Lasting Legacies
A new academic field called Native American literary studies. High-definition television. A hot dog emoji. These are just a few of the legacies SESP alumni have created during our 100-year history.
Jean W. Campbell (MA/MS39)
A pioneer who fought for work-life balance
A lifelong advocate for women’s rights, Campbell was instrumental in creating the University of Michigan’s Center for the Education of Women in 1964, where she was director for more than 20 years. The first of its kind, the center helped women return to college after their education was interrupted by pregnancy, childcare responsibilities, or other reasons. She championed courses with flexible hours and support services and scholarships, playing a key role in developing research on women’s education. A resident of Ann Arbor, Michigan, Campbell also founded the National Center for Research on Women and the National Coalition for Research on Women’s Education and Development. She was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame in 1993. Campbell died in 2016 at age 98.
Lorraine Morton (MS42)
Mayor and public school educator who led a life of service
Evanston’s longest-serving mayor and the first Black person to hold the office, Morton was a steady voice for equality, education, and community. One of nine children born in segregated Winston-Salem, North Carolina, she earned her master’s in education in 1942, a time when Black students couldn’t live on campus. But she harbored no bitterness. “I never had a bad experience at the University,” she said in 2007. “I always remembered why I was here. A university is more than just courses—it widens your mind. Northwestern opened another horizon for me.” In 1953 Morton began teaching in Evanston, becoming the first Black teacher at Nichols Middle School in 1957. As Evanston’s schools became a national model for integration, she worked as a desegregation consultant to districts across the country. Morton served as alderman of the city’s Fifth Ward from 1982 to 1991, then was elected mayor in 1993. After serving four terms, she retired in 2009, and the city renamed its civic center in her honor. “I only did what my mother and father told me,” Morton said in a documentary on her life. “As he was dying, my father said, ‘Only a life of service is a life worthwhile.’” Morton died in 2018 at age 99.
Florence “Flaurie” Berman (BS47)
Cofounder of Chicago’s iconic Superdawg
In May 1948, with her high school sweetheart, Maurie, Berman opened a seasonal hot dog stand in Chicago’s Norwood Park neighborhood that became the beloved Superdawg Drive-In, one of the last original drive-in restaurants in the country. When Flaurie and Maurie were forced to buy their rented lot to keep the restaurant, Berman left her teaching career at Chicago Public Schools to run the carhop operation full-time, turning the side venture into a year-round institution. Seventy years later, Superdawg still serves its original all-beef recipe with carhop service, beneath lovingly refurbished 12-foot hot dog statues modeled after Flaurie and Maurie themselves. In 2014, when a general manager noticed that smartphones were missing a hot dog emoji, the family launched a social media campaign that resulted in Apple’s adding one. Since the couple’s deaths, their family now serves Superdawg’s fourth generation of customers.
A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff (BS53)
Founder of the American Indian literary studies academic field
Ruoff earned her bachelor’s degree in secondary English education in 1953 over the objections of friends—and even her doctor—who believed college would be “too much for a married woman.” She went on to earn a doctorate and started teaching Native American literature in the 1970s, when many people didn’t believe such literature existed. In 1990, as a professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago, she published American Indian Literatures, a landmark reference book that helped establish the study of Native American literature as a formal academic field. The Chicago Tribune praised her discoveries in archives and libraries around the country of long out-of-print works by Native Americans: “Ruoff has shepherded dozens of obscure works back into print, providing key historical and cultural context for a literary tradition as old as the country. Along the way, Ruoff has befriended and mentored a generation of writers and scholars who have transformed the study of Native American literature into a vital academic field.” Ruoff received the Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award of the Modern Language Association, the preeminent professional organization of scholars of literature.
Richard Wiley (BS55, Pritzker58)
The “father of high-definition television”
One of the most influential media and telecommunications lawyers in the US, Wiley spent seven years at the Federal Communications Commission, as general counsel, commissioner, and ultimately chairman from 1974 to 1977. He became a leading force behind the agency’s early push toward greater competition and lighter regulation in the media. From 1987 to 1995, he chaired the FCC’s Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service, playing a pivotal role in the development of high-definition TV. “High-definition TV was the holy grail for me,” he told Arlington Magazine in 2014. “A lot of people said, ‘Who cares about pretty pictures?’ It was the most interesting and rewarding thing I was ever involved with.” He’s now chairman emeritus of Wiley Rein, the Washington, D.C., firm he cofounded in 1983 and built into one of the nation’s largest communications-law practices. The Media Institute honored him with the 1992 Freedom of Speech Award and 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award. His own 65-inch television hangs above his fireplace.
Barbara Smith Wynne (BS55)
Giving children a chance to play
A legend in the Indianapolis tennis community, Wynne began teaching the sport to neighborhood kids in 1955. Within a few years she established the Washington Township Schools Community Tennis Program, growing its capacity from 6 to 44 courts; it has served more than 24,000 people. With her friend, tennis champ Arthur Ashe, she founded the city’s chapter of the National Junior Tennis League, introducing more than 34,000 children to the sport. In 2004 the tennis facility she helped build was renamed in her honor, and she has received the International Tennis Hall of Fame’s Educational Merit and International Tennis Federation’s Service to Tennis Awards. In 2018 she was named a tennis legend at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, where visitors can pose beside her bronze statue. Wynne died in July at age 93. “She lived with energy, determination, and a belief that people were capable of more when someone gave them an opportunity,” her family said.
