THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT:  

OFFICEHOLDER OR RISK-          TAKER                                                                                                                                                                       

In 1946, Robert Hutchins, the revolutionary president of the University of Chicago, wrote a classic essay, “the Administrator; Leader or Officeholder?” and cited the minimum qualifications of a leader: “courage, fortitude, justice, and prudence or practical wisdom.” He did not include “patience,” which President Eliot of Harvard once claimed was the chief requirement of any university administrator. Hutchins considered patience “a delusion and a snare” and thought that “administrators have far too much of it rather than too little.” Ten years later he recanted. Eliot was right after all. In fact “lack of patience,” Hutchins confessed, was one of his own principle disqualifications as an administrator.

            Hutchins had grown older, perhaps a little wiser, but he should have stayed with his first instinct. Patience may be a virtue, but at some point it is incompatible with the administrator as leader; it is the comforting characteristic of the office holder. Every university president confronts a choice between exercising patience and taking risks, and probably has no choice in the end: his character is his fate and he has little control over whether he will maintain the status quo or move forward when he becomes president.

So it was with me, when I became president of Roosevelt University in 1988. I served for fourteen years and though most of my tenure was marked by responsible attention to security, I did initiate some risky ventures. To any search committee, my own background would have seemed comfortably conservative, traditional, and therefore cautious: son of a school teacher (and aren’t all teachers by definition risk-averse?); a Columbia Ph.D.; non-controversial articles and then literary criticism in American Studies; teaching at the City College of New York, protected by tenure; and then, an administrative career as chairman of CCNY’s large English department, dean of humanities, and vice president for development. Out of this traditional context, a Roosevelt search committee could have discovered one bold, rebellious event. While at the City College I risked my career by writing an essay that was published as a cover story for the Saturday Review on February 4, 1978. Like a conservative academic, I called the essay “Open Admissions: a Confessional Meditation.” The editors changed the title to “How to Kill a College: the Private Papers of a Campus Dean” and featured a cover with a college building that was penetrated by a dagger, gore and blood dripping across the page; as you opened to the essay itself there was an image of headless students  entering a college building. I had spent the years from 1970 to 1978, when open admissions was initiated as the policy of the City University of New York, struggling as a chairman, dean, and vice president to accommodate access and excellence within the same college and had concluded that the experiment hadn’t worked. The repercussions from publication of this article became inflammatory within the City College and controversial nationally. I was a caught in a maelstrom because I had touched upon one of the most important issues in higher education –can open admissions and academic excellence co-exist?-- and as a political liberal and academic conservative had concluded that the answer was no. I had my fifteen minutes of fame, but afterwards had to leave CCNY, working successively for the next ten years as a provost and dean and Penn State and the State University of New York at Purchase until the trustees of Roosevelt appointed me.

I describe this prelude to my presidency to illustrate that there was am irresistible tendency within me to challenge the status quo. After serving as the president’s humanist for eight years and trying to make the bridge between open admissions and traditional academic excellence, I wrote an essay that questioned the university’s policy. That would seem to be a simple matter— educators, even educational administrators, occasionally write polemics. It would also seem justifiable —educators, even administrators, have academic freedom and can write what they wish; tenure, if nothing else, will protect them. But can an academic administrator write an essay critical of university policy while he is in office and expect to survive?  No. He serves at the pleasure of the president and when he no longer pleases the president, he needs to seek employment elsewhere. Impatient with open admissions, dismayed at what I perceived to be its failure at the City College of New York, I should have quit as the dean of humanities, written my critique after leaving office, and then risked my career. The experience was seminal in my own career, but I had learned that for better and sometimes worse I was a risk taker. It would serve me well when I came to Roosevelt in 1988. I had learned, if I hadn’t always embodied, the other attributes of leadership-- courage, fortitude, justice, and practical wisdom; but I had never learned prudence or patience. Hutchins and Eliot might argue that impatience is a fatal flaw; but I will try to show that in my presidency of Roosevelt, marked by a number of bold ventures, it was a virtue, too, and helped to transform the university.

