James Oliver Freedman was born September 21, 1935 and raised in Manchester, N.H. as a "home-town boy." His father was a high school English teacher, his mother an accountant.
When he was 16, he had a summer job washing test tubes at a hospital. Freedman said he hated the job. When he decided to quit his father paid him to read for the rest of the summer.
At that point, he bought his first book, "Arrowsmith" by Sinclair Lewis, for 65 cents. Since then, he has become an avid reader and book collector and today he has a collection of about 4,500 volumes.
After high school, Freedman applied to Dartmouth, Yale and Harvard Universities. Freedman's mother encouraged him to go to Harvard, where he majored in English.
"The day he was born, his mother said her son was going to Harvard," said Freedman's wife, Bathsheba.
Freedman explained that his mother valued education, and to her, Harvard embodied that value.
His days at Harvard were filled with philosophical discussions in Lowell House. He did little in terms of extra-curricular activities because he did not shine academically. Freedman was a B student.
"I found Harvard so demanding academically. I was always scrambling to classes," Freedman said.
After graduating from Harvard, Freedman entered Harvard law school.
"He left after one year. He wasn't terribly happy. He thought he made the wrong choice," Bathsheba said. But before Freedman left, he won the moot court, a first year culminating activity in which students debate cases in mock trials.
Freedman spent the next two years working as a reporter for The Manchester Union Leader. "It was my first experience in the real world. My first major job," he said. He said he learned how to really produce and write on deadline.
Eventually Freedman found his way back to law school. He went to Yale. After graduation , he moved to New York City where he became a clerk for Thurgood Marshall, the late Supreme Court justice who was then a federal appeals court judge.
"Justice Marshall taught me the indispensability of legal craftsmanship and the moral obligation to put that craftsmanship in the service of a significant public cause," Freedman said in his convocation address to the Class of 1991.
While riding on the subway to his first day of work, Freedman had a memorable encounter with an old friend from Yale.
"He had met Ed, whom I was going out with, on the metro," Bathsheba said. "Jim asked Ed how do you get dates in this city and Ed gave him my phone number. Ed and I weren't really dating anymore because I had decided he wasn't the one I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, but I was still cooking dinner for him sometimes on Friday nights."
"When Jim called, I knew he was the one. He was kind of shy, very intelligent and very considerate," she continued. "We were married 16 months later."
After clerking for Marshall, he worked for a year at the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison. Then in 1964, he went to the University of Pennsylvania and became an assistant law professor.
During Freedman's 16 years at Penn, he held various positions: professor of law, professor of political science, university ombudsman, associate provost and dean of the law school.
He also taught law as a visiting professor at various other colleges and universities, including Michigan, North Carolina, Cambridge and Georgetown.
Then the offer of a presidency came from the University of Iowa in 1982. For the next five years, Freedman devoted his professional life to strengthening a writer's workshop, starting the Iowa Critical Languages program, promoting study abroad programs and leading one of Iowa's largest fund-raising efforts. Initially the campaign targeted $100 million but by the time Freedman left, funds totaled more than $150 million.
In July 1987, Freedman was inaugurated at Dartmouth.
