Robert “Bob” Lynn Knauss, ’57, an educator and academic leader who served on the Michigan Law faculty from 1960 to 1972, died in Saugatuck, Michigan, on October 16, 2024. He was 93.
Knauss graduated from Cooley High School in Detroit and Harvard College on a Navy ROTC scholarship. He went on to serve as an officer aboard a destroyer during the Korean War.
After graduating from Michigan Law, Knauss taught in the Law Quad for a year before joining Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro (now Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman) as an associate attorney in San Francisco. In 1960, he returned to the Law School as a professor, focusing his scholarship and teaching on corporate and securities law. At Michigan, Knauss and former Professor Alfred Conard co-authored a widely used textbook, Enterprise Organization.
Knauss also distinguished himself as an academic administrator early in his career. He was elected president of the U-M Faculty Senate and was named the University’s first vice president of student services during a period of student activism and social unrest on campus in the late 1960s.
Knauss left the Michigan Law faculty in 1972 to become dean of Vanderbilt Law School. He left Vanderbilt to assume the deanship at the University of Houston Law Center from 1981 to 1993. During this time, he also held visiting professorships at the University of Vermont Law School and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.
Later in his career, Knauss served as a director of nine public companies and took a leadership role in an attempt to begin privatizing the Soviet airfleet by creating Air Baltic in Latvia. Knauss remained professionally active until his death; at the time of his passing, he was serving as chairman of a public company—making him the oldest elected board member of a publicly traded company in the country.
Knauss’s ties to the University of Michigan remained strong long after he left the Michigan Law faculty. His two sons, Robert Knauss, ’79, and Charles Knauss, ’81, graduated from the Law School, as did his grandson, Andrew Knauss, ’14. His daughter, Kathy, earned her master’s degree from U-M’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. His immediate family holds nine additional U-M degrees among spouses and grandchildren.
He is survived by his wife, Angela; three children; one stepson; eight grandchildren; and his former wife, Barbara.
