John Sexton entered Brooklyn Prep, a Jesuit high school, in January, 1956, as a curious and passionate student in search of guidance. He quickly became enchanted with a charismatic young teacher named Charlie Winans, who dotted his freewheeling lectures with fleeting bits of advice on everything from the ideal wife to finding one’s true purpose. Winans encouraged a free and occasionally combative flow of ideas; Sexton, who had been fascinated, as a child, with the soapbox orators who dominated Manhattan’s Union Square, threw himself into competitive debating. He convinced the principal at a Catholic girls’ school to allow him to organize and coach a debate team there, a commitment that eventually took priority over his schoolwork. But Sexton had helpful, interventionist mentors, first at Brooklyn Prep and later at Fordham University. He went to graduate school, to study religion, and then to Harvard Law School, where he blossomed as a scholar. In 1981, he joined the faculty of the New York University School of Law; he was appointed dean seven years later. In 2001, he became the president of N.Y.U., a position he held until 2016. During his tenure, applications for admission doubled, and the school’s endowment increased; it is currently more than four billion dollars. The faculty expanded, and N.Y.U. opened satellite campuses in Shanghai and Abu Dhabi.

In “Standing for Reason: The University in a Dogmatic Age,” Sexton offers his “accidentally serpentine path” as evidence of the transformative effects of higher education. The book warmly and humbly renders the turning points of his life as a way of contextualizing Sexton’s fears about our present. Higher education is “under siege” by the forces of anti-intellectualism, he maintains, pointing to a Pew Research Center poll that suggested that a majority of Republicans now believe that higher education has a negative impact on America. Sexton is worried about our “balkanized society, with understanding in short supply,” and he hopes that places like N.Y.U. can still spark “serious conversation,” serving, in a culture increasingly attuned to the clipped rhythms of digital life, as a space of deliberative freedom. “Indeed,” he writes, “I believe universities can play a unique role in rebuilding the kind of discourse on which participatory democracy depends.”

This vision partly depends on taking the longest possible view of things—a perspective that has always been part of the appeal of academia, where research and teaching rarely abide by any traditional metrics of productivity. Sexton touts the virtue of such a long-term perspective in a section of the book about a perhaps over-discussed university issue: politically controversial campus speakers. Invitations to such figures, which are sometimes extended by conservative groups with the overt aim of drawing ideological opponents into overreaction, have turned into games of brinksmanship at schools across the country. Sexton believes that universities have an obligation to welcome the airing of any and all ideas, even those that seem odious. He recalls tense conversations he had with high-level N.Y.U. donors who were incensed by guest speakers whose politics they disapproved of and who threatened to take their money somewhere else. It would be easier to relent to such pressures, but there is great importance, Sexton writes, in “honoring the presumption of inclusion.”

It’s an odd place to take such a stand, because it’s purely symbolic—taking the high road works only when your skeptics and opponents aren’t simply trolling your commitment to “inclusion.” Throughout “Standing for Reason,” Sexton writes of the “moral authority” necessary for a university president. For him, that means being principled yet open-minded, never imposing his own political viewpoints on the campus at large. He offers intimate glimpses into his own intellectual formation, from his exacting education as a teen-ager to the probing conversations he had with his late wife, that suggest this is more than just high-level posturing; there is at least a narrative arc. Still, there is a Pollyannaish quality to the idea that his unusual path testifies to a system that works rather than to a set of advantages magnified, in an earlier era, by talent and good fortune. Critics of Sexton’s administration at N.Y.U. argued that the changes he enacted required a great deal of moral compromise, pointing, for instance, to the school’s forays to the Emirates and China—places not generally known for a free exchange of ideas. Sexton maintains that college is still the key to greater opportunities in life, though he’s not terribly specific about who will get those opportunities. (“Reasonable people would say it is in our national interest that half the members of President Xi’s cabinet have children being educated here,” he writes.) The campus of the future, he believes, will be an “idea capital.”

On some Friday nights, Sexton writes, he takes a red-eye flight from New York to Abu Dhabi. When he touches down, it is Saturday night local time. He has dinner with some friends and then gets some sleep. Sunday is spent teaching two seminars, one to students at N.Y.U.’s Abu Dhabi campus, the other to a seminar of top students from the country’s federal universities. Sunday evening is spent meeting with colleagues and students, before he takes another flight, at 2:30 A.M., back to New York. He lands in New York at 8 A.M. and is back in his N.Y.U. office a couple of hours later. “Such will be the life of some professors in this new century,” he writes, “a life unimaginable less than a generation ago.”

In “The Adjunct Underclass: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission,” Herb Childress describes a very different kind of commute. He writes about one of his friends, a sixty-year-old scholar who juggles teaching positions in Boston and New York. She grades papers on her four-hour bus rides between the two cities and, when she gets to New York, crashes on her elderly mother’s couch. Calculating her pay against the time she spends not only teaching but holding meetings, preparing lessons, giving feedback to students, and answering e-mails, Childress estimates that this friend earns roughly nine dollars per hour. There are others, Childress notes, who have it worse. He recounts the story of an adjunct who lived out of her car while teaching four classes per semester, often grading papers by the light of a headlamp in the parking lot of a Home Depot. After a while, the adjunct learned in which neighborhoods she needed to park in order to get an uninterrupted night’s sleep. He also recalls the tragic, widely reported story of Margaret Mary Vojtko, an adjunct language instructor at Duquesne University who, despite twenty-five years of service, could not afford health care or even electricity. She died in her home, in 2013, at the age of eighty-three, having never earned more than twenty thousand dollars a year.

In “Standing for Reason,” Sexton remembers Charlie Winans telling his students, “Consider teaching, boys. It is the noblest and most fulfilling of all vocations.” But, by and large, at the more prestigious universities, teaching is the least valued part of an academic’s life. More measurable indicators, like grants and publications, do much more to advance one’s career. The task of teaching—of unpacking complex ideas in the classroom, grading papers, helping students shape their arguments and smooth out the kinks in their sentences or equations—increasingly falls to the adjuncts whom Childress writes about. In the nineteen-seventies, about a quarter of college faculty were on limited-term, adjunct contracts; the majority of professors were tenured or on the tenure-track. Today, it’s estimated that nearly three-quarters of college faculty are adjuncts. Reading “The Adjunct Underclass,” whatever sympathy one might have had for Sexton’s jet-setting workaholism quickly evaporates. There’s a privilege in the weariness that comes with having too many opportunities.