11th president (September 1, 1990 – January 2, 1998)
Born: February 2, 1944
Born in Vernal, Utah, E. Gordon Gee graduated from the University of Utah, with honors, in 1968 as a history major, and Columbia University with his law and doctoral degrees. He spent a year clerking under Chief Judge David T. Lewis of the United States 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. He was named a judicial fellow and staff assistant to the United States Supreme Court. He worked directly for and with Chief Justice Warren Burger on administrative and legal problems confronting the Court and the federal judiciary. He returned to Utah again after a year in Washington, then to the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University in Provo. He became both a tenured associate professor and assistant dean. He later became full professor and in 1979, the West Virginia University law school in Morgantown hired him as dean. In November 1981, he became president of the West Virginia University, where he stayed four and a half years before becoming president of the University of Colorado on July 1, 1985. He became president of Ohio State in 1990 and went on to become president of Brown University in 1997 and chancellor of Vanderbilt University in 2000.
For more information on his second term as Ohio State President, see E. Gordon Gee (Second Term).