ANN ARBOR—Robben W. Fleming, president of the University of Michigan during the turmoil of the Vietnam era, tells of that time and more in his memoirs, ”Tempests into Rainbows,” published by the U-M Press.

Fleming’s accounts trace a lifetime of challenges faced by a man who, with grace and style, met those challenges with effectiveness. Though student troubles at U-M are chronicled as far back as 1856, Fleming entered Wolverine territory as the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War were coming to a head. Serving the University in 1967-79 and again in 1988, Fleming hosted freshman teas, faced students who wanted to abandon the traditional commencement ceremonies for something more akin to a ”sing-along.” During Fleming’s tenure, he faced activist groups protesting Vietnam, the University’s ROTC program and the number of Black students admitted to the University. One group wanted to dig a bomb crater in the middle of the Diag, another built a tent city there.

But the former military government officer who served with troops in North Africa and Europe during World War II, who became a specialist in labor-management relations and professional mediator and arbitrator of labor disputes, had no problem using his skills to turn these tempests, too, into rainbows.