Alexander Schure

Alexander Schure (August 3, 1920 - October 29, 2009) was an American academic and entrepreneur. Schure founded the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) in 1955. He also served as the Chancellor of Nova Southeastern University (NSU) from 1970 until 1985.

Schure is credited with saving Nova University, which was in deep financial trouble, after he became the school's chancellor in 1970. The university is now called Nova Southeastern University, and is now the largest private university in Florida, with more than 28,000 students as of 2009.

Schure and then-Nova University President Abraham Fischler, Ed.D., formed a federation between Nova and the New York Institute of Technology. The partnership between the two institutions brought money and new programs to Nova University. The money from NYIT allowed Nova University to remain open during its financial difficulties. The alliance between NYIT and Nova University ended in 1985.

In November 1974 Schure hired recent University of Utah doctoral graduate Edwin Catmull to direct NYIT's fledgling computer graphics lab, and ensured that the lab received special funding for more than 5 years. Schure was an early champion of computer animation; in 1979 Catmull left to form a computer-graphics group with Lucasfilm and the core technical team- including computer animation pioneers Alvy Ray Smith, David DiFrancesco, Ralph Guggenheim, Jim Blinn, and Jim Clark- came from the NYIT lab. (In 1986, that computer-graphics group would be funded by recently fired Steve Jobs as the independent company Pixar which manufactured and sold image-processing computers using the concepts first developed at NYIT, and also produced projects using them.)

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