Article published in Crain’s Chicago Business and Crain’s Chicago Business Morning 10 e-newsletter.

IIT president to step down

John Anderson will resign as Illinois Institute of Technology’s president on Aug. 1.

By Lorene Yue
May 21, 2014

John Anderson, Illinois Institute of Technology’s eighth president, announced today that he plans to resign from the position on Aug. 1, 2015.
Mr. Anderson, 68, will remain at IIT as a professor of chemical engineering. He became president in 2007.
“It has been a privilege and an honor to be president of one of this country’s finest research universities,” Mr. Anderson said in a statement. “It has indeed been an exciting time to have served as president of this great institution.”

It has been a tough tenure for Mr. Anderson, who joined IIT in 2007 from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. When he came to IIT, the South Side school’s undergraduate enrollment was down 16.6 percent from its peak in 1983 and the endowment was shrinking as funds were used to pay for expenses.
He called his first year at IIT one of the most difficult times of his career.

In the course of seven years, the school known for its architecture and engineering programs, added 15 endowed professorships, launched a $250 million capital campaign and plans to build a five-story innovation center — the first new building at IIT’s main campus in a decade. The student body also grew. Full-time undergraduate enrollment reached 2,712, the highest since 1982. Mr. Anderson’s goal is to top 3,300 by 2018.
“Replacing John Anderson won’t be easy,” Bud Wendorf, chairman of IIT’s board of trustees, said in a statement. “He helped bring fiscal stability back to the university while simultaneously insisting upon an upward trajectory of academic excellence.”

Mr. Anderson was given a five-year contract when he came on board in 2007. The board then extended the contract for three years; it expires in August 2015. IIT’s board of trustees said today that it will launch a search process for a new president.