In his remembrances of forty years in higher education, Friedman chronicles his moving from BA to PhD in the CUNY system and then on to what university administrators are fond of calling "positions of increasing responsibility." He describes the discordant and paradoxical position of doctoral students in English in Manhattan during the Koch, Dinkins, and Giuliani mayoralties, and then a series of academic jobs, with a focus on mentors and leaders who were helpful models of university leadership, and a few who were not. After describing his doctoral work, Friedman turns to Newark during its renaissance as the internet came alive, and then to several other public universities, big and small, whose leaders chose either to face the challenges of their time and place-or simply didn't, much to the detriment of their institutions, their communities, their faculty and their students.