’” a procedure he sees as flawed but without a viable alternative.

“No matter the time spent in the process (at least half a year), neither [the committee nor the candidate] gets to know much about the other,” he writes. “The interviews are too short and can play to attributes (such as the talent to generate sound-bite responses to complicated inquiries) that are irrelevant to how a person would perform in the job.”

Before Chace was chosen for President, Steven Pfeiffer, then the chairmen of the Board of the Trustees, warned him that Wesleyan was “different.” He soon found out that chief among the school’s differences was its steadfast commitment to diversity.

“For the six years I was to serve as president, ‘diversity’ dominated the campus,” he writes. “It was used as a term of praise, or an explanation, or an apology, or a defense, of everything and anything that happened.”

According to Chace, the institution’s embrace of diversity changed the school’s identity.

“Since the late 1960s, [the University] had never backed away from an issue involving race, or gender, or poverty, or war,” he writes. “In fact, it savored those issues…Wesleyan’s identity as a liberal institution became its ‘brand,’ the way it got to be distinguished from other places.”

He describes the tension between “new” and “old” Wesleyan, and the switch, over time, from a school with modest means and modest ambition to a very wealthy one with very large ambitions.

“[The new Wesleyan] attracted more and more activist students and, in some areas, a more liberal faculty,” he writes. “But as these extraordinary changes were going on, there was also another Wesleyan, an older Wesleyan, an institution characterized by a football team, fraternities…and above all, its alumni The older institution had a hard time speaking to the younger one.”

Chace saves his harshest criticism for the Board of Trustees. He notes that the trustees had no specific knowledge of education, but were appointed instead on a basis of their affection and loyalty to school, a problem he feels in symptomatic of many American institutions.

“But none of them, in fact, knew the school well, nor could they, given the limited time they could spend on campus,” he writes. “The faculty, which did possess an intimate knowledge of the institution, nonetheless felt inferior to trustee power and prestige.”

He details numerous altercations he had with the Board over a “vision” for Wesleyan. On one occasion, Chace writes, a trustee suggested that the social sciences—economics, political science, sociology, and history—should be dropped to save money and achieve “uniqueness among all our ‘competitors.’”

Chace argued that if such disciplines were deleted, Wesleyan would no longer be a liberal arts institution. He writes that the trustee responded by urging him to move away from “’timeworn tradition’ to establish a genuinely special ‘brand.’”

“This I knew was ‘thinking outside the box,’ but as a result we would destroy the box,” he writes.

Chace writes that the president of a college plays a largely symbolic role, taking part in rituals and acting as a symbol of the university. As president, he was a representative of the administration, the trustees, the campus, and even the students, although much of the decision-making wasn’t his own.

In the Op-Ed, Chace reiterated a theme central to his thinking on education: that the cornerstone of any institution is its educators, not its figureheads.

“My pay is about five times greater than an average faculty member’s,” he wrote. “That’s because I’m thought of as the chief executive of the university and chief executives get paid a lot in America. But I know I’m not really a chief executive because I don’t hold that kind of executive power.”

“[Chace] obviously speaks for himself,” said Vice President for Finance and Administration John Meerts of the Op-Ed. “His views do not reflect Wesleyan’s views on some of these matters, and on others our views may coincide…Wesleyan aims to pay competitive salaries to all administrators.”

While his experience at the University make up a significant part of the book, Chace also draws on knowledge gained during his 50-year journey through six schools.

He began his journey as an undergraduate at Haverford College, from which he went on to earn a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He taught for a year at Stillman College, a historically black school in Alabama, and then joined the English faculty at Stanford. Chace served as a president at both Wesleyan University then Emory University in Atlanta, where he still teaches and resides.

Chace’s book, “100 Semesters: My Adventures as Student, Professor, and University President, and What I Learned Along the Way” is now available from Princeton University Press.