At the same Board of Regents meeting where Clyde Wingfield’s resignation was accepted, John La Tourette was named NIU’s tenth president.
He had been the runner-up in the last search, the board reasoned, and had performed admirably both in five years as provost and in seven months as acting president. After the turmoil surrounding Wingfield, the campus needed stability and not more time lost and money spent on a lengthy search.
When he arrived at Lowden Hall on his first day as president, La Tourette was touched to find the front stairs lined with applauding faculty and staff. He acknowledged his gratitude – and then got down to work.
John La Tourette was a New Jersey native with bachelor’s master’s and doctoral degrees from Rutgers, all in economics. A specialist in macroeconomic theory, he studied and published widely on economic growth, monetary theory, inflation and unemployment.
He came to NIU in 1979 as provost and vice president for academic affairs, and quickly became known as an extremely hard-working administrator with an impressive command of details.
“My major responsibility as president must be to get NIU on track in its move toward quality and national status,” La Tourette said at a campus press conference. “Northern is an outstanding university which has made more progress in the past 10 years than any other institution I know of in the country.”
And move the university forward he did.
Under La Tourette’s leadership, the university doubled its landholdings and embarked on more than $200 million in capital improvements. NIU established three major off-campus education centers and secured funding for renovation of historic Altgeld Hall and the construction of the Convocation Center. New buildings erected during his tenure included the Campus Life Building, the Engineering building, the Campus Child Care Center, and Faraday West, which now bears his name.
He also established the College of Engineering and Engineering Technology and nurtured the growth of the College of Law. He added more than a dozen major academic offerings, including Ph.D. programs in physics, mathematical sciences, biological sciences and geology and environmental geosciences.
La Tourette was a champion of research and graduate studies. He saw opportunities for expanded collaboration with Fermilab and Argonne, and lobbied exhaustively over two decades for the physics Ph.D. Ultimately, it was the addition of Faraday West that provided state-of-the-art research facilities that finally helped spur state approval of the physics Ph.D. Appropriately, in 2010 Faraday West became John E. La Tourette Hall.
But of all the accomplishments of his 14-year presidency, surely none were as impactful as La Tourette’s efforts to win for NIU its own, independent governing board.
All three member institutions of the Board of Regents (NIU, ISU and Sangamon State) chafed at the limitations of multi-university governance. La Tourette was particularly distressed by what he perceived to be BOR efforts to keep NIU and ISU as alike as possible.
In 1996, the efforts of La Tourette, other university presidents and a number of elected officials succeeded in disbanding the Board of Regents (and the entire “system of systems”) and installing independent governing boards for state universities.
As an economist, John La Tourette studied regions and the interconnectedness of functions that create prosperity. He was convinced that NIU’s service area – from Chicago to the Mississippi – could be better served. His concern for those in the suburbs and small towns of northern Illinois who could not travel to DeKalb resulted in regional education centers in Hoffman Estates, Rockford and Naperville. Beyond that, La Tourette created the foundations for what became NIU’s outreach function, and facilitated partnerships with business and industry throughout the region.
In late summer of 1999, John La Tourette announced his intention to retire in early 2000. He did so, and he and his wife Lili realized a long-held dream by relocating to Prescott, Arizona, where they still live.
Not content to merely rest after a long and active career, La Tourette has spent the last two decades hiking in the desert, tracing ancestors in France, and serving on the Arizona governing boards of Northcentral University and the Yavapai College Foundation.
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