Dr. Rossman Honored as Distinguished Alumnus

J. Robert Rossman grew up in Tell City, Indiana, a small town on the Ohio River that was a hub of furniture making for nearly 150 years. His small town didn’t have a year-round recreation program, but during the summer he worked as an arts and crafts instructor, camp counselor, lifeguard, and pool manager. It seems an unlikely start for someone who would become a leading scholar, educator, and author in the area of recreation programming, and whose outstanding career and contributions would lead to receiving the 2021 Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s College of Applied Health Sciences.

Upon the recommendation of his high school counselor, Dr. Rossman pursued a bachelor’s degree in public park and recreation administration at Indiana University. After graduation, he entered a two-year internship program sponsored by the National Recreation and Park Association, working as a recreation center director in Oak Park, Illinois, under the guidance of Robert Toalson, who would later become the director of the Champaign Park District. When the internship ended, he was hired as the assistant director of the Oak Park Recreation Department, a position he held for five years.

During that time, he pursued his master’s degree through an Extension program that brought faculty in what was then the Department of Leisure Studies at Illinois to the Chicago area one night a week. As part of the degree requirements, he and his fellow students had to take classes on campus during their final semester. “The program nudged me into envisioning a career as a scholar,” he said. Joe Bannon and Allen Sapora encouraged him to stay on for his PhD, and Dr. Bannon helped him secure an appointment as a lecturer so he could support his wife and two children.

Dr. Rossman describes the faculty during his doctoral studies as “an all-star lineup.” His major professor was John R. Kelly, author of Recreation Business, the first textbook in that field. He took classes from Carol Peterson and Scout Lee Gunn, two of the leading scholars in therapeutic recreation, and from Lynn Barnett-Morris, internationally renowned for her research on play and children’s development.

“The faculty when I was a student was just outstanding,” he said. “The mix of both practitioners and discipline-based scholars really fit my interests perfectly. There was high-quality research about both the social psychology of leisure and top administrative practice. We didn’t just take courses on park and recreation administration; we also took classes in the social sciences. We had an understanding of the leisure experience.”

His experiences at Illinois inspired him throughout his more than 20-year career as professor at the University of North Texas, where he also was chair of the Department of Kinesiology, Health Promotion, and Recreation; the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, where he served as chair of the Department of Leisure Studies and founding dean of the Greenspun College of Urban Affairs; and Illinois State University, where he was dean of the College of Applied Science and Technology. His own work focused on programming and designing and staging recreation experiences. He wrote one of the most important texts in the field, Recreation Programming: Designing, Staging, and Managing the Delivery of Leisure Experiences, now in its eighth edition. It has been a critical part of RST curriculums at more than 100 colleges and universities in the United States, Canada, Thailand, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand for more than 30 years.

Although Dr. Rossman officially retired in 2006, he didn’t stop contributing. He had a three-year visiting professorship at Texas A-and-M and taught classes in China and Thailand. Three of the eight editions of his textbook came out after he retired. He also co-authored Designing Experiences with Brigham Young University scholar Mathew Duerden. Published in 2019 by Columbia Business School Publishing, the book recently received a silver medal in the Business Intelligence/Innovation category of the 2021 Axiom Business Book Awards. In 2020, he helped to found the World Experience Organization.

His professional contributions have earned him a variety of accolades, including the Legend in the Field of Parks and Recreation award from the American Academy for Park and Recreation Administration, the Academy of Leisure Sciences’ Distinguished Colleague award for lifetime achievement, and induction as a Fellow in the Academy of Leisure Sciences.

In accepting his award, Dr. Rossman said that one of the most important and influential choices he made in his life was attending Illinois.

“While you’re here, you learn the latest information in your field, but you also learn how to learn, how to discover, how to effectively apply new knowledge to issues in your field, and the joy of the whole enterprise,” he said. “Illinois degrees run deep. They last a lifetime.”