During his 15 years as president of the University of Chicago, Robert J. Zimmer was a forceful advocate for free expression on university campuses and helped to broaden the U. of C.’s offerings globally and locally.
Thank you for supporting our journalism. This article is available exclusively for our subscribers, who help fund our work at the Chicago Tribune.University of Chicago President Robert Zimmer speaks at a City Club of Chicago luncheon in 2014. Zimmer oversaw the establishment of a variety of faculty-led institutes and centers on campus.
Born in New York City’s Greenwich Village neighborhood, Zimmer received a bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University in 1968 and a master’s degree in mathematics from Harvard University in 1971. He followed that up by earning a doctoral degree in math from Harvard in 1975, and then taught at the U.S. Naval Academy for two years.
In 2002, Zimmer left the U. of C. to become Brown University’s provost. While at Brown, Zimmer won raves for working with the university’s president to bring more of a research orientation to an Ivy League school that had been known more for its undergraduate education. Shortly after taking office, Zimmer sent a five-page letter to faculty stating that the university should boost financial packages to draw the best graduate students and should investigate creating new international programs in India and China.“There is a clear sense that the university needed to think through where it was going to go in the next decade or so,” Zimmer told the Tribune in 2006. “We needed to get a sharp, strategic focus.
Zimmer also successfully courted donors. In 2008, the university’s business school collected $300 million from investment manager David Booth — the largest gift ever made to any business school up to that point.
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