Theodore L. Gross

Choices Theodore L. Gross

Choices is a vivid protrait of a man's rise to the leadership of a university and the personal consequences of his overvaulting ambition.

The novel traces Scott Bernstein's journey as an administrative leader in the trauma of open admissions at Gotham College in New York to his presidency of Jefferson University in Chicago, a mid-size institution that resembles the large majority of colleges and universities struggling with open access, academic standards, and the fundraising essential for survival. His first wife Sandy is loathe to leave New York and sacrifice her successful career, even though an essential part of her shares Scott's ambition and his eagerness to be a university president. She has stuck by her husband through his compulsion to succeed professionally: their decision, against her wishes, to postpone and then not have children; his publication of an indictment of open admissions in Saturday Review, which results in the loss of his job, and his need to escape from Gotham College for a position at Penn State, which separates them for four years. Now, in their forties, he is asking her to leave her beloved New York and an advancing career, which fills her with conflicting emotions of resentment at what she has and will have sacrificed and her pride in Scott's accomplishment. She is losing an important professional definition of herself, but she does want Scott to succeed, she does want to preserve the marriage, and she does support this achievement that both of them have been working for from the time they fell in love as adolescents. Before they leave New York, Sandy contracts breast cancer, which further divides them. She is a trouper, nevertheless, and prepared for a new life in Chicago; but before she can redirect her own career and acclimate herself to the Midwest, she dies tragically of breast cancer, which fills Scott with guilt at having pursued so single-mindedly his own goals. They've achieved the presidency both always des