Description
Book SynopsisIn this compelling memoir, Mary Kay Thompson Tetreault describes how a Catholic girl from small-town Nebraska discovered her callings as a feminist, as an academic, and as a university administrator. With remarkable candor and compassion, she reflects on how second-wave feminism has transformed academia and how much reform is still needed.
Trade Review“This is one of the bravest books about the long trajectory of leadership in higher education that I have read in a long time. Tetreault takes us on both a personal and professional journey through her triumphs and tribulations as she balances essentially three worlds every day; that of administrator and leader, academic, and wife and mother." -- Yolanda Moses * co-author of How Real is Race: A Sourcebook on Race, Culture and Biology *
“Living When Everything Changed is a remarkably candid account of an academic and administrative career filled with both successes and failures. While it offers a sometimes-painful picture of academic conflicts, paralysis, and betrayals, over the course of her career Tetreault and her colleagues grappled with many of the most important issues in higher education over several decades. In this sense it is surely true that Tetreault’s career (including her preparation for her career) took place in “interesting times,” and this volume offers readers a rare glimpse of the complicated mix of motivations, personalities, values and ideologies that animated both challenges to the status quo and resistance to those challenges.” -- Abigail J. Stewart * co-author of An Inclusive Academy: Achieving Diversity and Excellence *
"Selected New Books on Higher Education," compiled by Ki-Jana Deadwyler and Ruth Hammond
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Selected-New-Books-on-Higher/247595 * Chronicle of Higher Education *
"The strengths of this memoir lie in the author's honesty about her ambition as well as her insecurities. We follow her interior and outward struggle as she advocates for herself and her career while navigating a minefield of departmental territorialism, faculty egos, institutional hierarchy, cultural norms, and power dynamics, as well as emerging pressures of gender and race diversity in the world of higher education." * EqualwRites *
Table of ContentsTable of Contents
Preface
Chapter One: My Life as a Professor Begins
Chapter Two: Going Home and Leaving Home
Chapter Three: Nestled in the Bosom of Catholicism
Chapter Four: Wandering in the Wilderness
Chapter Five: Finding Love and Work
Chapter Six: Becoming the Men We Wanted to Marry
Chapter Seven: My Lewis and Clark Chapter Concludes
Chapter Eight: A Deanery of My Own
Chapter Nine: Second Chance to Be a Provost
Chapter Ten: Opportunity and Ambition Overshadowed by Ambivalence
Chapter Eleven: Shifting My Gaze Forward
Chapter Twelve: Among the Most Interesting Provost’s Position in the Country
Chapter Thirteen: A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far
