The library of Roosevelt University has about 400,000 books and a great view of Grant Park. In the distance are baseball diamonds, and watching the university`s president, Theodore Gross, stare out at those fields, one wonders if he is thinking baseball.
”I was a good player in college, a very good shortstop, but I never really pursued it,” he said.
Neither did he fully pursue his dream to become America`s next Hemingway. But he`ll tell you, in this quick delivery of his, that what he`s doing now is more exciting than any ball game, more complex than any novel.
”I`ve been exhilarated since I took this job,” he said. ”Moving Roosevelt into the future, making it play an active part in the city`s life isn`t a job for a bench sitter. My sleeves are rolled up.”
And they were too. His tie was askew and his suitcoat was two floors below, draped across a chair in his office.
It was afternoon and students were scattered about, hunched over books, taking notes or staring out the window.
”I went to school here in the `60s,” said a man named Henry Jason, an atlas open on the table in front of him. ”I was 23 when I started, 30 when I finished. I worked as a cabdriver and had a family to support. It was tough. But I did it. I come back now just to remember.”
For most people, Roosevelt University is not among the first colleges or universities they think of when they think of Chicago, even though it graduated a number of the city`s leaders and one of its recent mayors.
It is not the biggest or oldest. It does not have the most Nobel Prize winners or the biggest endowment. It does not have its own stadium or even a football team. It no longer counts, as it did when it opened in 1945, world-famous people such as Albert Einstein and Albert Schweitzer among the members of its advisory board.
”No, we don`t have any of those things and, as a result, we`ve got something of an identity crisis,” Gross said. ”When most people think of Roosevelt, they think, `Oh, that building near the Auditorium Theatre.` Many people have taken Roosevelt for granted.
”But such attributes as open admissions, small class size, flexible schedules, an ethnically diverse student body, the Auditorium Theatre and our location give us an edge. We can respond faster to the city`s changes and problems. And we`re going to.”
Gross arrived in Chicago two years ago with a mission: ”to make this university the intellectual, artistic and social nerve center of metropolitan Chicago,” Gross says. ”The ideals that formed and shaped Roosevelt in the 1940s and `50s gave it a voice in the city. We need to adapt those qualities for the 1990s. To be heard again.”
That will be easier said than done. Competition for students, professors and financial support is increasingly fierce. But when one looks back on the
”ideals” upon which the university was founded, one sees that there`s a lot to work with.
Egalitarian spirit
The school was born when Dr. Edward J. Sparling, then president of Central YMCA College, refused the request of the college`s board of trustees to put a quota on black students. He resigned. Simultaneously, 92 percent of the faculty resigned and 97 percent of the students walked out.
With backing from such tycoons as Marshall Field III, from the Julius Rosenwald Foundation and from Chicago residents, $500,000 was raised for a new college. Named for Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Roosevelt College opened its doors at 231 S. Wells St. on Nov. 15, 1945. Two years later it moved to its present location at 430 S. Michigan Ave.
Dempsey Travis, the author and real estate developer, attended Roosevelt in the 1940s. In his ”Autobiography of Black Chicago” he wrote that Roosevelt ”was the fountain head of democracy in higher education. . . . The spirit of brotherhood that permeated the walls of the University was unlike anything I had ever experienced. . . . Inside the University`s walls I was enveloped with a feeling of hope for black people in America.”
By opening its doors to large numbers of ethnic whites, blacks, Jews, Asians and others, it pioneered an educational egalitarianism rare in the pre- civil rights days, and created an environment of intellectual possibilities and excitement. One attracted to the place was Harold Washington, who enrolled at Roosevelt in 1946 after returning from World War II service.
Not only did Washington, as he told Travis, have his ”first sustained relationship with white folk” at the university, he also got his first taste of politics, when he was elected 1949 class president.
During the 1960s and 1970s, as other universities relaxed their quotas and such huge commuter campuses as the University of Illinois at Chicago were built, Roosevelt`s stature diminished.
Under Rolf A. Weil, president from 1964 to 1968, the university continued to reach out to the community, attracting foreign students and non-traditional students, such as those holding full-time jobs, by offering flexible schedules and special programs such as self-study off-campus.
A remarkable 90 percent of its students remained in the Chicago area after graduation, and it provided some of the area`s leaders: Illinois Appellate Court Judge Blanche Manning; Bigsby & Kruthers President Gene Silverberg; advertising executive Thomas Burrell; and Bob Wattel, vice president of Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises.
In 1978, responding to changing demographic patterns, it opened the Albert A. Robin campus in Arlington Heights, where enrollment has grown to 2,500. In 1987, it opened the Prairie View campus in Lake County.
But the city is where Roosevelt was rooted and where its future lay. When he retired in 1988, Weil said: ”How do you meet the needs of an urban community? That is one of the challenges that will face my successor.”
The big picture
Born and reared in Brooklyn, Ted Gross was the son of a language teacher in the New York schools but grew up with no taste for the family business.
”I always wanted to be a Hemingway, then Faulkner,” Gross said. ”After getting out of the Army in 1954, I did take creative writing courses at NYU
(New York University). But then I got married and reality set in.”
