Dr. Jerry Kruse, dean and provost of Springfield-based Southern Illinois University School of Medicine for the past nine years, plans to retire in summer 2026.
Kruse, 72, a family physician and member of the medical school’s faculty for more than 40 years, announced his retirement to the SIU Board of Trustees at its meeting Sept. 18 in East St. Louis. He was first chosen in 2015 to succeed Dr. J. Kevin Dorsey in the medical school’s top job and began on Jan. 1, 2016.
Kruse also expects to retire from his post as president and CEO of SIU Medicine, the medical school’s multispecialty group practice doctors.
“There just comes a time when it’s time to move on to other things,” Kruse told Illinois Times. «This is a very big job, and it consumes a lot of time and energy.»
The medical school receives about $41.1 million in state general revenue funds each year and generated almost $36 million in tax revenues during the most recent fiscal year, according to a recent report by two SIU economists. With campuses in Springfield and Carbondale, the medical school’s estimated $1 billion-plus annual overall economic impact includes spending on university operations ($901.2 million), student off-campus spending ($17.3 million) and spending related to the income of its alumni ($104.8 million), according to the report.
The school, with campuses in Springfield and Carbondale, has almost 2,600 full- and part-time employees. About 1,400 other jobs are created by the economic demand and spending created by the school and its students and employees, according to the SIU report.
Kruse, who is paid about $600,000 per year, presided during the COVID-19 pandemic and a more than two-year state budget impasse that began in 2015 and ended in 2017 during the administration of former Gov. Bruce Rauner.
Kruse said highlights of his career at SIU included working at an institution “with a really good mission and with just an amazing amount of creative and innovative people.”
Kruse said he has treasured “working with all of our partner hospitals and our community partners. And the students are an incredible highlight.
“I am most proud that we are a full-service, comprehensive institution, that we have people on the ground in the communities who understand mistrust in the medical community and who build trust, who work with community leaders to build plans for better health that translate into more people getting insurance and more people getting the primary care that they need,” Kruse said.
“We have emergency services, urgent care, chronic care, health maintenance, acute-care management, chronic disease management, population health, and we have specialties of all sorts,” he said. “We have some of the highest levels of tertiary care and ordinary care that you could imagine.”
Kruse and his wife, Lois, live in Springfield and Quincy. They have three daughters and three grandchildren. Jerry Kruse said the couple don’t plan to leave Illinois.
This article appears in October SBJ 2025.