URBANA — From being "a little bit naive" Texas boy to a nationally recognized agriculture expert to the head of the flagship university in Illinois' system, Robert Easter says he's done some growing.

Part of that was learning some Chinese, which he has used often in his travels there. Growing up in rangeland Texas, the language was often Spanish, which he has also had to use in Latin America.

"I speak bad Spanish fluently," he said.

Easter's time as interim chancellor ended on Sept. 30. But he will continue his research in swine production and serve new Chancellor Phyllis Wise as an adviser and might take on a graduate student or two in technology and agriculture.

Easter, 63, said he never wanted to be the permanent chancellor, but the thought did cross his mind a couple of times that he was going to miss it, "for about five minutes."

Still, the end of the job came more swiftly than he expected, as often happens. He had to scramble for tickets for the UI's homecoming football game because what had been his tickets went to the new chancellor.

"We just realized we didn't have tickets after Friday night," he said.

His hopes for the future? A full-fledged Illini hockey team.

More seriously, he is self-effacing, but believes that the Urbana campus is better off than it was a couple of years ago.

The Category I admissions scandal was hard on Urbana's reputation and self-image. It cost President B. Joseph White and Chancellor Richard Herman their jobs, as well as those of some of the trustees.

Easter said he retains a great respect for his predecessors, including Herman, whom he admired when the former was provost and then chancellor.

Interim President Stanley Ikenberry helped changed the atmosphere in Urbana, Easter said, and so did interim Provost Richard Wheeler.

To Easter, it's now a different place.

In 2009, the UI seemed slow to acknowledge and take responsibility for the admission scandal.

Now, he said, the university is out front reporting on the law school's problem with fudged statistics.

"People are very careful to make sure we don't make any mistakes. We always need to go back and look at what we have done. There's a culture now that, if something doesn't look right, report it. We're being pre-emptive about any problems cropping up," he said.

A longtime Urbana senate leader, Nicholas Burbules, agrees that things have changed for the better.

"After a bad time, I think we were extremely fortunate to have people like Stan Ikenberry, Bob Easter and Dick Wheeler — people of character, wisdom and integrity to lead us out of it," he said.

"They were interims, but they weren't just caretakers. They led us forward and they helped build the institution."

Finding a chancellor of the caliber of Wise, hired out of a very strong pool of candidates, "shows that this job is still seen as one of the most desirable in the nation. That's a testament to the kind of campus that Bob and Dick are leaving behind," said Burbules, who served on Wise's search committee.

"Bob Easter has served this great university with distinction for nearly four decades, and put off a much-deserved retirement to help lead us through one of the most challenging periods in our nearly 150-year history," President Michael Hogan said. "He is in my small pantheon of heroes, and will remembered as one of the greatest chancellors in the history of this storied campus."

Joyce Tolliver, former chairwoman of the senate executive committee, said the interim chancellor had a light touch.

"Bob Easter will long be known for his gentle yet powerful leadership at a time of crisis," she said. "He has demonstrated that leading through a crisis does not mean putting aside collaboration and consultation; on the contrary, he understands that it is precisely when important changes must be made that collaborative decision-making is most crucial. Forget the 'interim' — he has been one of our campus's great chancellors, period."

After the reforms, Easter said, he is a different man, too.

He said growing up near San Antonio, where his family had been pork farmers for a couple of generations, there were only 20 people in his graduating class. His ambition was to follow in the footsteps of his high school ag teacher.

It was a place, he said, "where if something needed to be done, tomorrow was OK. In Illinois, it's done in an hour."

He said that coming to Illinois in 1973, after earning his degrees at Texas A&M University, showed him what opportunities were out there.

"Illinois is a place where anything can happen," he says. "The sky's the limit if you think big, and if you fail, you can get up and go again."

After he earned a degree in agricultural education, a professor recommended he study swine production, because that was his family's profession. He briefly considered becoming an attorney, but eventually went with the family business.

But Texas A&M and Illinois offered him positions in 1973, and he said he does not regret choosing this campus.

In the meantime, he had married his wife, Cheryl, also a Texas A&M grad student, and fathered three successful children.

Brian is the athletic director at Centennial High School. Joanna is a registered nurse who lives in Mahomet, and Aaron works in forestry in Colorado.

Easter also served two decades in the Army Reserves, leaving as a major. He did not serve abroad, but worked at a chemical unit in Urbana and other stateside assignments.

His work at Illinois almost immediately led him abroad, though. He was able to use his Spanish in Latin America, but China gave him a little more trouble at first. Easter has been there about 40 times.

"At first the infrastructure in China was very poor, and the hotels were very basic," he said.

And, in the years before China opened to capitalism, food was dicey and his ability to communicate was limited.

"When I first went to China, my wife and I came back 10 pounds lighter," Easter said. "Now she says I come back with 10 extra pounds."

He said the Chinese have had a different approach to swine production. For one thing, they sometimes stack hog pens vertically. He has seen a three-story pig facility; a friend noticed a six-story one.

His primary research before he went into administration was in nutrition. Easter said food producers erred on the side of too much vitamin supplementation.

"They thought that if a little was good, more was better," he said.

One project was to study swine livers as food sources for dogs. The livers are full of vitamin A, a fat-soluble chemical that can be toxic to dogs (and humans) in large quantities.

He also helped bring American corn and soybeans into global markets.

Once he was dean of the College of Agriculture and Consumer Sciences, though, Easter decided to cut back on his graduate students and research because he could not give them the time they deserved.

Though he never planned to be an administrator, after eight years as dean, he was promoted to provost and then, in 2009, to interim chancellor.

While he worked with donors and corporations as a dean, it was a new experience for Easter to deal with the visibility of being a chancellor at sports events and presentations.

Budget reductions and a scandal made his stay as Urbana's leader a challenging one.

He doesn't mind moving out for Wise, whom he praised as "a national figure" he came to know well since both were in interim positions.

Easter said he didn't have "the long-term horizon" to be a permanent chancellor, but said Wise will do well in that role.