Many memoirs written by professors, whose academic distinction generates interest in their lives and works, tend to focus upon events that have taken place outside the classroom. In contrast to such books as Sidney Hook’s “Out of Step” or A.J. Ayer’s “Part of My Life,” William Chace’s “100 Semesters,” as its title intends to show, stays firmly in the domain of the classroom, library carrel, dormitory, laboratory, faculty meeting room, or administrative office within the confines of the campus.

The subtitle of this memoir— “My adventures as a student, professor, and university president and what I learned along the way” — understates the expanse of Mr. Chace’s experience, which ranges from small colleges like Haverford and Wesleyan to major research universities like Berkeley, Stanford, and Emory. It also includes an account of Mr. Chace’s time at Stillman College, a historically black college in Tuskaloosa, Ala. The optimistic tone of Mr. Chace’s memoir recalls the tale of the clerk at Oxenford of whom Chaucer writes, “Gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche,” with the surprising addition of, “and gladly would he administer.”

Even from Mr. Chace’s current vantage point as a critic of the political quietism of the American liberal arts college in the 1950s, his belief that Haverford College, his alma mater, was a model of educational excellence remains strong. The model of Haverford frames the two main issues with which his book is concerned.

The first is the loss of the “commitment to the kind of moral development that produces an informed and responsible citizenry,” which was once “the mission of America’s best colleges and universities.” Mr. Chace identifies several reasons for this loss, including the dominance of the research university, which has pushed aside the primacy of the small college dedicated to the moral development of its students, as well as the “depressing uncertainty on almost every campus about what moral development might even mean.”

The second issue is “the decline in the force and relevance of the humanities.” His account of this decline indicates his own ambivalence as a professor of English. He seems ready to concede the legitimacy of the new relativistic literary theories in the field of the humanities, while also recognizing that these theories necessarily involve a triumph of an ideological or politicized approach to literature, which has contributed strongly to the decline.

Mr. Chace’s view of politics in the academy were further complicated during his time as a professor at Stanford in the 1960s. He describes his own dilemma as a liberal who sympathized with the ends and stated ideals of the protest movement at Stanford and Berkeley, while refusing as a scholar to participate in violent protest action against the university. Recurrently throughout this memoir, he reflects upon this problem as his own unresolved conflict between poetry and politics; that is, his commitment to apolitical scholarship and teaching, combined with his political aspiration to help make the world a better place.

On the one hand, Mr. Chace believes it’s an ironic truth that the primary inheritors of the legacy of the 1960s have been the university’s conservative critics, who have exploited some images and texts of the period as relics of horror to be displayed in confirmation of their views. On the other hand, it would be difficult to display a more compelling relic of the changes that “Sixtyism” hath wrought than Mr. Chace’s own first-hand reportage about the course in Western culture at Stanford. For instance, Mr. Chace reports that when a vote was taken on the reading list of the essential works for the humanities, he was “dumbfounded and dismayed to learn that Shakespeare did not make the ‘top ten.'”

Mr. Chace’s liberal faith was not eroded when he became president of Wesleyan, which he labeled “diversity university.” Alongside his presidential duties, he taught a course with a reading list intended to provoke classroom discussion even at the risk of minimizing balance. With his characteristic candor, Mr. Chace concludes that the course failed to provoke discussion. Students had already been subjected in high school to similar provocative discussion about issues of race, class, and gender to the point of saturation. Not to mention that many individuals in his diverse class refused to accept representative roles as advocates on issues of race, class, and gender. Despite this perceptive conclusion, Mr. Chace expresses confidence that a minority within the university, like the football player from the American heartland marrano-like restraint in comparable situations.

In his last post as president of Emory University, Mr. Chace is scathingly critical of the adequacy of the preparation of boards of trustees for their role in university governance. At the same time, he records his awareness that the support of these same trustees was essential during the “chapel issue.” Mr. Chace had intervened to overturn the decision of a college dean who denied the use of a university chapel to an employee for a “same-sex commitment ceremony.”

Mr. Chace’s memoir provides a basis for assessing of the continuities and discontinuities of the contemporary American university with its predecessors. Many of his experiences confirm his optimism that the university remains a singular institution in the society that is dedicated, particularly in the natural sciences, to the transmission of advanced knowledge and the pursuit of truth. “With mixed regret and relief,” he concludes that the university is no longer able to fulfill its traditional responsibility in moral education but should settle for more limited vision of dedication to moral integrity in research and teaching. Similarly, his final observation about the field he knows best – the study of English and American literature— is that the discipline “has lost its way.” This excellent memoir does not depend on agreement or disagreement with its theses or antitheses. “100 Semesters” provides the reflective reader with rich resources for his own judgments through its well-observed encounters of a diverse sampling of American colleges and universities over the past five decades.

David Sidorsky is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. His related essay, “Multiculturalism and the University,” has been anthologized in “Our Country, Our Culture” (Partisan Review Press).