Purdue President Emeritus Steven Beering Dies at 87
(photo courtesy of Purdue University)
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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowPurdue University President Emeritus Steven Beering, who led the school for 18 years, died Monday at the age of 87. During his tenure from 1983 to 2000, Beering is credited with expanding Purdue’s international reach, setting new marks for fundraising and adding to the campus, with 20 new buildings. A physician, Beering came to Purdue after serving as dean of the Indiana University School of Medicine and director of the Indiana University Medical Center.
“His 18-year leadership of our institution was but one chapter in an epic life of serial achievement,” said Purdue President Mitch Daniels in a university news release.
Beering will be buried at the top of the university’s Slayter Hill, alongside his wife Jane, who passed away in 2015.
According to the university, one of Beering’s most significant accomplishments was overcoming war and Nazi oppression to become a physician and president of a global university.
The following is an excerpt from a Purdue news release detailing Beering’s early years in Germany:
Beering was born Aug. 20, 1932, in Berlin and spent most of his early years in Hamburg, where his father, Stephen, managed two retail furniture stores before World War II. As the Allies rained bombs on Hamburg, he and his mother, Alice, and younger brother, John, sheltered with neighbors in their basement. A four-day raid in July 1943 set off firestorms and claimed 77,000 civilian casualties. It also destroyed their home, and left a million residents homeless.
The boys and their mother were sent to work on a farm labor camp south of Nuremburg while their father in Berlin feared them dead. It would be years before their father tracked them down with the aid of the American Red Cross.
The future Purdue president was just 11 years old when he was taken to the camp. The war and its aftermath interrupted several years of his public schooling, but his mother, a French nurse, home-schooled her sons as much as circumstances allowed. After the war, the family returned to Hamburg, then moved to London with the assistance of cousins there, and finally arrived in New York Harbor on the MV Britannic on July 24, 1948.
“My father, my brother, and I were standing at the railing of the ship as it came into the harbor,” Beering said. “It was early in the morning and there was this fog. The mist parted, and there was a shaft of sunlight that hit the statue just as we were coming up to the Ellis Island area. It was magic, absolutely magic, just like in a movie. And my father said, ‘There she is, the Statue of Liberty. Never forget this moment. This is the signal to you to make something out of yourself.'”
You can read the full Purdue news release by clicking here.