Chancellor Blog List
Chancellor Blog List
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I love the hustle and bustle at the beginning of May. But often in the midst of preparing for Commencement, taking final exams, submitting work to academic journals and all the other tasks that go along with this time on campus, I think we can neglect our health. Fortunately, we have so many resources on campus to lead us towards a healthy lifestyle.
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The beginning of May always brings a welcome energy to our community. There is the anticipation and the excitement of change permeating our campus. This is an invigorating time for all of us here at Illinois. It’s a time for seizing opportunities, for the planning futures and for taking new chances. It’s also a time for celebrating.
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Provost Adesida and I thank all of you who joined us in the Beckman Institute (or watched the live stream) Monday for our Town Hall meeting to discuss the emerging vision and strategic plan for the campus. We know the large turnout meant a number of you were watching from an overflow room or from seats in the aisles. We appreciate your presence and your clear interest and engagement in the future direction of this campus.
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The Undergraduate Research Symposium, taking place on Thursday (April 18) of this week in the Illini Union, is a great way to share student research with the campus. Now in its 6th year, the symposium continues to celebrate student scholarship. And this year should prove to be the best yet. And in a sign that our institutional efforts are already beginning to show results, the 2013 symposium features almost twice as many presentations, with about half of those presenters being freshmen, sophomores and juniors.
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On April 4, we lost a great friend of our university -- Roger Ebert. Always the consummate ambassador, Roger was a generous donor and more broadly a lifelong representative of the values upon which we were founded. We will miss him. As I hope you have heard, Ebertfest will go on as planned next week (April 17-21) with Roger’s wife, Chaz, hosting the event. While his absence will echo throughout the festival, it is a wonderful opportunity for this campus and community to remember and honor Roger Ebert. And, the sadness will be tempered by the news that the festival will continue for years to come with Chaz Ebert’s continued involvement.
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I am looking forward to the first annual Campus and Community Day of Service coming up on April 20. Philanthropy and service have always been foundational to our mission, and designating a specific day for this purpose enables us to come together in a more powerful way.
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As you may recall, about eight months ago we announced that Illinois would become the first land-grant university to join Coursera - the consortium of top universities offering free online classes to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. Now, with our first set of courses finished and the next batch getting underway, I wanted to share some of our early experiences with this innovative partnership.
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This is the last blog column until classes resume after spring break. It has been fairly eventful on campus over the past couple weeks and I just wanted to share my thoughts on a few recent issues.
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As you probably know, our students will be holding their annual elections this week. In addition to choosing representatives to the Illinois Student Senate and Student Organization Resource Fund Board and the new Student Trustee, they will be voting on an advisory referendum measuring support for Chief Illiniwek.
In light of this referendum, I submitted an open letter to the student body that was published in the Daily Illini today (March 5) outlining my perspectives on this issue. I wanted to share the letter with the entire community and also to expand on it a little in the blog this week.
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We are having quite a year at Illinois, celebrating and honoring actions Abraham Lincoln took 150 years ago. We started this academic year with a series of events around the Morrill Act anniversary – the legislation that led directly to our own 1867 founding. And we have spent this second semester celebrating the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation – issued on January 1, 1863. I cannot imagine what it must have been like for President Lincoln – at such a critical juncture in the history of a nation and really, the world. It seems like simply holding a country together in the midst of an all-encompassing and debilitating war – just making it to the next day or week – would be considered a significant accomplishment. To add to this – two different acts that would change everything in a fundamental way for our country – I don’t think there is any doubt as to why many, and certainly those of us in Illinois consider him our greatest president.
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As a member of the American Association of Universities and one of the top annual recipients of federal research funding, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was asked to create a short video outlining the potential impacts of the impending budget cuts that will automatically trigger in March if Congress does not act. This segment was requested by ScienceWorksForU.S., a collaboration among the AAU, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, and The Science Coalition to demonstrate the tremendous impact that federally funded university-based scientific research has on the nation and on the lives of all Americans. They intend to use these collected statements in their efforts to advocate more strategic approaches to budget reduction efforts.
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I think it would be difficult to find a better start to a week here than by announcing a new $100 million gift to Illinois. This new pledge to the College of Engineering from The Grainger Foundation marks the largest gift to a public university in the country this academic year. Made in memory and in honor of William W. Grainger, a 1919 electrical and computer engineering graduate – the Grainger Engineering Breakthroughs Initiative is really a transformational investment in the College of Engineering, and indeed in the university for generations to come.
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This Monday, the nation celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day – in honor of what would have been his 84th birthday. It was, to me, interesting to see the holiday celebrated simultaneously with one of the foundational events of our nation – the inauguration of a president. I realize that this overlap wasn't by intent, but rather the outcome of chance and calendar. But, coincidental or not – it was an intersection of one of our oldest national democratic traditions with our newest federal holiday honoring a man who, quite literally, gave his life in the effort to ensure everyone in the United States would get to participate in our democracy.
