All About Me: Society, Serendipity, And Self

This is a highly personal autobiography covering 80 years of my professional and personal life. It is intended for an audience comprised of my progeny, professional colleagues personal friends and unknown archvists.

This is a book about life. Well, still not exactly right. It really is a book about MY life. I hope that, at least in a small way, this book about my life can influence your life. I apologize ahead of time if this is too presumptuous or over zealous a goal. About this Book The book has six major sections, each with a different theme. There sections contain a total of twenty chapters, each an essay about a facet of my life. With one exception, I have consciously avoided writing a chronological autobiography. I have refrained from such a format for fear that it would be boring and not be of much value. The exception is Chapter sixteen, in which I recount chronologically the many locations and houses in which I have resided throughout my life. Book contents include a number of real life vignettes and anecdotes. I have tried to recount all of these straightforwardly, as I recall the individuals, instances and incidents being described. If I have made factual mistakes, they are honest ones. Where I express feelings, these are mine, and I know they are real. Little here is whitewashed. I am striving for more than self-serving pap. However, upon the advice of numerous family members and friends, I have seldom engaged in detailed criticisms of individuals still living. This had led, in places, to excising paragraphs and entire pages from an original manuscript. However, miraculously, the act of simply writing my criticism, some quite caustic, sufficed to heal whatever hurt I had held.

JAMES W. GUTHRIE James W. Guthrie is a Presidential Fellow and Professor of Education Policy at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida. Previously he was the first gubernatorially appointed Superintendent of Public Instruction for the State of Nevada. Prior to that he was the first appointed Senior Fellow and Director of Education Policy Studies at the George W. Bush Institute, a component of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, located on the Southern Methodist University campus (SMU) in Dallas, Texas. He held a concurrent position as Professor of Education Policy and leadership in the Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development at SMU. Professor Guthrie formerly was the Patricia and Rhodes Hart Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy, and Director of the Peabody Center for Education Policy at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. From 1999 through 2009, he served as chair of Peabody College’s Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations, the nation’s highest ranked university educational administration department. He instructed both undergraduate and graduate courses, and conducted research on education Previously a professor at the University of California, Berkeley for 27 years, Professor Guthrie holds a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Stanford University, and undertook postdoctoral study in public finance at Harvard. He also was a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford Brookes College, Oxford, England, and the Irving R. Melbo Visiting Professor at the University of Southern California. Professor Guthrie has been a consultant to the governments of Armenia, Australia, Chile, Guyana, Hong Kong, Pakistan, Romania, and South Africa, and has had extensive experience in consulting for The World Bank, UNESCO, OECD, and the Organization of American States. He is the author or co-author of 20 scholarly books, a mystery novel, and more than 200 professional and scholarly articles. He is past president of the American Education Finance Association, former vice president of the American Education Research Association, served as editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Education, published in 2002.