Stanley O. Ikenberry was a powerful force in modernizing the role of the University of Illinois System during his 16 years as president, creating the current University of Illinois Chicago campus by combining two existing campuses as well as making significant changes to the university’s flagship Urbana-Champaign campus, including leading one of the largest building booms in its history.

“Stan was an excellent president of the University of Illinois,” said former Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar, who also is a longtime distinguished fellow at the U. of I.’s Institute of Government and Public Affairs. “He could do the academic thing, but he also was a very good people person. He could relate to all different types.”

“President Ikenberry was a trailblazer as a University of Illinois president and led through a period of robust growth and the development of so much of what we know now as modern U. of I. System,” current U. of I. System President Tim Killeen said in a statement. “He was also a man of unquestioned character and deep loyalty, both of which he demonstrated when he returned as interim president, and as a patient and wise mentor to me.”

Ikenberry, 90, died of heart failure April 1 at his home in Boca Grande, Florida, said his wife of 66 years, Judy.

Born in Lamar, Colorado, Ikenberry literally grew up in higher education. His father, Oliver Ikenberry, had been a school superintendent in Lamar, and he later became president of Shepherd College in West Virginia.

After graduating from high school in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, Ikenberry received a bachelor’s degree from Shepherd in 1956. He picked up master’s and doctoral degrees in education from Michigan State University in 1957 and 1960, respectively.

Ikenberry’s first job was teaching on the faculty of Michigan State from 1960 until 1962, and he then served as an institutional researcher at West Virginia University for three years. In 1965, he was promoted to dean of West Virginia University’s newly formed college of human resources and education.

In 1969, Ikenberry was hired by Penn State University as a visiting professor and associate director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education, and he was named senior vice president for university development and relations in 1971.

From a field of 300 candidates winnowed down to seven finalists, the U. of I. hired Ikenberry as its 14th president in 1979, making him, at age 44, the youngest president in the university’s history. Right at the outset, trustees gave Ikenberry two broad directives, to maintain the quality of the Urbana-Champaign campus while working for a “stronger presence” in Chicago, where at the time the university had two campuses, Chicago Circle and the Medical Center.

Early on, Ikenberry set to work on both directives, establishing a 16-member committee of administrators, faculty members, students and other university employees to study the merger between the two campuses, which were a mile apart. The committee wound up recommending a merger, and in 1982, Ikenberry presided over the formal joining of the Medical Center campus and the Chicago Circle campus and the creation of the University of Illinois Chicago.

Ikenberry told the Tribune in 1982 that the merger “will enhance the potential for greatness of the university in its tripartite mission of teaching, research and public service” and that it would “open up new academic options and opportunities and improve the ability of the university to serve Chicago and the people of Illinois.”

Ikenberry and other university officials also believed the merged entity would have more clout with the state General Assembly and more lobbying power, and that it would be a plus for recruiting faculty and students.

As president, Ikenberry forcefully and consistently reached out to private benefactors and the business community to develop stronger ties and partnerships. In the mid-1980s, he was part of a group of leaders who approached chemist and philanthropist Arnold Beckman with the idea of creating large-scale science projects and centers on the campus. The result, funded with Beckman’s $40 million donation — the largest amount ever donated to a public university at that time — was the interdisciplinary research-focused Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

Around that same time, Ikenberry matched federal funding, including $75 million from the National Science Foundation with corporate grants, a $1 million state grant and some university funding, to form the U. of I.’s Center for Supercomputing Research and Development, a research center.

Ikenberry also pushed to develop the U. of I.’s Urbana-based National Center for Supercomputing Applications — a state-federal partnership that provides leading-edge, high-performance computing resources — in 1986.

“We would not have been able to compete nationally and win the National Center for Supercomputing Applications or to create the Center for Supercomputing Research and Development if we didn’t have the very best talent that was available nationally,” Ikenberry told the Tribune in 1989. “The same is true … of the Beckman Institute. Every major university in the country, from Johns Hopkins to Stanford to MIT to Caltech had a proposal in to Beckman.”

“That was probably the golden age of building at the university, but a lot of that had to do with his personality and his ability,” Edgar said. “He spent a lot of time with some of those people who gave a lot of money. He was very good at it and very sincere.”

Ikenberry was unapologetic about the U. of I.’s emphasis on a tilt toward science and technology.

“We are and have been for over 100 years basically a very heavily science-and-technology-oriented university,” he told the Tribune in 1989. “We don’t want to walk away from that heritage. It makes us, in a way, constructively different from a lot of universities around the country.”

Ikenberry also oversaw the first expansion of the Big Ten conference, when he announced in December 1989 that the conference would invite Penn State to join the Big Ten, and the Tribune reported the following year that he had been the prime mover behind that effort. Today, the conference has 18 schools.

Citing a brighter financial future for the university, increased academic quality and a more diverse campus population, Ikenberry announced in 1994 that he would retire as U. of I.’s president in 1995, although he continued to maintain an office on campus as a regent professor. From 1996 until 2001, he was president of the Washington, D.C.-based American Council on Education, an umbrella group for 1,600 colleges and universities.

In May 1995, Edgar tapped Ikenberry to lead a state commission investigating how the state pays for elementary and high school education to find more equitable ways to pay for Illinois schools. Ikenberry’s report, released in 1996, proposed a constitutional amendment to swap a $1.9 billion increase in income taxes with a $1.5 billion cut in local property taxes. The proposal never went before voters with Republicans, then in control of the General Assembly, politically spooked at the prospect of losing power by backing a tax-hike initiative after the Edgar administration had denied such plans were afoot.

Though that recommendation did not become law, another proposal, to set a foundation level for per-pupil education, won approval from legislators in 1997.

“He brought a lot of prestige to that effort, and he was one of the reasons we were two-thirds successful,” Edgar recalled. “We got (a tax increase), we got the minimum foundation level, we just didn’t get the shift from reliance on property taxes to more reliance on the income tax.”

In 2009, Ikenberry was tapped to return to U. of I. as interim president during a time of turmoil, when President Joseph B. White resigned amid a scandal over the university’s shadow admissions track for politically connected applicants. In the wake of the scandal, Ikenberry called for the resignations of all university trustees, stating that the revelation that powerful people had held sway over admissions decisions jeopardized the integrity of the institution.

“U. of I. was very fortunate that he was (already) on campus when they had to change presidents rather quickly and they needed somebody to step in and get the ship back on level, and he was there,” Edgar said. “And he did a superb job. You never saw a search committee move so fast. He did not want to be president again for any length of time. He wanted to get back to being retired and enjoying life.”

At the U. of I., the new $75.7 million Ikenberry Commons residential complex, which opened in 2010 and replaced the group of dorms known as the Six Pack, is named for Ikenberry.

“That was a big deal to him,” Edgar said.

“It’s a wonderful honor,” Judy Ikenberry said. “He was very touched. And I was, too, that he was.”

Ikenberry also served on several corporate boards, including Pfizer Inc. and UtiliCorp United. Outside of work, he enjoyed traveling and spending time with family, and he also had a particular affinity for sailing, taking the helm of a 33-foot sloop named The First Lady while on Lake Michigan.

“We enjoyed sailing very much and did a lot of it — in good weather, and bad weather,” Judy Ikenberry said.

In addition to his wife, Ikenberry is survived by three sons, David, Steven and John; a sister, Jane Ikenberry Dorrier; eight grandchildren; and one great-grandson.

A service will be held April 26, in Boca Grande.