His bachelor`s degree from the University of Maine led to a doctorate from Columbia University. He became an English professor and administrator at City College (later City University) of New York, then dean and provost of Pennsylvania State University`s Capital Campus in Middleton, Pa.
”I sort of drifted into administration because it was a place where you had some say in putting things right,” he said. ”But academics was in the blood. My brother`s a physicist at Brandeis.”
When he was approached to succeed Weil, he was dean of letters and science at the State University of New York at Purchase.
”We needed someone who would elevate Roosevelt to a new plateau,” said Alan B. Anixter, chairman of Roosevelt`s board of trustees. ”We interviewed dozens of candidates, and what impressed me most about Ted was his ability to think in broad terms, to see not only what needed to be done today but also in the future.
”He was able to see the big picture and articulate an answer. A lot of people just talk. Ted is what I call the three D`s: dynamic, dedicated and a doer.”
Since Gross` arrival, enrollment has grown 10 percent; new top-level administrators and 20 new faculty members have been appointed; the bond between the university and the Auditorium Theatre, which the university owns, has been strengthened.
The Harold Washington Chair in Political Science was established (and filled initially by the Tribune`s Clarence Page). Perhaps, most ambitiously, the Institute for Metropolitan Affairs was established to ”become a major metropolitan agency affecting citywide policies in education, economic development, public policy and administration, health and mass
communications.”
Those and other changes laid the groundwork for the ”Roosevelt University Renaissance,” a plan to guide the university through 1995, whose objectives take aim at academic, civic, cultural and fundraising matters.
Richard Krieg was sufficiently impressed to resign recently as the city`s acting health commissioner to become the first head of the Institute for Metropolitan Affairs.
”There`s a laundry list of problems to address,” Krieg said. ”Schools, health care, criminal justice, environment. . . . The mission is not to stop with a report but to become actively involved with policy. That`s my incentive, real time as opposed to research time. It`s an active role.”
And one that the board and faculty support.
”We are behind this plan 100 percent because it seeks not just to pinpoint problems but to play a part in their solutions,” Anixter said. ”The last two years have been a delightful experience, and there`s no question that Roosevelt is an exciting place to be.”
A memo machine
Walking through the university`s downtown campus with Gross is like walking around a spring training camp with a baseball manager. His gait and manner suggest that of a former athlete rather than a lifelong academic. Although gray streaks his hair, he looks younger than his 59 years.
”I play tennis whenever I can,” he said. ”But that`s not often.”
He`s usually up at 5 a.m. at the Michigan Aveneue apartment where he lives with his wife, Selma, a former administrator with New York City Colleges and a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University. Their children are grown: One is also a Columbia Ph.D. candidate; the other works in the film business in Los Angeles.
”Every Monday morning I come in to find five or eight memos from Ted on my desk,” said one of his top aides. ”This is obviously a man without much social life.”
Gross would agree, reluctantly.
”We go to theater, to concerts-classical mostly; Mozart deadens the pain-but not as much as I would like. I guess I am consumed by work.
”And I know this is going to sound self-serving, but I really can`t wait to get to the office. How many people get to work in a such a place?”
Roosevelt University is in the Auditorium Building, one of the city`s most famous and stunning landmarks.
Designed by Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler, it celebrated its 100th birthday in November. As almost everyone knows, the building also houses the Auditorium Theatre, generally recognized as one of the most acoustically exquisite and beautiful in the world.
What is now the university was once an office building and the Auditorium Hotel. The school`s library was once the hotel`s restaurant. The student lounge on the second floor was once the hotel`s main lounge. The Rudolph Ganz Recital Hall was once the hotel`s ballroom.
Understandably, there is a gerrymandered feel to Roosevelt`s downtown campus. But there is also something quite charming about it. And it is studded with architectural delights.
”There`s a no-nonsense feel to the place,” Gross said. ”People are here to learn, to gain their, as the saying goes, passport to prosperity. It also happens to have some of the greatest cultural facilities in the world.” Gross is the first of Roosevelt`s presidents to add the title of chairman of the Auditorium Council, and the ”Renaissance” plans for its expanded use. There also are plans to increase enrollment in the university`s Chicago Musical College, which was founded in 1867 by Florenz Ziegfeld Sr. and became part of the university in 1954, and to further restore the library`s splendid ornamentation.
It was in the library that Gross admitted that attracting the best and the brightest-not to mention the corporate and foundation financial support for big plans-will be no easy task.
Of Roosevelt`s 6,500 full- and part-time students spread among three campuses, only 360 live at the downtown Herman Crown Center. The university offers 72 bachelor`s and 40 master`s degree programs in five colleges, day and evening classes, and an average class size of 12.
”We are a little university, aiming high,” Gross says. ”I think our plans are bold but realistic. Being a part of this area means that we are obligated to use our academic and cultural resources in socially responsible ways.”
Gross was asked what he might have to say about Roosevelt in the year 2000. He gazed out the window into Grant Park below.
”That would be about the time of my retirement party, I hope,” he said. ”I want to be able to say that in the 1990s Roosevelt became a university for Chicago, because it was connected to the life of the area in fundamental ways. And then I`ll go away and work on the two big novels I`ve still got in my head.”