When I arrived at Roosevelt in September of 1988, the university had systemic problems of major proportions. An accreditation team had underscored two fundamental problems: the lack of a strategic plan and enrollments that had been declining for more than a decade. These two major concerns pointed to deeper issues: the endowment was a mere $3 million; average faculty salaries were well below the national average; there was deferred maintenance everywhere; and a general malaise persisted among administrators, faculty, and staff. The downtown campus, despite its superb location at Michigan Avenue and Congress Parkway, had been eclipsed by two private Catholic universities, DePaul and Loyola, and by the public University of Illinois at Chicago. The administration had a rented facility in Arlington Heights which was a cash cow, but there was no real effort to capitalize on its success and develop a major campus in the northwest suburbs, where no other university had a presence. And the Auditorium Theatre, which occupied 40% of the iconic Auditorium Building, was resented for its incompetent management; it had accumulated a debt of $400,000 to the university and was seen as an albatross rather than a performing space of promise and possibility.

            There were many internal problems as well—the business college had lost its accreditation in 1981 and suffered from severe enrollment declines; arts and sciences was atomized into something like twenty-five departments, with their chairmen all enjoying released time; performing arts, inherited in 1954 from the Chicago Musical College, ran such a continuing deficit that some trustees felt it ought to be abolished or severely reduced in size.

 As I surveyed all of the issues confronting Roosevelt, I came immediately to a fundamental decision: I needed a provost to run the university internally while I developed the board of trustees, met the movers and shakers in the corporate community, and raised as much money as quickly as possible. There had been a dean of faculty who was the first among equals among the academic deans, but there had never been an internal leader charged with the responsibility I was prepared to give the provost. After a national search, I settled upon someone whom I had worked with at Penn State when I led one of its major campuses. He was my second appointment from Penn State: another friend had come as my executive assistant and during my presidency went on to become the vice president for development and CEO of the Schaumburg Campus. Inevitably I was accused of running a Penn State Mafia and not rewarding those who had been at Roosevelt for years. But I knew the university needed fresh blood, I needed leaders I could trust, and I wanted to move fast, take risks, and create an enthusiasm that would be transformative. My provost provided a profound contribution to Roosevelt University. This was his last position in a distinguished career, which meant that he wouldn’t use the position to serve his own personal goals, and he set about working with administrators and faculty to design a strategic plan called Finding the Center, which created centers of excellence and opportunity that should receive priority funding. When he presented the document to the faculty, he was met with a fierce reaction from those affected and was crucified in what became known as the Friday afternoon massacre. He had warned me that after Finding the Center was finished, he would have to retire—the changes would be so draconian that he would have to leave. And so it was. “Reality is hard to bear,” T. S. Eliot once wrote, and change in a university is even harder to accept. He left, but that slender document, Finding the Center, was the core of all other subsequent plans and informed my presidency.

As the provost set about to strengthen the internal university, I directed almost all of my attention to building the board of trustees, to persuading community leaders that Roosevelt would become increasingly important for them, to raising funds from corporate and foundation leaders, and to preparing for a desperately needed capital campaign. Beyond good management, two elements are essential for a university to become truly significant: a president with vision and major donors to implement that vision. Brandeis, established in 1948, only three years after Roosevelt, had Abram Sachar and a host of wealthy Jewish leaders whom he persuaded to share his vision; Father Hesburgh did the same for Notre Dame with Catholic donors; Emory had its Woodward, the CEO of Coca Cola; Washington University the Danforth family; and close to home, IIT could claim Bob Galvin of Motorola and Bob Pritzker of the Marmon group who donated $60 million each in the 1990’s to the IIT we see emerging now. In each case, the university was transformed. I wanted the same for Roosevelt and I set about searching for my own holy grail.

