Experience Is The Angled Road

While Experience Is the Angled Road: Memoir of an Academic is about leadership, it is not a handbook on how to be a leader.

When her parents moved from New York City to a small town in Alabama, R. Barbara Gitenstein knew that she just did not fit. After leaving for boarding school in the eighth grade, she discovered that it was more than being Jewish and a Yankee that made her an oddity. She was an intellectual; she loved classical music.

Before entering academe, Gitenstein learned to lead from the periphery, benefitting from exceptional and surprising mentors. She survived painful loss and life-changing challenges. In her memoir, R. Barbara Gitenstein captures the shock and the humor she faced when confronting the obstacles of being the only "whatever" in the room (woman, Jew, Southerner, liberal).

R. Barbara Gitenstein is the author of some thirty academic articles on Jewish-American literature and academic administration as well as the monograph Apocalyptic Messianism and Jewish-American Poetry. She has made over 100 presentations at literature and academic administrative conferences. She was often interviewed on radio and television stations in New Jersey, focusing on higher-education issues. She did not grow up aspiring to be a president of a college; rather she wanted to be a prima donna at the Metropolitan Opera Company. Her second-choice career turned out rather well; after receiving a BA with honors from Duke University and a PhD in English and American literature from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, followed by fifteen years as a full-time English professor, she served as provost and executive vice president at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and as president of the College of New Jersey in Ewing, New Jersey.