TCNJ

10 The College of New Jersey Magazine P R A I R I E E S S A Y Throughout her life, R. Barbara Gitenstein, former president of TCNJ, has held books and scholarship in the highest esteem. Her pursuits since she retired from the college in 2018 indicate she still does. She recently published a memoir; and she and her husband, Donald Hart, made a $1 million gift to the college in February, with $750,000 earmarked for the library that bears her name and an additional $250,000 for the Gitenstein-Hart Faculty Early Career Prize, which will support the scholar- ship of junior faculty. In her book, Experience Is the Angled Road: Memoir of an Academic, Gitenstein recounts her own scholarship and the faculty who influenced her — from as early as middle school, when an English teacher advised her how to write in the first place ("Be sure to eschew gobbledygook, prolixity and hokum."), to her time as a doctoral candidate at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gitenstein ends her memoir prior to her time at the helm of TCNJ, but excerpted here are a few moments with the people who were her guiding voices and who helped shape her into the leader she was to become. There was of course the stereotypical unreasonable professor, the one who lived to flunk students. In the English department at UNC during those years, that was Dr. Norman E., the pro- fessor of Old English and linguistics. Because of his areas of expertise, almost every student had to take at least one course with him, and he rel- ished the status of gatekeeper. He A scholarly road Barbara Gitenstein writes a memoir of the life that set her up to lead.

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