Ray Loeschner (MA/MS62, PhD62)
A legacy of leadership
In 1955 Loeschner built a public miniature golf course in his family’s backyard in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to help pay for graduate school. Now called Loeschner’s Village Green, the course is still family owned and one of many legacies he’s left during his career in higher education. A community college graduate and then football and track star at Albion College, Loeschner spent two years in the US Navy before pursuing graduate education while working as an assistant football and track coach. He then began his career in higher education, which included coaching football and track and serving as president of Olivet College and Ohio Northern University in the 1970s. Now retired, Loeschner, former president of the private company Loeschner Enterprises, is known for giving back. He founded and was longtime president of the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park Foundation in Grand Rapids, and in 2013 he helped establish the Ray and Nancy Loeschner Lecture Series on Leadership at SESP to bring visionary speakers to campus—an annual event that is still going strong. Another legacy: Loeschner’s grandson, James Keane (BS16, Kellogg MBA17).
Jane Waller (MA69)
First female judge in Lake County, Illinois
When Waller was appointed an associate judge in Lake County, Illinois, in 1981, she became the first woman in the county to hold that position. She was later elected a full circuit judge and in 2000 was chief judge of the 19th Judicial Circuit. Waller presided over family law cases for 19 of her almost 28 years on the bench; for a decade, she was chief presiding judge of the county’s family court, where she introduced psychological evaluations for parents in custody disputes and mandatory parenting classes for divorcing couples with children. She also helped establish Kids Korner, the first courthouse waiting room in the state for children brought to the courthouse by parents or guardians on court business, “to spare them the pain and hostility of attending court proceedings affecting their families,” she said. Waller retired from the bench in 2008, then practiced family law for another decade. These days she’s taking piano lessons, painting, knitting, and hoping to learn Spanish. “I credit my year at Northwestern with building my courage and confidence to take on big challenges,” she said.
Aleta Margolis (MS91)
Founder of the Center for Inspired Teaching
When Margolis began her career, teaching high school students in the juvenile justice system, she thought about how school can both fuel and suppress a student’s potential. She went on to teach third and sixth grades and later trained future teachers as a professor at American University. In 1995 she founded the Center for Inspired Teaching, a nonprofit that trains teachers to help students investigate ideas rather than simply absorb information. “Teachers are the most creative problem solvers on the planet,” she says. She became the center’s president in 2016, focused on building public support for schools that emphasize student participation over compliance. Under her leadership, the center has earned recognition from the LEGO Foundation, the LRNG Innovation Challenge, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She was selected as an Ashoka Fellow in 2001 for “revitalizing public education by unlocking the personal creativity of teachers and thereby dramatically improving student learning.”
Michael Alperin (BS11)
Working to solve the housing crisis
SESP’s class of 2011 valedictorian, Alperin joined Teach For America and taught in Brooklyn, where most of his students lived in public housing. Tutoring them after school, he saw that while they may have had a good classroom environment, many children would go home to mold, broken plumbing, noisy neighbors, and families cycling between apartments. Some families periodically slept on the subway. For those who missed breakfast, he kept a stash of cereal at his desk. “It wasn’t a direct thought,” he says, “but implicitly I probably saw that housing is critical to helping kids thrive.” In 2023 he founded Terra Living Partners, which has raised $450 million to convert market-rate housing into residences designated for those who earn too much to qualify for traditional subsidized housing but are priced out of market-rate rents. Housing policy is one leg of a triad, alongside health and education policy, that determines whether families can find stability, he says. What he loves most is seeing the smile on residents’ faces when they walk into a unit—floors and appliances they’re proud of, in communities they couldn’t otherwise afford. “It’s invigorating to provide people a home.”
More notable graduates:
Otherie Love (BS41)
Evanston’s first Black student teacher and later a tax preparer and, at age 101, her senior community’s poet laureate
J. Warren Perry (MA52/MS52, PhD55)
A scholar, administrator, author, lecturer, and founding dean of the University at Buffalo School of Public Health and Health Professions
Gwen Rosset Knapp (BS56)
Cofounder of the Gwen Knapp Center for Lupus and Immunology Research at the University of Chicago
Betsy Holden (MA/MS57, PhD62)
Board director, consultant, and retired senior adviser at McKinsey & Company and former CEO of Kraft Foods
Michael Bakalis (BS59)
President and CEO of American Quality Schools Corporation and previously deputy US secretary of education, Illinois state superintendent of education, and president of Triton College
Irv Cross (BS61)
Former professional football player and sportscaster and the first Black full-time sports analyst on national television
Elaine Schuster (MA/MS71)
First layperson named superintendent of Catholic schools for the Archdiocese of Chicago and later CEO of the Golden Apple Foundation
Susan Popkin (BS82, MS86, PhD88)
A leading national expert on public housing policy at the Urban Institute
Deborah Gold (PhD86)
First student ever to receive a doctorate in human development and social policy; her dissertation won an award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Aging. She is now professor emerita at Duke University Medical Center
Sallie Tucker-Allen (PhD86)
Wrote a SESP dissertation that led to the founding of what is now known as the Association of Black Nursing Faculty, the first organization of its kind
Kelly O’Donnell (BS87)
Emmy-winning NBC News correspondent covering the White House and Capitol Hill
David Harris (BS91)
President emeritus of Union College and former provost of Tufts University
Sam Schiller (BS09)
Founder and CEO of Carbon Yield, through which farmers earn compensation for regenerative agriculture
Renetta McCann (MS12)
Marketing and advertising executive at Publicis Groupe and Advertising Hall of Fame inductee
John Lee (BS20)
A teacher at Evanston Township High School who helped pass the Illinois Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History Act
By Julie Deardorff