If you’ve looked toward the South Loop recently, you’ve seen the future of Roosevelt University on the skyline, a majestic blue glass slab that rose over the last two years on Wabash near Congress and now looms behind Roosevelt’s longtime home in the landmark Auditorium Building.
It’s probably impossible to overstate the actual and symbolic importance of this structure to the university, which, like many other private colleges, has been hit by both the bad economy and a slew of new, for-profit rivals. In a fiercely competitive higher-ed environment and an “if you build it they will come” frame of mind, Roosevelt’s banking on the new building to boost its image and bring in more students. “There is nothing which signifies the University’s potential more than construction of our new building on Wabash,” is how President Charles Middleton put it in a letter to the RU community a year ago.
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Middleton says he and other Roosevelt officials quickly ascertained that the Crown building “wasn’t worth spending that kind of money on” and began to consider how they’d replace the 300 beds they were going to lose.
In a phone interview last month from Beijing, Groesbeck ticked off the challenges of putting a 420,000-square-foot building on a 17,000-square-foot site, right next to a 120-year-old landmark that can’t be destabilized, and trying to create distinct spatial identities for functions that typically would have their own buildings. But the overriding concern, he said, was what you could put next to “one of the most iconic buildings not only in Chicago but in the world,” without looking stupid. “We didn’t want to put up a building that in any way tried to mimic its form or color,” Groesbeck said, “because you would dilute the strength of that original masterpiece.”
Projections of continued enrollment growth were used to justify the debt load and escalating multimillion dollar annual payments. According to one of its own brochures, the university was projecting “a 50 percent increase in the number of full-time equivalent students at the Chicago campus between 2007 and 2017.”
That rate of increase is almost matched by recent hikes in Middleton’s pay. Between 2008 and 2010 the president’s total compensation went from $434,811 to $636,445. Since he was hired a decade ago, his compensation is up about 200 percent.
