Our Ted Talk:

We worked closely with Ted Gross during his 14-year tenure at Roosevelt University – Lynn as dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, and Mary as vice president of Enrollment and Student Services. As our way of remembering Ted, we wish to share some of his many accomplishments. We’ve also included some personal memories.

Ted was a man of many talents. He was a teacher, novelist, scholar of English literature and higher education, and an avid tennis player. After a career as a professor and administrator at City College of New York, the State University of New York at Purchase, Penn State University and the University of Nancy in France, he was appointed Roosevelt’s fourth president in 1988.

When Ted arrived, Roosevelt University was only 43 years old and struggling. The endowment was just $3 million. The enrollment of 5,500 consisted primarily of older, part-time students, and an unfocused array of courses caught the unwelcome attention of accreditors.

But Ted embraced these challenges. When he retired in 2022, the endowment had grown more than 10 times to exceed $30 million, and he had led a highly successful $53 million capital campaign. Roosevelt’s 7,500 students included a healthier mix of part-time and full-time students of all ages. Academic programs and colleges were restructured to reflect changing student needs.

Ted believed that Roosevelt should be a metropolitan university — uniting city and suburb. In 1996, he acquired a site in Schaumburg to develop Roosevelt’s second permanent campus. This project marked the first new comprehensive college campus to be established in Illinois since the late 1960s. In addition, he partnered with DePaul University, Columbia College and the University of Illinois Chicago to open one of the nation’s first multi-institutional residence halls in Chicago’s South Loop.

He was especially proud of creating both the Chicago College of Performing Arts and the University’s undergraduate honors program. He also established several centers and institutes that offered new opportunities for faculty, students and community engagement.

Ted worked tirelessly with trustees, faculty, administrators and students to strengthen the University. Lynn remembers as a novice history professor being invited to a breakfast for new faculty. “I was terrified. What university president meets with his youngest professors? But I soon realized he really wanted to get to know the faculty. At that meeting, Ted discussed what a university should be. He wanted to hear our hopes for our careers at Roosevelt and our thoughts about the purpose of higher education. This meeting — like so many others we attended with him — reflected his enthusiasm for Roosevelt’s future, his wry sense of humor and his open mind.”

Similarly, Mary recalls how much she learned from Ted after he recruited her to join Roosevelt’s administrative team.

And we can promise you this: whenever we think of President Gross, we will smile.

Ted loved hosting holiday parties because they reflected the diversity and values of the University — welcoming employees from any rank, race, religion and sexual orientation. He described the parties in his memoirs by writing, “I smiled at the wonder of it all and hoped that this diverse community would be the future of all institutions everywhere.”

The legacy of Ted Gross lives on in Roosevelt’s commitment to social justice, student success and community engagement. Above all, his legacy was defined by hope. In 2002 he wrote: “The spirit of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt pervades this University. When Eleanor Roosevelt said that Roosevelt was dedicated to the enlightenment of the human spirit, she lit the torch of the University … and its future burns brighter than ever.”

Ted, thank you.