Trouble in Academe: A Memoir

Trouble in Academe: A Memoir is a partially autobiographical account of two academic crises: one at Indiana University in the late 1960s and another at Boston University during the 1970s.

Born in Germany in 1934, Fritz Ringer came to the United States in 1949. Educated at Amherst College and Harvard University, he taught European Intellectual History at Harvard (1960-62), Indiana University (1966-69), and Boston University (1970-84), before coming to the University of Pittsburgh. Accustomed to the role of cultural outsider, he felt compelled to play an activist role at Indiana and especially in opposition to President John Silber at Boston University. Ringer is the author of The Decline of the German Mandarins, Education and Society in Modern Europe, Fields of Knowledge, and Max Weber's Methodology.