Former University of Chicago President Robert Zimmer dies
Calling Zimmer "among the most effective and influential university presidents of his time," Alivisatos wrote: "Bob made historic contributions to advance the university’s scholarly eminence, strengthen our intellectual community and enhance the university’s positive impact in the world. His ambitious vision and inspired leadership helped the university become the preferred destination for the world’s best scholars and students."
During Zimmer's 15 years as president, starting in 2006, the undergraduate student body expanded and diversified, with new scholarship programs opening avenues for low-income applicants, including Chicago Public Schools graduates, who confronted soaring tuition fees across the higher ed landscape. Applications tripled, and the admission rate — a gauge of selectivity — dropped to 7%. The faculty also grew and added prestige. New dorms and classroom and research facilities sprouted on campus.
"We had to be ambitious and we had to take a more outward look at how we interact with and affect the world at large, whether that involves scholarship, societal impact or the nature of the students that we're able to attract," Zimmer told the university's alumni magazine in 2021.
Zimmer courted large donors to pay for much of it: a $300 million gift for what became the Booth School of Business; a total of $150 million from Citadel founder Ken Griffin; $100 million from Chicago's Duchossois family; and another $100 million from the Pritzkers to build molecular engineering into a full-fledged school.
Zimmer also relied heavily on debt financing during a period of low interest rates but couldn't avoid ratings downgrades and other warnings from Wall Street. He paid up to attract administrators and he became the nation's highest-paid university president in 2011.
It didn't hurt that his years as president encompassed a former law school faculty member, Barack Obama, becoming president of the United States and the first lady, Michelle Obama, working for the University of Chicago Medical Center in the pre-White House years. Zimmer also cultivated ties with then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Obama's election and plans to site a presidential center near the Hyde Park campus, however, intensified the university's historically fraught relationship with communities closer to home. The university built dorms and other facilities, including the Riva & David Logan Center for the Arts, in Woodlawn, just south of the Midway Plaisance. A flashpoint came in the mid-2010s, when the medical center reversed itself amid community protests and re-established a Level 1 trauma center, after earlier selecting a joint site six miles away with another health system.
Zimmer was a more hands-on administrator than his immediate predecessors, centralizing authority and back-office services, editing speeches of other university officials and contending with unionization efforts by graduate students who taught courses. He banned religious references — even the word "amen" — at university events in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel on campus, contributing to the resignation of its dean.
For a specialist in ergodic theory, Zimmer proved adept in leadership roles at explaining and delegating, according to Jim Crown, who chaired the university's board of trustees when Zimmer was named president. John McCarter, also on the board and Field Museum CEO at the time, said in 2008: "He is managing the place."
Yet Zimmer also reaped the benefits of his predecessors' investments in dorms and other infrastructure and efforts to expand the college and add degree programs. He shifted into overdrive.
Born Nov. 5, 1947, Zimmer grew up in Greenwich Village, N.Y., a Willie Mays fan, and had hoped to follow in the career footsteps of his physician father — until he blanched at dissecting a frog. At Brandeis University, plans to major in physics similarly went awry in the lab. So he became a mathematician, earning a doctorate at Harvard University in 1975. After teaching at the U.S. Naval Academy, he was named a math instructor by UChicago in 1977.
Following a two-year stint on the math faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, Zimmer returned to Hyde Park in 1983, eventually to become chairman of the math department, then deputy provost and vice president for research. He also handled responsibility for Argonne National Laboratory, which a university-led entity manages. Passed over for provost, he left in 2002 for the same position at Brown University in Providence, R.I., until UChicago recruited him back as president.
On Bloomberg Radio in 2009, Zimmer was asked how rare it was for a mathematician to become a university president. Zimmer paused and replied true to form: "Well, I actually haven't seen the data."
Crown said Zimmer arrived with a 10-point plan enriched by his time at the undergraduate-centric Brown. It called for upgrading UChicago's desirability to college applicants and relationships with its neighborhood and the medical center.
"He had been thinking about this for years and years and years," Crown said, citing results ranging from a Jeanne Gang-designed dormitory to development along 53rd Street — "how much more livable it is, how many more offerings there are."
