The conference room in IIT’s Downtown Campus could swallow an elephant—or in this case a massive, 30-person table, meticulously polished, sparkling, and free of fingerprints. John L. Anderson walks directly to a seat at the head of the table, nearest to a window overlooking the city. It’s an appropriately big window—the kind that’s made for looking out, thinking, and collecting thoughts.

It is three weeks before Anderson officially takes office as the eighth president of IIT. Anyone would expect a new university president to be doing a lot of forecasting at this time—and he is—though the unusual early-morning quiet of a city on the verge of a downpour offers him a welcome silence for reflection.

“I did not think I would do this,” he says without hesitation. “It’s a good lesson in keeping your options open. You never know what’s going to happen.”

Rewind to 1969. The unforeseeable “this”—a career in higher education—arrived at a crossroads in Anderson’s life. Like many master’s degree candidates, he found himself choosing between entering the workforce and pursuing his doctorate. On top of this, he was about to spend six weeks at ROTC summer camp in Kansas, a necessity brought on by the Vietnam War. He had not anticipated a tough decision, because there had been only one option. “I never thought about an academic position. Almost all my relatives worked at DuPont, and I envisioned a career in industry,” he says.

His thesis advisor, the most influential figure in his life outside of his family, made the case for academe, citing Anderson’s potential as a researcher.
“He told me I could do it,” says Anderson, whose towering stature belies his soft-spoken demeanor. “I began to find success in higher education, and I really enjoyed working with students.

Anderson grew up in Wilmington, Del. His parents were the children of Swedish and German immigrants who first settled in Cleveland, Ohio, after moving to the United States.

“Neither of my parents went to school past the eighth grade, so they were very proud that my sister and I both went to college,” he says.

He received his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Delaware. It was there that he met his wife, Pat, a fellow student in math and physics classes. “In those days it was rare for a woman to be in those classes. She was smart—Phi Beta Kappa—and better at math than I was, and I thought I was pretty good,” he says, smiling proudly. “I really fell for her and worked hard to get that first date.” Pat worked in computing for DuPont and several universities in the days when knowledge of ‘assembler language’ was critical. They married in 1968, and have one son and one daughter, both in their 30s, and two grandchildren.

Anderson earned his master’s and Ph.D. degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he pioneered the development and use of micro-porous membranes to study biological transport phenomena. He began his academic career as an assistant professor of chemical engineering and of applied mathematics at Cornell University.

He has experienced higher education from nearly every vantage point—student, assistant professor, associate professor, professor, center director, department chair, dean (the latter four at Carnegie Mellon University), and provost (at Case Western Reserve). Anderson has held visiting professorships at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Melbourne (Australia), and the Landbouwuniversiteit Wageningen (The Netherlands), and guest lectureships throughout the country. He is the author of more than 100 journal articles and book chapters.

John Quinn, Anderson’s thesis advisor at the University of Illinois and now professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, praises Anderson for holding top administrative positions at Carnegie Mellon “while maintaining a prominent research program as well as building an outstanding faculty,” he says. “He is a natural leader, and he has always had the respect of his colleagues because of his impeccable academic credentials—a quality not always found in academic administrators. John is always up to the challenge, and he is ambitious in the best sense of the word.”

“At Case Western Reserve and Carnegie Mellon, John earned his reputation as a leader with sharp ideas and an unfailing commitment to education,” says IIT Board of Trustees Chair John Rowe, who headed the Presidential Search Committee. “His intelligence, academic credentials, and vision resonated with the search committee, and are the ideal qualities that IIT needs in a new president.”