I knew that, given its history, Roosevelt would not be able to attract the traditional CEOs who were the royalty of Chicago. They were white Christian men who hadn’t yet included Blacks or Jews or other minorities into their private clubs. They still considered the university as the liberal home of the excluded, a little red school house sympathetic to labor and the working class. The distance between the affluent, who were deeply committed to the Lyric Opera, the Symphony, Art Institute, Field and other museums, and a university that embraced the underprivileged from the ethnic neighborhoods of Chicago was vast; and I knew that, for a whole host of reasons –beginning with prestige, status, and snobbery—I would be rejected by the CEOs who felt that Roosevelt wasn’t important enough for them. It wasn’t for lack of trying—I was so convinced that Roosevelt would emerge into a great secular, private university in the center of Chicago that I took my case to those I thought would be sympathetic and willing to take the risk with me. I remember approaching the CEO of Harris Bank, who was a leader in the educational reform movement and so many social causes and said with a straight face, “Every cause you champion is one embodied by Roosevelt University; join my board of trustees. “No,” he apologized. “I’ve already committed myself to the University of Chicago, my alma mater, as a chief fundraiser for their capital campaign. But there is my president, who doesn’t need the prestige of Chicago or Northwestern and who believes in what you’re doing.” So I walked across the hall and made the case to the president, who was prepared to take the risk with me: several years later he would be the trustee who made the crucial case for purchase of our Schaumburg Campus to the trustees; he would be the chair of the committee that searched for my successor; he would become invaluable—and he wasn’t a graduate. I remember asking the CEO of the Tribune to be a trustee –when I think of my naive nerve, I smile at myself—but he turned me down gently, joined the IIT board and was responsible for an $8 million gift as well as contributions even larger to the Medill School at Northwestern; but he did recommend a young attorney from Sidley Austin who was legal counsel to the Tribune. That man did agree to be a trustee and would be responsible for successive gifts from the Tribune’s foundation and become the publisher of the paper, one of its three or four leaders.

These appointments taught me a lesson. Clearly I would not succeed in attracting CEOs to the board. I needed to find rising stars who might become so committed to Roosevelt that they would wouldn’t leave for Chicago or Northwestern when they did become CEOs. I joined the Economic Club, where corporate leadership is concentrated,  and volunteered for the nominating committee, with the specific intention of identifying bright young business leaders who were not yet well known but who were clearly marked for ascendancy. I went after them with a vengeance, building a team for the future.

The Roosevelt board of trustees was composed of three major constituencies: alumni, corporate leaders, and independent entrepreneurs or retirees. The alumni were in their fifties and sixties now and achieving some degree of affluence—they were a loyal group but had not yet contributed significantly. Corporate executives were important as a steady secondary source of support, and I recruited them aggressively. In Chicago there had always been an historic and inflexible hierarchy of corporate funding for educational institutions that ran from the University of Chicago and Northwestern to DePaul and Loyola and then to Roosevelt; it was called “unrestricted” philanthropy and left to the discretion of the president. But in recent years, business leaders were demanding specific programs in education or neighborhood revitalization-- “restricted” gifts. I remember a breakthrough at the Harris Bank, when Roosevelt received a significant grant for education reform, the largest of the year. I had linked and continued to link the university’s projects with the quality of life in Chicago; it was not accidental that when we came to name the new performing arts college and the school of real estate they were called the Chicago College of Performing Arts and the Chicago School of Real Estate. There may have been a great institution called the University of Chicago, but very self-consciously, we prepared ourselves to become a university for Chicago. Corporate philanthropy has been crucial to Roosevelt, primarily because it is a reliable source of support; in most instances, the case made has been for a university that serves Chicago, where 90% of its students live and work. Unlike others, our students remain to nurture the metropolis where they were born and educated.

The most promising constituency among the trustees was a group of retired executives and entrepreneurs, many of whom were Jewish, most of whom did not have Roosevelt degrees, and all of whom joined the board because of their belief in the university’s mission of social justice, its diversity, and its hardscrabble student body from the neighborhoods. These senior citizens were self-made millionaires and I knew that if I were to find a truly major donor it would likely be one of them. They all had divided loyalties—to the Lyric Opera, the Art Institute, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and other institutions that gave them greater prestige and prominence than Roosevelt; but they did have the faith and the wherewithal, and I saw my primary task as one of persuading them to make the university their priority.

Once the strategic plan was completed, I began to draw the outline of a capital campaign. Beyond the traditional plea for scholarships, endowed chairs, and long-deferred renovations of the Auditorium Building, the major focus would be a campus in the northwest suburbs. Although there were fine public community colleges, there had never been a university presence in a region that boasted the headquarters of huge international corporations –Motorola, Baxter, Abbott, Allstate, and others—and a middle-class population that was growing exponentially. Our enrollments at the rented facilty in Arlington Heights had enjoyed ten percent growth annually, without any real investment; it was obvious that one could develop a second university campus and enlarge Roosevelt from an urban into a metropolitan university. The issues of education, transportation, and the environment were not restricted to the city or the suburbs; they were metropolitan in scope –witness the work of Metropolis 2020—and needed a university to reflect them.

