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Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

In 1944, a fresh-faced 18 year old named Robert A. Pritzker enrolled at IIT for what he thought would be a semester or two break from California Institute of Technology. He’s been here ever since. Pritzker has done just about every job possible at IIT during the past 62 years, earning a degree, returning to teach night classes to undergraduates, joining the Board of Trustees in 1962, and heading the board since 1990. That is to say nothing about the $60 million he and Robert Galvin each gave to the university in 1996—at the time, the largest charitable pledge ever made to a single institution in the Chicago metropolitan area.
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The Fall of a Technology Empire

The Fall of a Technology Empire

The tech bubble of the 1990s had not yet burst when Marie Hicks graduated from Harvard University and began working as a system administrator. There, she made an observation that would eventually become the impetus for her critically acclaimed book, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing, published by MIT Press earlier this year. Although most of Hicks’s co-workers were male, all the supervisors were female—and from a different generation.