In the words of the old Gospel hymn made famous by the late Mahalia Jackson, some might wonder how Robert LeAnder “got over.”
“Dr. Bob,” as some of his students call him, is an associate professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. The 63-year-old product of East St. Louis public schools boasts five degrees, with three in engineering.
In jeans instead of a Brooks Brother suit, he teaches bioinstrumentation, engineering electromagnetics and stochastic processes, alongside electrical and computer engineering courses.
His parents – a cab driver and domestic worker – were by no means wealthy. College seemed out of his reach.
“In the 1950s, education wasn’t the focus among many African Americans,” LeAnder said. “I went to school, came home at 4 o’clock and watched ‘Superman.’ I never came home and practiced my arithmetic.”
However, LeAnder’s high school principal told his parents about a program aimed at helping blacks earn degrees. LeAnder graduated six and a half years later with a B.S. in music education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He then taught music in East St. Louis schools.
“Suddenly, things fell apart,” he said.
Diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of 36, he learned that the financial and educational hurdles he leapt over to earn his first college degree were child’s play compared to what lay ahead.
“Voices screamed a constant chorus of ‘Kill yourself!’” he said. He suffered from paralyzing panic attacks and was plagued by deep depression and erratic mood swings. At first, LeAnder took medication. But this also made it difficult for him to function, so he turned to God.
“I prayed and asked the Lord to please hold my mind together, because I couldn’t take Lithium any longer,” he said.
Besides faith in the Lord, LeAnder uses Neuro-Linguistic Programming – a self-help technique that purportedly allows people to re-program their own minds – to manage his disorder.
For example, LeAnder said he “tricked his brain” into replacing the feelings of impending failure and stress that he got from thinking about a statistics class with positive thoughts.
“I developed a joyous anticipation for the next time that I would go to class,” he said. “Developing a positive attitude about statistics won at least half the battle. So despite starting out feeling ill-equipped, overwhelmed and out of my depth, I earned a B.”
Then a friend from church encouraged LeAnder, now no longer satisfied with teaching music, to join him as an engineer.
LeAnder quickly learned that he needed several remedial courses to get his mathematical skills up to speed, but he persevered and earned four degrees in the process. He earned his most recent degree, a doctorate in bioengineering, from the University of Illinois at Chicago at the age of 51.
“College algebra was murder,” he said. “But any class I took and got a C in, I kept retaking until I got an A or a B.”
Studying math from five to 15 hours a day for eight years was therapy of sorts for LeAnder, he said, because it protected his mind from voices and hallucinations.
“Some relatives probably thought I didn’t care much for them, because I didn’t come to family functions,” he said. “I was determined and said to myself, ‘I will not lift my head up from this math.’”
