Blue Skies: My Life in Many Worlds, by S. Frederick Starr, Dorrance Publishers, 2025.
In his memoirs, Edward Gibbon observed that “every person has two educations, one which he receives from others, and one, more important, which he gives to himself.” By that standard, S. Frederick Starr has done very well indeed. Starr, who was the president of Oberlin College and the Aspen Institute, has written books on a wide range of topics, including Russian history and art, Central Asia, and New Orleans jazz. A talented musician, he founded the Louisiana Repertory Jazz Ensemble in 1980 to reclaim the authentic traditions of New Orleans jazz. Now, in his sparkling and droll new memoir, Blue Skies, Starr recounts his own odyssey as a historian and educator.
Throughout, Starr makes clear that the study of the past is vital to understanding the present. Like his friend and mentor George F. Kennan, the author of the containment doctrine that guided America during the Cold War, Starr steeped himself in Russian history and culture.
Starr’s first book was about mid-nineteenth century reforms in Russia, arguing that more ferment took place at the local level than had been commonly acknowledged in depictions of Russia as an absolutist autocracy. As the founder of the Kennan Institute in Washington, Starr became a prominent voice in debates about US-Soviet relations and met with Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush to advise them. The collapse of the Soviet Union confirmed his longstanding diagnosis that the fissiparous forces that had existed in Russia under the old regime also lingered on in the new one in the Soviet Union.
When it comes to America, Starr, like Kennan, displays a distinct soft spot for the times of yore. He mourns the disappearance of an older America and its replacement by a wantonly destructive commercial ethos that led to travesties such as “urban renewal.” The Irving Berlin song of his title, “Blue Skies,” counterbalances optimistic lyrics with a minor-key melody. Likewise, Starr’s recollections couple an upbeat spirit with a sometimes muted, plaintive narrative.
Starr was born in 1940 and grew up in Cincinnati, a bastion of Teutonic culture (over half of its citizens were German immigrants and when Wilhelmine Germany entered World War 1 in 1914, many of the locals spontaneously gathered to sing the Prussian military tune Die Wacht am Rhein). Seven years of Latin at Walnut High School, which Starr likens to a German gymnasium for its union of academic excellence and artistic pursuits, formed the foundation of his education. Free time was spent exploring the city and playing music in local establishments. “Cincinnati was an industrial society,” Starr writes, “but it retained many traits from a more communal era.”
Starr soon became fascinated by the architecture of the city and its environs; of particular interest were the Indian mounds that dotted the area. Eventually, Starr, as a seventeen-year-old, was appointed by the director of the local Museum of Natural History to lead an excavation and publish the results, which he did in the Historical and Philosophical Society’s Bulletin. These pioneering studies instilled in him a sense of the unresolved tension between continuity and change, “the great conundrum that preoccupied me.”
Similar historical themes continued to intrigue the budding scholar at Yale, which he entered in 1958. “The Yale of those years,” he explains, “was far closer to the Yale of 1920, or even 1880, than to the Yale of today.” Once more, Starr plunged into the past, his efforts culminating in two senior theses, one on archaeology and the other on the Roman emperor Septimius Severus.
A fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge, fortified the sense that history was his true calling. “I was again amidst natural and man-made beauty and surrounded by people who seemed to live for learning, music, and unhurried conversation. I felt utterly at peace.”
Upon return to America, war, not peace, awaited him. His studies with Isaiah Berlin, who was visiting Princeton University, convinced him that the ideological battles sundering American society, what we would today call the culture wars, were redolent of the pitched ideological battles that radical Enlightenment and Anti-Enlightenment thinkers had waged against each other. Another formative influence at Princeton was Kennan who had become a member of the Advanced Institute of Study. Kennan, an opponent of the Vietnam war on realist grounds, scorned the student protesters, decrying their claims to moral superiority in a book called Democracy and the Student Left that was published in 1968. Here were the first glimmerings of the political correctness that would later come to bedevil Starr during his tenure at Oberlin.
When Starr became Oberlin’s twelfth president in 1983, the college was about to celebrate its 150th anniversary. Starr was feted as a conquering hero but rapidly came to be depicted as a nefarious figure intent on traducing the college’s noblest traditions. Having entered Oberlin the same year that Starr became president, I can attest to the accuracy of his account. A disgruntled student body and faculty, Starr writes, clung to an identity “as a center for the emerging counter-culture and political radicalism.” He aspired to change that.
The main difficulty he confronted was that Oberlin’s governing structure invested the faculty with outsized powers to resist any real reform. Continuity, not change, prevailed. Though Starr was painted as a hidebound reactionary, the label could be more safely applied to his detractors. Little appears to have changed. A 2016 essay by Nathan Heller in the New Yorker showed that Oberlin remained a hotbed of woke liberalism. In 2019, Starr himself entered the lists to decry Oberlin’s administration in the Wall Street Journal for defaming a local bakery. The college claimed that racism lay behind the arrest of a college student for shoplifting. After a jury ruled against Oberlin, it appealed and lost. In 2022, the college’s pettifoggery came to an end and it paid the judgment and interest, amounting to $36.59 million.With his characteristic avidity for learning, Starr has gone on to become a leading figure in the field of Central Asia studies. In a recent essay for this journal, for example, Starr provided a detailed conspectus of Central Asia’s geopolitical importance. In one form or another, this remarkable scholar has not ceased to educate himself or the rest of us.
