Robert Ross, who died on March 19 aged 92, was an adventurer and entrepreneur who spent more than 70 years chasing “the American Dream”; he succeeded in his 70s after founding Ross University, an institution offering degrees in Medicine and Veterinary Medicine located on the Caribbean islands of Dominica, the Bahamas and St Kitts.
Robert Ross
Ross, who boasted of having “almost as much ego as Donald Trump”, claimed to have begun hustling at the age of 13 when he had made “$100 a week” ($1,400 in today’s money) as a paper boy in Detroit. During the Second World War he sold $5 Mickey Mouse watches to Russian soldiers for $100 each. Later he claimed to have been the first to sell television sets in the Midwest and to have established a $100 million-a-year commodities trading business with Comecon countries, selling fertiliser to China, grain to Moscow and $29.95 Romanian suits to New Yorkers. In 1972 Time magazine described him as a new Marco Polo. Ross’s business card read “Dr Robert Ross, Lord of the Manor of Halton Lea, Northumberland”. The “Dr” derived from an honorary degree from a school of optometry and the British title from an auction in London.
While the scale of some of his entrepreneurial feats were no doubt exaggerated, there was one success Ross could prove. In 1978, despite having no qualifications in either medicine or education, he founded a medical school for would-be doctors who could not get into similar American establishments. When it opened in a motel in Dominica it had 11 students. By the turn of the century it had grown into Ross University, a profitable institution with more than 1,700 medical and 1,000 veterinary students.
Far from being a mere diploma factory, its students had to pass the same exams as those in other American schools; many of its staff were retired faculty members from mainstream medical schools attracted by the prospect of earning a post-retirement income in the Caribbean. Many Ross University graduates have gone on to take hard-to-fill positions in run-down urban neighbourhoods. In 1983 a Brooklyn hospital administrator told Forbes magazine that its graduates were a “godsend”.
Robert Ross was born Robert Rosen in Detroit on Boxing Day 1918 and served during the Second World War with the 69th Infantry Division in Europe.
Ross’s entrepreneurial exploits sometimes earned him the unwelcome attentions of the Mob. As the sole distributor of television sets in Detroit after the war, he did a brisk business with the city’s bar owners. When Al Capone’s nephew told him to stop, fearing competition with his own jukebox business, Ross made him a partner.
In 1948 Ross moved to New York, where he traded in electron tubes and opened his own transistor factory. Other enterprises included sheer no-run nylons sold under the brand names Chez La Femme and Silky Legs. More recently he developed a homoeopathic concoction to deter snoring, marketed in the United States under the name YSNORE. In 2000 Ross sold his university for $135 million to a private equity firm. He hoped to stay on for a year but was forced out by a new chief executive who complained, mysteriously, that he did not believe what Ross was telling him “about substantive things”.
Ross, though, was not ready to retire: “I play golf one day a week, I don’t play cards and I’m too old for broads,” he explained. After failing to win support for a new medical school in Wyoming he opened a nursing school and a new medical school on St Kitts.
Ross is survived by his wife, Anne, and by two sons and two daughters
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