Dear Orange Friends:
The Chancellor’s house has a library with a lot of empty shelves. I have been filling them up with books written by our faculty, and reading the books late at night. This reading gives you a sense of the breadth and depth of faculty expertise and interest (and you can access all these books free through our library). I know writing these books can be grueling and lonely at times, but from what I have read, the results are really worth it.
There are so many fine books that it is dangerous to single out examples for praise. I am far from expert in many fields, and have used this as a chance to learn more. I have especially enjoyed work by Dana Spiotta of the English Department, who teaches in the MFA Program, and by David Bennett of the History Department. Bennett has just published a new biography, Bill Clinton: Building a Bridge to a New Millennium.
Having worked through Clinton’s autobiography (which was long) and at least a dozen essays and articles on his presidency, I did not expect to learn much from this book. Instead, I discovered a readable, scholarly, authoritative biography that is marvelously concise. I believe this is going to be the book that scholars and students start from in studying the Clinton presidency. Bennett ends with an essay on presidential “Greatness,” speculating as to whether Clinton will meet that ambiguous metric. I think it still remains a bit early to make that call, but this book should inform any decision.
Dana Spiotta is a novelist. I read Eat the Document (2006) and Stone Arabia (2011). I can’t do them justice in a few sentences, but I cannot stop thinking about these works and their characters and relationships. You need to read them. The stories capture in very idiosyncratic situations how relationships of friends and siblings mutate across decades I lived through (especially the 70s and long after). This scholarship—and it is manifestly that and much more—made me envy the students who get to learn from Professor Spiotta here.
You will no doubt read this as you enjoy Labor Day weekend. I wish you a great weekend and encourage everyone to join me on Labor Day to cheer on the women of our soccer team during their home opener against UConn at 1:00 p.m. in the Soccer Stadium at the Lampe Athletics Complex.
Chancellor Kent Syverud