Roger Ebert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic, got two big thumbs up from the University of Illinois for a seven-figure gift to his alma mater.

Ebert, a 1964 U of I graduate and widely regarded as the nation’s most visible and influential film critic, and his wife, Chaz, have made a gift of $1 million toward creation of the Roger Ebert Program for Film Studies Fund.

Education always mattered to Arlys Streitmatter Conrad. The daughter of an Illinois farmer and teacher, Arlys Streitmatter Conrad graduated from the University of Illinois in 1944, had a successful career in the corporate world, and, after a longtime and fulfilling relationship with her Alma Mater, has honored the University with a $12 million endowed gift to be shared equally by the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS).

Champaign, Ill. — Jorge Paulo Lemann, of Jona, Switzerland, and his family have pledged to give $14 million to establish a Brazilian studies institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The gift is the largest ever to the university from non-alumni. The Lemann Institute will build on the university’s existing programs and initiatives related to Brazil to create one of the leading Brazilian studies programs in the nation.

“I look forward to hitting the ground running when I arrive,” Paula Allen-Meares said last July, after the University of Illinois Board of Trustees approved her appointment as UIC chancellor.

Twenty private gifts totaling more than $43 million earmarked for University of Illinois programs at the Urbana-Champaign and Chicago campuses were announced today (Friday, Oct. 17, 2008) at the U of I Foundation’s 73rd Annual Meeting.