I launched a capital campaign after I had been president for three years. From any objective perspective, I had no right to do so. The consultants whom we hired to estimate a sensible goal and to see whether there was trustee support returned with a mixed report. The trustees were excited by the plan to develop a suburban campus and other presidential projects, and the estimate was that we probably could raise between forty and fifty million dollars over five years; but no one --neither the trustees nor the major donors interviewed-- was prepared to make a lead gift of several million dollars. In addition, we had no chairman for the campaign. Any sensible president would have waited until he had identified strong leadership and set in place a clear campaign strategy, but the needs of the university were so pressing I decided to take the risk and initiate a forty-five million dollar campaign that would have as its centerpiece the establishment of a permanent second campus in Schaumburg. Every president has an edifice complex and Schaumburg would be mine. I even had a potential major donor for whom the campus would be named—Al Robin, a wealthy real estate developer.

We searched for the best possible location of our permanent campus and settled on Schaumburg, the Hong Kong of the northwest suburbs, one of the three or four largest commercial centers in the United States, with Woodfield Mall at its core, and access via the network of highways to the north, south, east, and west. In Schaumburg, we discovered the Unocal administrative headquarters on thirty acres of prime land. The company was preparing to relocate in California and offered (after some tough negotiations) the 225,000 square foot building and 30 acres for $4.5 million; the renovations of the facilities would require an additional $16 million. We needed to borrow most of the money from American National Bank, which demanded to see a down payment from the university—either through its own funds or through those of private donors. Since Roosevelt had no substantial reserves, I turned to Al Robin and the trustees, and therein unfolds a fundraising story in which I had to confront my own capacity to take a risk that would change the university forever.

In retrospect it seems like a fundraising scenario that a university president might create in his fantasies. Here was a trustee who was one of the wealthier philanthropists in Chicago, believed deeply in Roosevelt’s mission, and already had given $1 million to the temporary facility in Arlington Heights; surely he would contribute more to a permanent campus that would continue to carry his name. After months of cultivation, during which Al Robin and I became good friends, I flew to Rancho Mirage in southern California for a luncheon with several of the trustees and Robin at their country club. The four other trustees were all friends; each was capable of a major donation, and each felt that Robin should make the lead gift for the capital campaign. But they themselves had not yet pledged to the campaign. After I had made my case, which Robin listened to with care, he said he wanted to wait. The trustees prevailed upon him: the centerpiece of the capital campaign would be the building of the second campus in Schaumburg; the campus would bear his name; it would be his legacy; his gift would be a dramatic challenge to other trustees, alumni, and the entire community of the northwest suburbs. Robin turned to them and said, “What do you think I am? A pigeon?” He moved his eyes slowly round the table, taking in each of his friends and fellow trustees. “What are you giving?” Then in the phrase he soon would be so fond of repeating, “What do you guys think I am? A pigeon.”
            I returned to Chicago a shaken and depressed president, feeling that the dream of a new campus was dissolving before me. The faculty had been skittish about the whole enterprise, even though they realized a permanent suburban campus held great promise; they were afraid that if it failed, Roosevelt could go under. The trustees were convinced that this expansion made great sense, but no one had stepped to the plate with the funds that would made it happen—it was like the academic version of Waiting for Godot; they were all “waiting for Robin.” The alumni lauded the idea but again no donor emerged—everyone was “waiting for Robin.” My administrators urged me to recommend the project to the board of trustees for their approval, but the CFO was adamant that the university couldn’t afford further indebtedness. We had squirreled together more than three million dollars, but we needed another 1.5 million to convince American National to support the project. Then, at a meeting when we were staring at each other and wondering where $1.5 million might be found, someone dared to mention the elephant in the room, the jewel in our crown, the pearl in our oyster—the iconic and celebrated and now financially successful Auditorium Theatre.

“Why not?” he said. “It’s plush with reserves. Phantom of the Opera will make it even richer. It’s an auxiliary unit of the university. It has an unpaid debt of $400,000 to the university and owes us so much for support over the years. It’s payback time.”

