From humble beginnings to academic gangbusters






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November 23, 2003

BY DAVE NEWBART
Chicago Sun-Times Staff Reporter

Debate races around a wooden conference table as 15 undergraduate students discuss the legal intricacies of rape.

The elite seminar -- "Women and the Law" -- is led by a Harvard-educated attorney. Most of the students around the table graduated in the top 5 percent of their high schools. Their standardized test scores top the charts.

But this class isn't at one of the area's premier private colleges -- or even at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

It's at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a school better known years ago for offering cheap tuition to commuters.

UIC is still relatively cheap ($6,900 a year for tuition and fees as opposed to $29,238 for a year at the University of Chicago), but its selling points have changed dramatically.

BIG MEN ON CAMPUS

Top scholars who recently joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago include:
Sander Gilman, a professor in the German department and director of the UIC Humanities Laboratory. He came to UIC from the University of Chicago in 2000. Gilman -- also a scholar in medicine, psychiatry, sociology, Jewish studies and film -- is the author or editor of more than 50 books. He was named Outstanding German Educator by the American Association of Teachers of German. Gilman taught at Cornell University for nearly 30 years.

Lennard Davis, a professor of disability studies and human development and former head of the English department. Davis taught at the State University of New York, Columbia University and Brandeis University before joining UIC in 2000. He was named a Guggenheim Fellow last year to work on a book, A History of Obsession. He has published five books on disabilities, deafness and society's definition of "normal.''
John D'Emilio is director of the gender and women's studies program and professor of history. D'Emilio's Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, is a finalist for the National Book Award. His The World Turned: Essays on Gay History, Politics and Culture won the Lambda Literary Foundation's Editor's Choice Award. He has also been a Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellow. He's the editor or author of eight books. He left the University of North Carolina to join UIC in 1999.

Now, more challenging coursework and cutting-edge research are pulling in top students and faculty. Experts say there's no reason to believe that will change in the wake of nationally renowned scholar Stanley Fish's resignation last month, although some caution that further large-scale state budget cuts could damage the school.

Fish, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, recruited more than two dozen top-name faculty for UIC from schools including Yale, Harvard, the University of Michigan and U. of C. in his five years.

Most important, all of the new faculty teach in the classroom.

Students and university officials say the university has made a stunning transformation since it opened for 4,000 students at Navy Pier in 1946, largely for returning soldiers. While its campus wouldn't be mistaken for the Ivy League, concrete buildings are giving way to green space and hangout spots. A campus community is forming in the heart of the city.

"This isn't your father's UIC,'' said Chancellor Sylvia Manning.

Indeed, it is now one of the top 50 research universities in the country in the amount of federal funding it captures, a change that started after the school moved to the Near West Side in 1965, later merging with the U. of I. Medical Center. Its research funding more than doubled to $233 million between 1996 and 2001. Only four schools in the country grew that fast. The total has surpassed the amount granted to the U. of C.

"It's seen as one of the very best urban research universities in the country,'' said Elizabeth Hoffman, president of the University of Colorado System and provost at UIC from 1997 to 2000.

Smarter students, more of them

Quality faculty is among the biggest reasons students have taken a new interest in UIC, where freshman applications are up 46 percent in the last 10 years. UIC enrolled a record 25,690 students last year.

Last year, the 400 faculty in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences racked up 170 awards. Faculty at the School of Art and Design have won MacArthur Foundation "genius grants.''

UIC also is drawing higher-level students. Among the evidence:

*One-quarter of all freshmen at UIC graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school class.

*The mean ACT scores for entering freshmen rose nearly 2-1/2 points to 23.4 in the last decade.

*The Honors College, open only to students with top test scores and grades, has nearly doubled its enrollment in the last 10 years, to 1,350 students.

*The school is attracting more students straight out of high school, with the under-22 population increasing by 8 percent in the last 10 years.

*Seventy students from New Trier, considered one of the best high schools in the state, applied to UIC last year, and 21 enrolled, compared with less than a handful a decade ago.

"The prestige of the university has certainly risen,'' said Jim Conroy, chairman of post-high school counseling at New Trier.

Most still commute

Part of the appeal is the revitalized Near West Side, where UIC offers 3,100 dorm rooms. The school hopes that eventually one in four students will live on campus. While most still commute, Conroy points out that the on-campus population is larger than that of many small colleges.

