Jeremiah Reedy

I can't really recommend this book, although I found reading it worth my time.

Quick background: I enrolled at Macalester College in 1967, and dropped out during my sophomore year. Arthur Flemming's term as Mac's president closely coincided with my Army enlistment. When i (finally) returned to Saint Paul in 1981, the school could be said to have begun recovering from the early-1970s budgetary collapse. I graduated in '82, with some credits from another school.

In Reedy's telling of the story, Mac's budget woes were entirely caused by Arthur Flemming's apparent failure to worry about, well, budgets. Most folks would call that an oversimplification. School presidents don't have absolute authority over anything. I'd want to spread the blame to the school's trustees and (especially) to DeWitt Wallace, as the school's most important donor probably could have found it possible to intervene without just cutting off all funds. The author's so intent on establishing Flemming's responsibility for the school's near-bankruptcy that he's lost all perspective. The result's a very slanted narrative.

That said, there's useful information in this book.

==========

Here and there the author gets the timing of some policy and practice changes wrong. Usually these are accompanied with some wording like "as I recall," but they still represent research failures on Reedy's part.

And I found a couple spelling errors that were quite annoying. Chapter 2 consists entirely of a transcribed interview; the transcription consistently spells Mac finance director John Dozier's last name as Dozer. I expect Reedy blames the transcriber for the error; I'd not accept that excuse. And he spells Liz Cheney's last name Chaney, an error I'd likely ignore if it weren't for the Dozier issue.

Finally, as the author sort of acknowledges, the book's organization leaves a lot to be desired.

A frustrating book. I was hoping for better.… (altro)