Academic Recollections

[from the inside front flap] Howard R. Bowen's association with higher education spanned six decades -- from 1925 when he set off for college, to his retirement in 1985, capping a brilliant academic career. In that time he rose from undergraduate and graduate student to professor of economics, college dean, and finally, university president and chancellor. Here he reminisces about his experiences at the six institutions with which he was intimately associated: Washington State University, the University of Iowa, the University of Illinois, Williams College, Grinnell College, and Claremont University Center and Graduate School. These candid memoirs not only recall his life and that of his family, but they provide a vivid, first-person account of the remarkable evolution of American higher education during the turbulent modern era. As Dr. Bowen writes: During much of the sixty years, these institutions, and indeed all of higher education, were going through rapid growth and development. They were also adjusting to momentous social changes relating, for example, to war and peace, economic depression and prosperity, advancing knowledge and technology, changing demography, new mores and values, and new classes of students. I was an interested witness and active participant in the many adjustments required by these social changes. These warm recollections bear striking testimony to the resilient nature and indomitable spirit of one of this country's most precious resource - it's colleges and universities.