"It's a wonderful community here,'' said Jennifer Baek, 20, an economics major from Northbrook, who chose UIC over Northwestern and Johns Hopkins. Baek came to UIC because of a program that guarantees her admission to medical school, but she found faculty surprisingly accessible. She now counts an English professor and a chemistry teaching assistant among her close friends.

It also is the fifth most diverse campus in the country, according to U.S. News and World Report. About 37 percent of students speak a native language other than English. Minority students outnumber whites.

Diversity is a plus for students such as Highland Park resident Christopher Van Den Berge. He liked the perspective he got in a "History of the Balkans'' course last year.

"Two of us were from the U.S.'' he said. "Everyone else was from the Balkans.''

Scholars from other parts of the country talk about a buzz surrounding UIC, largely since Fish joined in 1999. Of the 64 schools ranked among the third tier of universities by U.S. News and World Report, UIC was graded the highest by its peer institutions. UIC's peers also ranked it higher than or equal to one-fifth of the top 126 schools in the country.

"It's on an upward trajectory,'' said Catharine Stimpson, dean of the graduate school at New York University, who recently was unsuccessful in coaxing a UIC faculty member to leave. "It has some very strong programs.''

Money crunch

But all is not rosy at UIC. The school's state budget has been cut by $54 million, or 17 percent, in the last two years. Noting that his college actually lost 35 faculty positions since he started there, Fish cited those cuts in announcing he would step down at the end of the academic year. The budget constraints have led to course cutbacks, making it harder for some students to get classes needed to graduate.

UIC is also dogged by critics who question whether it should be going after high-profile, high-salaried professors in a time of budget constraints.

Students complain of recent steep increases in tuition and fees, although those have been offset by more modest increases this year. They also lament red tape and a campus beautification project to spruce up University Hall that seems out of place in a budget crisis.

But despite those concerns, if you walk the campus, it's hard to find a student unhappy with the overall education experience offered at UIC.

"It's an excellent school,'' said KellyMarie Conlon, 22, communications chairwoman for the Undergraduate Student Government. Like many students, Conlon came to UIC because it was more affordable but said she thinks the education she has received is top-notch. She said she was immediately impressed that she was able to take a class from Matthew Lippman, an internationally renowned terrorism expert, whom she called "brilliant and phenomenal.''

Another student reached the pinnacle of academics when he became the first UIC student to be named a Rhodes Scholar.

Rudyard Sadleir of Park Ridge, an average student in high school, said he took a geology class his freshman year taught by now emeritus Professor Kelvin Rodolfo that changed his life -- even though the course had 200 students.

"He was the greatest, most talented teacher,'' said Sadleir, 26. The lectures, he said, were mesmerizing.

After the course, he changed his major from anthropology to geology. A subsequent course led him to volunteer at the Field Museum and become involved with a dinosaur dig in Niger with paleontologist Paul Sereno from the U. of C., where Sadleir is now a Ph.D. student in evolutionary biology.

Many students don't make it out

UIC still lags in some national rankings, however, in part because of its six-year graduation rate, which has risen by 8 percent in the last decade but is only 44 percent, half of the rate of U. of I. at Urbana-Champaign.

Retention rates, or the number of students that return for a second year, have also risen by about the same amount, to 78 percent, 14 percent less than the Downstate campus.

Officials said those numbers might never be as high as some schools because of the lower-income slant of the student body. More than 70 percent work.

"We are never going to have rates like Amherst or Princeton,'' Fish said.

Nor should anyone expect UIC to turn into an elite school overnight.

"You wouldn't predict this will become the University of Michigan of the 21st century,'' said Pat Callan, head of the California-based National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. Colleagues at other schools still point out that UIC has no Nobel laureates on staff, unlike U. of C., which has seven on the faculty, and the U. of I. at Urbana-Champaign, where nine have served.

But noting that most top schools have a 100-year head start, Fish believes UIC can eventually become one of the best, as long as state cuts don't decimate the budget. While it has taken years to build up UIC, he said, it would only take a short while for private schools to hire away UIC's top faculty if the budget picture doesn't improve. "It could become one of the great institutions of higher learning,'' he said.