A compelling memoir by the first woman president of a major American universityHanna Holborn Gray has lived her entire life in the world of higher education. The daughter of academics, she fled Hitler's Germany with her parents in the 1930s, emigrating to New Haven, where her father was a professor at Yale University. She has studied and taught "[An Academic Life] contains magisterial reflections but is also sprightly, often playful, and chockful of entertaining anecdotes."---Robert E. Lerner, National Interest