“You will have a revolution,” I warned. “A public relations disaster. I know the Council members. They think the theater is theirs. They think the money is theirs. Besides, I’ve promised them that I would never recommend the university touch that money, even though, as you say, it technically belongs to us.”

We went back and forth with these arguments and against my will I turned to the executive director and told her we needed to borrow the $1.5 million in order to buy the Schaumburg campus from Unocal. It was December, 1994. Unocal wanted a decision by the end of the month. I knew that donations would be arriving during the Christmas season and that we could return the loan. With these thoughts in mind, on December 14, 1994 –may that date live in infamy-- I went to the executive committee of the Auditorium Council with my CFO and the university’s attorney and described my plan. Through the executive director they had already learned of my intentions. Not only did they refuse the request for funds, they immediately sued the university and made certain that their protest was published in the Tribune the following day. That action set in motion a series of lawsuits and appeals and stays, an eight-week bench trial in the summer of 1998 as well as adverse publicity and visits to the mayor, his people, and the arts community to make the case that the university needed to borrow funds to built its second campus. Council members, one of whom was the second largest donor to the democratic party in Illinois, characterized the effort as “a construction project in Schaumburg” and solicited support from the Mayor. Roosevelt trustees and I approached him as well. Daley clearly favored the Auditorium Theatre Council, for Roosevelt was taking $1.5 million from his city to build a second campus in affluent Schaumburg; to his credit he never made a public statement on the case. Others did for him; many in the arts community spoke for him; aldermen and politicians spoke for him; and their criticism of the university tested the trustees, many of whom had to protect their own professional positions, and tested me—I was excoriated by the Council in the press, I was the scapegoat, the villain, the greedy imperialist.

 To the credit of the trustees, they never flinched. There was enormous pressure on the university to mediate, which really meant capitulate—and we did try. Another president --more prudent and patient than I-- would have found a way to compromise with the demands of the Council in what amounted to a desire to secede from the university. But I felt that the theater had always belonged to Roosevelt, that it occupied 40% of the physical space of the Auditorium Building, and that it held enormous possibilities for the university. Looking back upon the experience, I don’t know whether my decision to fight the Council legally was an act of courage, fortitude, and (in my eyes) justice or simply one of perversity, stubbornness, and imprudence; but I do know that compromise would have resulted in surrendering the theater to the council, saving the university millions of dollars and continuing distractions from its primary purpose—education. Still, a university is a complex organism, an amalgam of education and business, and we were at the bloody cross roads where ideas and commerce clash. In October 2002, after eight years of legal squabbles and millions of dollars in legal fees, the Supreme Court of Illinois ruled in favor of the university and the theater became known as the Auditorium Theatre of Roosevelt University. A risk it was, the Auditorium Theatre conflict, but surely one worth taking. Perhaps my original dream of a conservatory within a College of Performing Arts that has the great public Auditorium Theatre and smaller, experimental theaters will one day be realized.

The greater risk, however, was the purchase of the Schaumburg Campus, and it still awaited me. In December of 1994, with Unocal imposing a deadline for purchase by the end of the calendar year, the courts prevented Roosevelt from using the theater reserve and we had to take another bank loan from the American National Bank. We made the case that we knew gifts were coming in over the holidays and that market studies indicated significant enrollment growth at the Schaumburg Campus— indeed we guaranteed a 4% annual increase there and 1% growth university-wide. With American National’s reluctant endorsement, we went to the trustees at their first meeting in the new year and received their approval.  I made the argument to the faculty, administration, students, staff, alumni, the bank and the trustees with great force, indicating that after Roosevelt’s movement into the Auditorium Building in 1947 the purchase of the Schaumburg Campus was the second most important event in the history of the university. The risk was great, for despite my certainty I knew what failure would mean. Al Robin ultimately contributed $5 million and other donors and corporations supplemented his gift; the new Campus gave the university community a whole new sense of itself; and now it is the educational home for 3,500 students, almost half of Roosevelt’s enrollments. But in early 1995, the outcome was by no means guaranteed and I spent many sleepless nights convincing myself that what I told everyone would really work out. I could have waited and exercised patience then; but if I had, there would have been a missed opportunity of enormous consequences. Roosevelt would be a different and far less important university now.