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Unfortunately, this semester opens on a somber note. As many of you have heard or read, Professor Carl R. Woese died at home on Sunday, December 30, at the age of 84. In 1977, with the publication of two papers with his colleagues, he turned the world upside down for most of the biology community – establishing archaea as a "third domain" of life. You can read a much better and much deeper account of his life and work here.
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Later this week, I'll be sharing my annual holiday greeting video with the full campus community, but I wanted to give blog subscribers and regular readers a first look at it. You can find it here (http://go.illinois.edu/happynewyear) if you'd like to be among the first to see it. Several of our more iconic campus figures join me in wishing all of the Illinois family a wonderful season. And as with several previous messages, I wanted it to echo what I've seen in my time at Illinois.
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This week, I am excited to announce that five of our faculty have been named as Swanlund Chairs, the highest endowed honor we can award on this campus.
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A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to speak at the 27th annual campus Diversity Breakfast. During that talk I related the story of my parents coming to the U.S. from China to pursue their advanced degrees – and how the bombing of Pearl Harbor prevented their scheduled return home and set my family on a path that eventually led me to Illinois. Shortly after this presentation, I received a wonderful note from a staff member in the audience.
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This fall, I have been talking about four major goals for the campus under my leadership - one of them being centered around diversity. This is a foundational issue for me. It is a critical factor in determining the future of our institution as it is fundamentally and inseparably tied to excellence in all aspects of higher education. The power of universities comes from our ability to engender new ways of thinking and to open up new perspectives. If we have a "product" – it must surely be the creation of ideas. And ideas aren't limited by skin color or by the language you speak or where your parents came from. They are born out of life and educational experiences. They grow in environments where robust and respectful debate is encouraged.
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When I became chancellor last year, I knew that I was coming to a top, public research university located in a rural, agricultural center of the nation. What I didn’t fully understand then was that our campus may be physically-located among corn and soybean fields a hundred miles south of Chicago – but Illinois is, and always has been, a truly global university.
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As I hope you have seen and heard this fall, we are celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Morrill Act – which directly led to the founding of our university. As one of the original 37 Land-Grant institutions, we take a special pride in tracing our institutional heritage back to that momentous July day when Abraham Lincoln signed Justin Morrill’s bill into law. However, it is also important to realize that, while this legislation might have created a new potential for educational access, it is the relentless efforts of universities like our own that have turned those opportunities into realities. The world didn’t change because President Lincoln signed the act – the world changed because places like Illinois pushed it forward.
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Gallium, phosphorus and arsenic don’t go together. At least that’s the story you would have gotten from most materials and chemistry authorities in the early 1960’s. But not the one you’d have received from Nick Holonyak Jr. - who was busy creating the crystals from those elements that would lead to his October 9, 1962, demonstration of the first visible LED. The campus celebrated that anniversary last week and more than 200 people had the chance to meet Nick and to hear him talk about the invention and about the people and ideas that made it possible. While GE can lay the claim as the birthplace of the invention, we claim Illinois as the academic birthplace of the inventor.
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Just over a year ago, on October 1, I was officially appointed as chancellor. In the 370-odd days since then, I have been on an adventure that has confirmed what I expected when I took this job – Illinois is a dynamic and driven university. There has been plenty of excitement along the way and, as you know, a number of significant changes. I want to talk about one particular change that is important to me at a very personal level. When I first arrived here, and from my first public (and private) comments, I talked about “your university.” Last week, at the town hall meeting when I addressed the campus community – I talked about “our university.”
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This past Friday, September 28, we hosted the 77th Annual Meeting of the University of Illinois Foundation – the independent organization that helps to secure and to administer private gifts on behalf of all three university campuses. It was my first UI Foundation meeting on our campus. While I have had the opportunity to meet with individual friends, donors, and corporate supporters, this was my first opportunity to meet with some of the most passionate advocates of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Throughout the day and the weekend, nearly 500 individuals came back to this campus to see the impact of their gifts and to explore options for future investments in our faculty, staff, students and programs.
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In this Olympic summer, one set of games from London has a particular significance to our campus – the 2012 Paralympic Games. They didn’t receive the international attention and television coverage of the Olympics – which is unfortunate for us, because there would have been a great deal of Orange and Blue to be seen. 31 current and former Illini, representing six different nations, competed in these games. And, when the closing ceremony ended them on September 9, sixteen individuals had earned 22 medals – 11 gold, 6 silver and 5 bronze.
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On July 17, I sent out a massmail announcing that we were joining Coursera, the consortium of more than a dozen global universities offering free online courses to anyone in the world with access to an Internet connection. Today, exactly two months after the announcement, more than 115,000 users have enrolled in Coursera courses offered by Illinois faculty. An initial course, “Introduction to Sustainability,” netted 32,000 new participants alone.