We had been talking for an hour or so. The Spaniers’ condo is spacious and plush, with panoramic views of the campus and surrounding countryside. The building is full of affluent retirees, but the Spaniers are more like exiles. I asked him what in particular provoked his father to strike him.

“Everything caused him to fly into a rage,” he said. “If my sister made an ‘eek’ noise, she’d be beaten. Or it could be a slight infraction. We had very strict rules in the house. At 5:30 everybody had to be in their seat at the table for dinner. Not 5:31. And not just in your seat. The curtains had to be closed, the slippers needed to be put out, the table needed to be set. . . .

“Or it could be there was something left on your plate. Food was so important in our home that if you didn’t eat something or didn’t like something, you would be beaten. You didn’t talk while you were eating. Eating was eating.” Spanier said that his father sometimes hit him with his hands or fists, “but 90 percent of the time, it was what’s called a strapping. He would undo his belt, double it up and would strap you with it. You’d be cowering in the corner, and he would continue doing that until I assume he got tired. He just couldn’t do it anymore.” The abuse was not a secret, he said, because his bruises were often visible. “Back in the ‘50s, someone like my father would be described as a strict disciplinarian. Nowadays, you’d be in jail for what he did.”

Spanier’s sister, Anita Koszyk, a special-education teacher, told me that all three children were beaten but that her father gave the worst of it to his oldest child. “I have a visual image of Graham on the floor, with his hands up, trying to protect himself from the thrashing,” she said. She remembers him being sent to bed without dinner. Their mother, who sometimes tried but rarely succeeded in stopping the beatings, would sneak food to him.

The family ultimately moved to the comfortable suburb of Highland Park, Ill., to a small house on the working-class side of town. Fred Spanier’s involvement in local politics led to a job as the town’s postmaster. The beatings finally stopped, Spanier said, when he was 15 or 16.

It is easy to imagine that his father’s cruelty was emotionally devastating and left its own kind of disfigurement. But Spanier hints at this only obliquely. The story he tells is about his ability to break away and take charge over his own life. It is triumphal, a testament to the control he came to exercise. “I had such an aversion to being at home,” he said. “We all hated each other. The only legitimate reason my father would allow for not being at home at 5:30 at night is if you were working, so I developed the world’s strongest work ethic. Basically I started working at 9 years old. I worked all through school. Super-responsible positions. I worked like crazy.”

The habit of work set him on a lifelong course. Spanier paid his own way through Iowa State. By 24, he had earned a Ph.D. at Northwestern, secured a faculty position at Penn State and published his first book. At 43, he was named chancellor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and four years later he took the Penn State job.