My goal was to make the university as meaningful as I could by taking it from an urban to a metropolitan university and developing programs that would attract greater gifts and increased enrollments. Arnie Weber, the former president of Northwestern, once told me that a university president should serve ten years: two years to develop a plan, six years to implement it, and the last two years to defend it against those who resisted him. In the middle of my presidency, after the Schaumburg Campus was established and a capital campaign of $53 million completed, I felt this pressure of time. The university was on a roll, but it still needed the large gifts that would make it as significant as I imagined it could be. I could not see any donor providing the kind of contribution that transforms a university and I turned to other initiatives. First was an attempt to merge with or acquire another institution. I had conversations with the leaders of George Williams, Columbia, Shimer, John Marshall Law School, and most publicly National Louis University. None of them worked out and the reasons why would require another essay that would conclude with the major reasons for the failures of mergers and acquisitions in higher education: the desire to retain historical identity, the ego of the president or board of trustees, and the unwillingness to take a risk, even though students might benefit and the merged institution would be greater than either one alone.

The second initiative that I was absolutely convinced would transform Roosevelt was housing, which would lead to the growth of an undergraduate student body. I had seen the development of NYU in New York and George Washington University in Washington D.C. that transformed them and their neighborhoods; there was no reason why Roosevelt could not do the same in the south loop of Chicago, where the problems were less formidable. I had witnessed the School of the Art Institute and Columbia College grow an undergraduate student body through attractive housing; there was no reason why Roosevelt, which had attracted almost exclusively upper-divisional and graduate students, could not increase its enrollments through housing and become far more of a regional university. We did not have the investment capital to act on my idea, and I didn’t dare take the risk through borrowing still more money from the banks—my perception was blunted by patience or prudence or fear. Still, we rented five floors of a twelve-story building at 18 South Michigan Avenue, across from Millenium Park, shifted all of our applied programs there, and vowed that we would buy the entire structure as enrollments warranted. And, instead of developing dormitories alone, we joined forces with Columbia and DePaul in creating a magnificent University Center at State and Congress Parkway, which was filled to its capacity of 1730 students when it opened in the fall of 2004.

The final set of initiatives were programmatic and therefore most difficult to implement. Faculty are politically liberal but practically conservative, and generally resistant to change. Every president has a list of new programs that his faculty has objected to because they alter old ones or require existing resources or simply demand change. Arterial sclerosis in universities is a chronic condition and encourages the president to be patient, to wait, to be an officeholder rather than a genuine administrator or leader.  Roosevelt was no different—indeed, as a university almost entirely dependent on student tuition, it was worse. If I listen closely, I can still hear the complaints echo from the rear of the room—“We tried that ten years ago and it didn’t work. . . .Are you trying to bankrupt the university?. . . .Why bring in outsiders when we have the talent here? . . . There aren’t the resources. . . . Move more slowly. Be patient. Be patient. Be patient.” But patience wasn’t in my vocabulary and I used every device known to presidents to implement new programs—quickly. We initiated an Institute for Metropolitan Affairs, devoted to applied research that explores the issues of transportation, housing, and drugs, with specific recommendations for change. It was made possible by a multi-million dollar gift from the Rubloff estate, and resisted by some administrators and faculty who were convinced that the university couldn’t afford this luxury; but over these fourteen years it has done important work and now thrives—largely because of two strong directors. We launched an honors program with the clear intention of attracting more gifted students and it too was resisted because of the fear that the original mission of Roosevelt might be sacrificed, as if academic excellence and social justice or access to the underprivileged were incompatible; but it is firmly planted and the fears have faded, mostly because of the tenacity and sensitivity of its director. We forged an educational partnership with eleven other universities and the Chicago Public Schools which secured more than $50 million from the Ford Foundation and the federal government. In performing arts we hired visiting artists from the symphony and opera at salaries never paid before— that risk resulted in the most gifted students and the finest conservatory in the metropolitan region.

In the Business College we developed a program in risk management and an International MBA for Chinese executives. These and other innovations were started with minimal resources. In each case we sought support from a foundation or individual donor because I knew I could not reallocate the budget fundamentally; if I had attempted to do so, I would have had a faculty revolution on my hands. The programs still exist, some more successful than others, and always a measure of the leader I appointed.

