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.
Trained as a mathematician, Zimmer also managed that most important role for university presidents — courting well-heeled donors. Under his watch, the U. of C. collected major donations including a $300 million gift to the university’s business school and a total of $155 million from Citadel founder Ken Griffin.
Zimmer’s embrace of free expression was a constant theme of his tenure, and he didn’t shy away from responding to then-President Donald Trump’s statements in 2019 about the possibility of the White House imposing federal oversight on campus speech. In a 2020 statement on faculty, free expression and diversity, he wrote that the U. of C. “does not limit the comments of faculty members, mandate apologies or impose other disciplinary consequences for such comments, unless there has been a violation of university policy or the law.”
“Bob Zimmer’s legacy is that of a strong institution strengthened by his steadfast insistence on the most rigorous standards of education and scholarship for faculty and students alike, combined with his uncompromising dedication to the principles of academic freedom and freedom of expression,” said retired U. of C. President Hanna Holborn Gray, who led the university from 1978 until 1993.
Zimmer, 75, died on May 23, according to a university statement. A North Side resident, he had been diagnosed with brain cancer, and had stepped down as president in September 2021 after undergoing surgery to remove a malignant brain tumor. He relinquished the role of chancellor in July 2022.
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.
Zimmer’s specialty within mathematics was an obscure area known as ergodic theory, which is a mathematical way of describing systems — found mostly in geometry and in physics — in which there is constant movement from all objects in a system or process. A statement he developed, known as Zimmer’s conjecture, became a challenge for other scholars in the field. Two U. of C. scholars were part of the group that finally proved the conjecture in 2017.
“Robert Zimmer’s mathematical work illustrated deep connections between algebra, geometry and dynamics,” said Northwestern University math professor Aaron Brown, who was one of the U. of C. scholars who proved the conjecture. “He outlined an ambitious program of mathematical research which has seen a number of fundamental breakthroughs in the last few years. Our work on Zimmer’s conjecture is only one of many recent results following the program Zimmer outlined. His mathematical work continues to guide future research and influence the next generation of mathematicians.”
Zimmer joined the faculty of the U. of C. in 1977, and he served as chair of the mathematics department and also was deputy provost and vice president for research and for Argonne National Laboratory, a federally funded research and development center near Lemont that the university administers for the U.S. Department of Energy.
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.
Zimmer returned to Hyde Park in 2006 when he was named the U. of C.’s 13th president, succeeding Don Michael Randel.
“We have a college that is becoming stronger and more prominent every year, and we need a good representative on campus and around the world,” then-U. of C. board Chairman James Crown told the Tribune upon Zimmer’s hiring. “In Bob Zimmer, we feel we have that person.”
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 did not take long to implement those ideas. In early 2007, the university announced it would invest an additional $50 million over the next six years to boost financial aid to doctoral students in the social sciences and humanities. Zimmer also established new centers in Beijing, Delhi and Hong Kong.
Zimmer oversaw the establishment of a variety of faculty-led institutes and centers on campus, including the Chicago Quantum Exchange, the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics, the Institute of Politics, the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation and the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society.
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. Griffin gave the university $155 million in two different gifts, the Duchossois family donated $100 million in 2017 for research to University of Chicago Medicine, a couple gave the business school $75 million in 2017, the Pritzker family gave $75 million to launch the university’s first-ever engineering school, and James Crown and his wife, Paula, donated $75 million to the U. of C.’s social work school.
In 2012, Zimmer launched a plan to eliminate loans from the financial aid package that the university offers incoming students from Chicago as part of its UChicago Promise initiative, which was aimed at helping high school students across the city succeed in college. The university also waived its $75 application fee to such students.
“Students from the city of Chicago should be aiming very high to fulfill their potential,” Zimmer said at a 2012 news conference at Kenwood Academy. “We want them to attend the best school — the best college possible — that suits their needs, interests and abilities.”
Toward the end of his tenure, free speech issues loomed large, particularly after former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon received an invitation by a business professor to speak on campus. The invite sparked protests from students and alumni. The following year, when Bannon’s former boss, Trump, floated requiring universities to promote free speech — particularly conservative speech — or face losing federal money, Zimmer spoke out in opposition.
“A committee in Washington passing judgment on the speech policies and activities of educational institutions, judgments that may change according to who is in power and what policies they wish to promulgate, would be a profound threat to open discourse on campus,” Zimmer wrote in a letter to campus.
“Bob Zimmer was the most important and influential academic advocate for free speech on campus at a time when many other university presidents failed to defend those core academic values,” said U. of C. law professor Geoffrey R. Stone, who was the university’s provost from 1994 until 2002.
Zimmer also led the university’s bid for establishing the Obama Presidential Center in nearby Jackson Park, and after the site was chosen in 2015, he called the project a “watershed moment” for the South Side and Chicago as a whole.
“This will be unlike any that has come forth,” Zimmer said. “It’s the first truly urban presidential library located in the heart of the city.”
Zimmer wrote four mathematics books between 1984 and 2019, three of which were focused on ergodic theory.
A first marriage to Terese Schwartzman ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife, U. of C. classics professor Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer; and three sons, Alex, Benjamin and David.
Plans for a memorial service are pending.
Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
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