A portrait of former Eastern President Carol Surles placed in Old Main was unveiled to a crowd of administrators, faculty and students Sunday.

Surles became Eastern’s eighth president on March 1, 1999, but had to resign in July 2001 because of illness. Interim President Lou Hencken, former vice president for student affairs, assumed presidential responsibilities on an interim basis Aug. 1, 2001.

Surles’ portrait showed her in a long, dark robe with a blue and gold sash draped over her shoulders. A yellow tassel lays across her lap, and a gold pin is attached above her bosom.

A serious, professional look protrudes in Surles’ nonchalant facial expressions.

“It didn’t just capture her image, but the essence of her personality,” said Jim Johnson, chair of the university Presidential Portrait Committee, of the president who University police officers would sometimes find still in her office during the midnight shift.

The 34 by 42 inch portrait will be placed in a glass and wooden case outside the president’s office in Old Main, the portrait’s illustrator William Chambers said. A smaller version, about 11 by 14 inches in dimension, hangs in the 1895 Room of the Martin Luther King Jr. University Union. A smaller, third portrait was given to Surles.

Chambers, a national award-winning illustrator based in Arlington Heights, painted the portrait for about $19,000, Jill Nilsen, vice president for external relations said. The money was funded by private donation.

“Mr. Chambers made me look the way I wanted him to make me look,” Surles said to laughter. “(He) made me look like a real university president.”

Surles told the audience of co-workers, friends and family she remembers her tenure at Eastern for increasing private and public funding, purchasing more university land from Charleston and addressing a “long list of deferred maintenance needs.”

“While I was president here,” Surles said, “I often said that I was not born in Illinois, but I got here as quickly as I could.”

At the end of her speech, Surles kissed her family members. Hencken and Johnson unveiled Surles’ portrait to applause.

“There are a lot of portraits on these walls,” Hencken said as he pointed toward the portraits of three former Eastern presidents in Old Main “And they all have one thing in common: they all wanted the best for Eastern and to make it the best place it could possibly be.”

“When you become president there is only one goal: to leave the institution in a better place than when you started, and Carol did that.”

Surles, who was the first woman to hold the presidential position full-time, left Eastern in the summer of 2001 because of a battle with breast cancer.

The work order for the portrait had been requested in early 2002, Nilsen says, but Surles’ cancer treatment prevented her from meeting face to face with Chambers until earlier this year. She now lives in Florida.

The portrait was the pinnacle of decades in higher education, Surles said, but her starting point began 27 years ago with a book and a mentor.

She said during her doctoral studies at the University of Michigan, the late Robert Blackburn told her to read Cardinal Newman’s book, “The Idea of a University” that was published in 1854.

Years later, Surles said she worked with and worked with several university presidents who understood Newman’s vision of the university “in its purest form of seeking knowledge and truth, giving it a new arrangement and preserving it for posterity.”

Surles reiterated those two lessons to faculty, to tell students to read the best books first, and find a student or colleague to mentor so faculty leaders will influence “the character of universities far into the future.”

“Thus, had I not read one of the best books first, and had I not been mentored, I would not have seen the light in the Old Main tower,” Surles said.

Administration editor Tim Martin can be reached at [email protected].