Roger L. Taylor (L71)
President, Knox College

When he retired after 30 years as an attorney with Kirkland & Ellis in Chicago and returned to his family farm in Galesburg, Ill., Roger L. Taylor's life took an unexpected turn. As chair of the Knox College board of trustees, he agreed to serve as interim president when the school's president left suddenly.

And then, "One thing just sort of led to another," he says. "A few folks on the faculty encouraged me to apply. Some of the students got hold of a button machine and started printing these 'Hire Roger' buttons, which they started wearing — which, frankly, brought a tear to my eye. It was a wonderful inadvertence."

Taylor ingratiated himself with students partially by lunching in the cafeteria. "The first day we came by with our trays, you could see them looking down, saying, 'Please, God, don't sit with us,'" he says. "But I think they got a charge out of it."

Early in his tenure, Taylor undertook the symbolic gesture of fixing the bell in the nearly 150-year-old Old Main building at Knox. "How can you have a college if the doggone bell doesn't work?" he asks.

Taylor also has focused on academic excellence and what he terms "charting a course toward financial impregnability." Applications have increased to 2,500 this year for 340 slots, and the endowment has risen from $43 million to $72 million.

Taylor figures his law degree has helped with everything from giving speeches to reviving the study skills needed in "taking a crash course in higher education" when he arrived at Knox with no university experience.

"One of the things I still remember, the late law professor Robert Childress said, 'You should spend less time briefing cases ... and more time thinking about them,'" Taylor recalls. "That's stuck with me, the importance of thinking about what you're reading."