Retirees Association

The Preface To A Just Published Memoir by WSU Retiree Larry Hussman

Long serving Professor of English from 1965 to 1993
Acanemia book jacket

Larry Hussman has just published his memoir, Acanemia: A Memoir of Life in the Halls of the Higher Learning, which is available as a paperback or Kindle edition from Amazon.com. The two paragraphs below are taken from the Preface to the book. Two other excerpts will be found in the Reflections section of this website: Setting Off, Reluctantly an account of his first day in school; and  Acanemia: A Memoir of Life in the Halls of the Higher Learning, an explanation of why he wrote this book.

This book grew out of an essay describing the development of a representative American educational enterprise. From the mid-1960s through the early 1990s, I served as a member of the pioneering faculty assembled at the newly established Ohio branch campus that would become Wright State University. In this role, I had an exceptional opportunity to track the trends that have befogged the future of American higher education. The university’s achievement and impact were too often retarded or subverted along its historical way by certain actions and inactions for which administrators and faculty shared substantial responsibility. Wright State’s history should prove instructive to my readers because, in academe, all politics is national. Colleges and universities across the United States share many of the faults I will enumerate in this book.

As a memoir, Acanemia begins with my own formative intellectual experiences and moves on to depict a life centered on my role as a professor and literary critic, English department leader, Fulbrighter, and visiting professor in Poland and Portugal. By offering an account of my time inside the academy in a period of declining public support, my aim is to inspire fresh thought about the nation’s higher education ventures and pose suggestions for reform of their management and mission. And I’ve admixed more intimate life details on the theory that such an approach would add appeal beyond the nuts-and-bolts explanation of education policy.

In constructing my narrative, I’ve interrupted the flow of past events when appropriate in order to connect them to current situations and to make relevant political and related points. I’ve most often disguised those responsible for Wright State’s setbacks and have also masked the identities of some blameless others, to protect the guilty as well as the innocent.