Oakley recounts his life story, reflections, and experience as President of Williams College in Massachusetts alongside the story of the college's educational and cultural progression from the 1950s to today.

From the Cast-Iron Shore is part personal memoir and part participant-observer’s educational history. As president emeritus at Williams College in Massachusetts, Francis Oakley details its progression from a fraternity-dominated institution in the 1950s to the leading liberal arts college it is today, as ranked by U.S. News and World Report.

Oakley’s own life frames this transformation. He talks of growing up in England, Ireland, and Canada, and his time as a soldier in the British Army, followed by his years as a student at Yale University. As an adult, Oakley’s provocative writings on church authority stimulated controversy among Catholic scholars in the years after Vatican II. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Medieval Academy of America, and an Honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he has written extensively on medieval intellectual and religious life and on American higher education.

Oakley combines this account of his life with reflections on social class, the relationship between teaching and research, the shape of American higher education, and the challenge of educational leadership in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The book is an account of the life of a scholar who has made a deep impact on his historical field, his institution, his nation, and his church, and will be of significant appeal to administrators of liberal arts colleges and universities, historians, medievalists, classicists, and British and American academics.

Prelude

Part 1. LIVERPOOL

1. The secure realm of BEFORE

2. The shadowed world of AFTER

3. Trajectories of Fear

4. Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam

Part 2. LISSANANNY, OXFORD, TORONTO, CAMBRIDGE, MA., PRESTON, ALDERSHOT, CATTERICK, GLOUCESTER, NEW HAVEN

5. Poblacht na hÉireann

6. Collegium Corporis Christi

7. Oh, Canada!

8. On Her Majesty’s Service

9. Lux et veritas

Part 3. WILLIAMSTOWN

10. Williamstown and its College

11. Encountering the Old Williams

12. The Transformative Sixties (i): The New Williams

13. The Transformative Sixties (ii): The Second Vatican Council

14. Vita contemplativa: Teaching and Research

15. Vita activa (i): Matters of governance

16. Vita activa (ii): The administrative turn

17. Presidential Years (i): The job: nature, range and variety

18. Presidential Years (ii): Organization, appointments, initiatives

19. Presidential Years (iii): Principal challenges confronted

20. Aftermath

Postlude

Acknowledgements

Citations