McCarter last year said other candidates in 2006 were more interested in a potential offer from Harvard University, which was conducting a simultaneous presidential search. Zimmer, in contrast, declared at the start of his interview, "I want the job," McCarter said, citing an 11th point Zimmer promised: "I will figure out how to pay for the other 10."
Zimmer's national profile rose after a committee he appointed drafted a statement in 2014 reaffirming free speech on college campuses when many were pressured to issue "trigger warnings" and create "safe spaces" for individuals feeling harassed by ideas they considered discriminatory.
"Zimmer not only championed and celebrated this position within the university, but he also took to the national stage to advance the fundamental importance of these values to the university’s essential commitment to the search for truth," law professor Geoffrey Stone, who chaired the committee, said in 2021. Almost 100 other higher-ed institutions adopted what became known as the "Chicago Principles," making a case for the university as "the single most influential academic institution in the United States supporting academic freedom," New York Times columnist David French wrote in April.
In a 2020 Zoom interview with The Washington Post, Zimmer said the principles had worked "reasonably well'' at his university, with its century-long tradition of open debate, but less so at other places lacking "great clarity about fundamental principles."
In late 2021 Zimmer joined an advisory board to the non-accredited startup University of Austin in Texas, which dedicated itself to combating "cancel culture" and other perceived liberal bias in American higher education; but he quickly resigned, contending the school "made a number of statements about higher education in general, largely quite critical, that diverged very significantly from my own views."
Reflecting on his years as president for the alumni magazine, Zimmer chose to cite areas that engaged the university with the broader world, from having more professional school (law, business, etc.) faculty teaching college courses and merging the Urban Education Institute into the School of Social Service Administration to expanding arts programming.
During the late 1990s, as deputy provost, he backed successful efforts to reduce the number of required core courses, increase electives and expand opportunities to study abroad—which stirred controversy among old-guard alums while combating the image of the university as the place where fun goes to die. (An echo of Mays' reputation for robbing batters of triples.)
In 2012 he brought artist and community activist Theaster Gates on board as director of the Arts & Public Life initiative, after naming composer Augusta Read Thomas to a university professorship—the first artist so honored.
Crain's in 2010 reported that Zimmer had separated from his wife of 35 years, Terese, and was dating a faculty member, classics professor Shadi Bartsch. Andrew Alper, then-chairman of the board of trustees, deemed the situation a personal matter and not one of university governance. "The president has gone out of his way to ensure that there is no conflict of interest or appearance of a conflict stemming from his personal life," Alper said in a statement.
Zimmer and Bartsch later married and spent nearly $10 million on three North Side residences.
When plans for Zimmer's early retirement were disclosed in 2020, Joseph Neubauer, chairman of the board of trustees, ticked off what had been wrought under Zimmer with the aid of donors, including Neubauer himself:
The Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, the Chicago Quantum Exchange, the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics, the Bucksbaum Institute for Clinical Excellence and the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics. Also the Duchossois Family Institute, the Energy Policy Institute at Chicago, the Institute of Politics, the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture, the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation and the Neubauer Collegium for Culture & Society. Other initiatives were the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition, the Pearson Institute for the Study & Resolution of Global Conflicts, the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge and the Institute for Mathematical & Statistical Innovation.
The Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics debuted in 2008, just in time for the global financial crisis and Great Recession, which gave skeptics of the economist's free-market principles fuel to protest. The university in 2011 defused the controversy by merging the institute with the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory, named for another Nobelist (and faculty member), Gary Becker.
And after the Pearson Family Members Foundation pledged $100 million in 2015 for an institute exploring ways to reduce global conflict, the foundation sued in 2018 to recoup the $22.9 million it had donated to date, complaining that the university had neither hired a director nor laid other groundwork for the institute. UChicago described the still-pending lawsuit as without merit.
Zimmer is survived by his wife, Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer, and three sons, Alex, Benjamin and David, from his previous marriage to Terese Schwartzman, Alivisatos wrote.
The university had prepared to honor Zimmer next month with an honorary degree, doctor of humane letters. Alivisatos said the university would announce plans for a memorial service.
Source: Crain's Chicago Business
