Born in Newport News, Virginia, Chace was awarded the bachelor of arts degree from Haverford College (1961) and a master's (1963) and Ph.D. in English (1968) from the University of California, Berkeley.

While there he joined with Black students in protesting the state's segregationist policies and participated in the 1964 march on the Tuscaloosa County Courthouse that ended in his arrest [1] the only white person to have been incarcerated.

[2] While at Stanford he rose to Professor of English and served as Associate Dean of Humanities and Sciences (1982 -1985), and Vice-Provost for Academic Planning and Development (1985 – 1988).

Sonnenfeld subsequently sued Emory in the Federal Court, and during the proceedings it emerged that Chace had anonymously leaked information to the press regarding evidence admitted in the suit, in contravention to university policy.

Writing about it in “Inside Higher Education”, Chace wrote “faculty members are not so much the employees of the institution as they are its intellectual engine and its most important asset.

He had been accused of being racist and uncommitted to diversity, an irony that the media noted given his early teaching at Stillman and his participation in the civil-rights movement that resulted in being “thrown to the ground by police, threatened with a cattle prod, and locked in jail overnight on charges that included resisting arrest.”[1] Commenting on the Wesleyan incident, Chace remarked “..when you become president of an institution, for some students it does not make any difference what you were once upon a time.

You are the symbol or the representative of authority, and you are seen in that way.”[1] Later, a group calling itself STRIKE (Students Rebuilding Institutions for Knowledge and Education) claimed responsibility for the act.

Chace responded in a lengthy letter to the presiding bishop, arguing that Emory's policy was consistent both with its educational mission and with the call to justice in the Methodist Church's Book of Discipline.