The month after Richard Nelson resigned the NIU presidency in January of 1978, the Board of Regents named William R. Monat acting president and launched a national search for a permanent chief executive.
Monat at the time was NIU’s provost. He was a native of Minnesota with a military background and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Minnesota. He taught for six years at Wayne State University, then did a three-year stint as executive assistant to Michigan Governor G. Mennen Williams. He returned to teaching for ten years at Pennsylvania State University, then served a year as director of the budget for the Pennsylvania State Legislature.
In 1969, Monat returned to university life by taking the position of chair of the Political Science Department at NIU. Political Science had just won approval for a doctoral program the previous year, and Monat was excited at the chance to help build that program. He wrote in his NIU memoir The Achieving Institution that he was also attracted by the opportunity to help launch a new public service initiative call the Center for Governmental Studies.
“In a way I arrived at NIU on the cusp of a dramatic redirection of university mission,” he wrote.
Nonetheless, Monat was lured away just three years later by the chance to become chief academic officer at Bernard M. Baruch College of the City University of New York. Five years later, when the provost’s position opened up at Northern in 1976, Monat returned to NIU.
As the chief academic officer and as president, Bill Monat was an enthusiastic leader in the ongoing process of broadening the university’s academic mission.
Under his leadership, doctoral programs in education, geology, biological sciences and mathematical sciences were added at NIU, and in 1979, the university opened the College of Law. Former colleagues say his time as president is best remembered for his commitment to cementing NIU’s reputation as a well-rounded university prepared to meet the needs of its region.
Monat surrounded himself with academic leaders who were themselves distinguished scholars, and NIU began to focus on the hallmark of a mature university – an agenda for research and scholarship. Considerable effort went in to attracting and retaining top faculty during the Monat years, including special awards for research accomplishments.
On his watch, partnerships were formed with national laboratories, and the tradition of honorary degrees was born. By 1983, NIU ranked 17th in the nation for the number of Fulbrights awarded, ahead of the University of Chicago, Northwestern and the University of Illinois. That same year, NIU was listed among 200 universities meeting the National Science Board’s criteria as a “research and development university.”
Monat also dispatched physicist Clyde Kimball to establish relationships with Argonne and Fermi national laboratories and created a position for Kimball as the president’s science and industrial advisor.
And in a move that set the stage for NIU’s current P-20 Network, Monat worked to establish the Corridor Partnership for Excellence in Education, uniting NIU, Waubonsee Community College, and an association of 150 businesses and industries in the Fox Valley region in an effort to improve math and science education. The Corridor partnership created the impetus for the Illinois Math and Science Academy near Aurora.
In September of 1984, Bill Monat left the NIU presidency to become chancellor of the Board of Regents system – a position he held for just two years. In 1986, he returned to NIU as Regency Professor of Political Science and taught courses in Public Administration until his retirement in 1992. Monat and his wife, Jo, continued to live in DeKalb until 2014, when they moved to Florida. Bill Monat died there in September of 2017 at the age of 92.
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