After 19 years at Northwestern, the most influential administrator behind university finances will retire at the end of this academic year.
Jim Elsass, associate vice president for budget planning, has been the brains behind NU’s annual operating budget since he arrived in 1986.
Elsass said he will leave NU with a heavy heart.
“This is a great institution,” he said. “I don’t know where the time went.”
Elsass’s job of advising senior administrators and the Board of Trustees — the body that votes on the university’s budget — on financial matters has made him a mostly invisible force to students. But his behind-the-scenes role of making sure NU stays in the black has been far from trivial, his colleagues said.
Senior Vice President for Business and Finance Eugene Sunshine wrote colleagues in an e-mail Wednesday that Elsass has helped produce a balanced budget for NU every year since he arrived. His no-nonsense style of ensuring NU’s spending stays on track has done nothing but good for the university, he wrote.
“Jim has successfully persevered mightily in managing the university’s financial resources and has been a faithful steward,” Sunshine wrote. “He has endured the monikers of budgetary ‘naysayer’ and ‘curmudgeon’ with aplomb — all said in a collegial manner, of course.”
Elsass laughed at the labels.
“You should always ask tough questions,” Elsass said. “I guess the ‘curmudgeon’ adjective was attached because people think I enjoy doing that. And I do, sort of.”
Elsass said one his biggest achievements was helping develop a budget-making process for linking NU’s larger plans to its budgets.
He also has worked with the Undergraduate Budget Priorities Committee — the student committee that submits annual spending requests to administrators — yearly since the group was created several years ago. Elsass also helped implement a budget-making structure for the Feinberg School of Medicine.
Before coming to NU, Elsass served as an associate vice chancellor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was a founding member of the Illinois’ Bureau of the Budget, a state government body, in Springfield, Ill., and also served on the Illinois Board of Higher Education.
The Evanston resident has also served as president of the Evanston Historical Society.
Elsass said he hopes to be more involved in the community after he retires. He would also like to run the Chicago Marathon again, he said — a feat he hasn’t achieved since 1984.
An avid football fan, he is waiting for the day that NU’s coaches accept his suggestions for player picks.
“I’ve been known to pass on recruiting tips to the basketball office,” he said. “It’s always interesting because I get responses back: ‘Yeah we know about them.’
“I’m going to continue to feed them information because at some point we’re going to click,” he added. “I’m going to find something they don’t know about.”
Reach Dan Strumpf at [email protected].
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Budget steward to retire after 18 years at NU
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Elsass known for asking ‘tough questions’, economizing abilities in balancing even the tightest of budgets