The one program that had greater possibilities than any other and that came to me late in my presidency was in real estate. It represents more vividly than any other the conflict between patience and risk taking, between the office holder and leader and the varied forces within the university that constrain the president. Two real estate leaders --Marshall Bennett and Jerry Fogelson-- recommended a hands-on, pragmatic MBA, which seemed to me a perfect fit with Roosevelt. It promised to revitalize the business college; it would reach out to donors who had never supported us and who were among the richest men and women in the city. We moved with the aggressiveness of entrepreneurs, building an advisory board of 100 real estate leaders, raising several million dollars within two years, appointing a director, attracting 100 students in the first year, sponsoring forums, annual galas and other events that featured what became known as the Chicago School of Real Estate. No program in the history of the university had ever been launched so swiftly and so publicly. The real estate community responded with a generosity that was extraordinary, and I thought that I had discovered the holy grail I always sought.

Faculty resisted the MBA in real estate, claiming that resources were being reallocated to a program that hadn’t proved itself; DePaul had already developed a program with which we would have difficulty competing; administrators doubted its wisdom when we had no full-time faculty qualified to teach real estate; the CFO noted that the gifts were pledges, not fully payable for five years; and the entire effort was being developed toward the end of my presidency so that I would be leaving thorny internal issues to my successor.  I found myself torn between risk-taking, aggressive real estate entrepreneurs who wanted to develop a program as their legacy and a university community fearful of change. It was the academic equivalent of the decision to purchase the Schaumburg Campus. I charged ahead-- impatiently. I met with every member individually of the business faculty to persuade him or her of the possibilities of a real estate program; I twisted the arms of fellow administrators; I followed up every fund-raising lead, knowing that my case would be made by raising money externally as well as by building enrollments. The Chicago School of Real Estate is now a permanent fixture in the university and metropolis, largely through presidential impatience, courage, and fortitude.

As successful as the projects and programs may have been, they have not quite provided the revenues essential to transform Roosevelt University. Major donors have that galvanizing effect. In my experience, Al Robin came close; he deserves to have had the Schaumburg Campus named after him. Others have donated gifts of $1 million and for Roosevelt they have been substantial.  I have never felt the thrill of a truly transforming gift, although there have been a few surprises. Once, for example, I noticed that an alumna by the name of Florence Miner had increased her annual $100 contribution to $1,000; she had been an employee of Motorola and through tuition reimbursement had earned a bachelor’s degree.  I asked the development office to have her come by. In my office, this unassuming woman sat with her sister and repeated the question on everyone’s mind.

“I’ll bet you’re wondering why I suddenly increased my contribution to the

university.”

“It has crossed my mind.”

Then she told me her story. She was the sister of Robert Miner, the co-founder with Larry Ellison of Oracle Corporation. He had grown ill from cancer prematurely and she and her sister had relocated to Tiburon, California, in a house he bought for her; she helped cared for him at the end and when he died discovered that he had left her a fortune.

“I’d give up every share to have him back,” she said.

My mind was racing as she spoke. I suggested she remember him through a scholarship, an endowed chair, even a school of computer science. Her eyes responded and within days I was visiting her in Tiburon, making a request of $5 million, then sending her the formal proposal and listening to her agree a day later to donate 60,000 shares at $84 a share; the following year she contributed another $1 million; and she would have continued if Oracle hadn’t plummeted in value with the crash of the technology sector.

There is another Florence Miner somewhere out there, now that my own presidency is over. Besides Al Robin and Florence Miner, I never found the donor who would share my vision and make the transforming gift I sought. I like to think that I have laid the foundation for my successors to discover our Maecenas. Perhaps this is what Eliot and Hutchins meant when they recommended patience as well as courage, fortitude, justice, and prudence or practical wisdom; perhaps, I needed to learn patience and to manage my expectations. But character is fate and I am still an advocate of impatience. Let the provost and CFO and faculty and trustees and others exercise patience and restraint. Let them warn their leader of his impatience. A president must reach beyond his grasp, as Browning once said, “or what’s a heaven for”?

Theodore L. Gross

President Emeritus

Roosevelt University

January 17, 2005