UIC and other members of the Consortium on Institutional Cooperation joined with the Newberry Library to create a new American Indian Studies Consortium, a multidisciplinary program to train graduate students in the cultures and experiences of Native Americans. The unprecedented program will be headquartered at the Newberry and its director also will hold a tenured faculty appointment at UIC.

"A number of distinguished universities, all with commitments to American Indian studies, pool their resources and in an instant constitute themselves as one of the major centers of an intellectual area of growing importance," said Stanley Fish, dean of liberal arts and sciences. "Put this together with the extraordinary resources of the Newberry Library and the commitment of UIC to ethnic and religious studies, and you have a recipe for innovation, avant-garde scholarship and truly multidisciplinary teaching."

Barbara Allen, executive director of the CIC, said the program is the first collaboration of its kind in the nation. She noted there is a growing demand for academic training in American Indian studies.

The new venture will offer core programs to enhance the training of students on each CIC campus. CIC faculty will spend a year at the Newberry to conduct research and teach a spring seminar to graduate students from the collaborating institutions. Scholars will come to the Newberry for an annual conference and for workshops and seminars.

The field of American Indian studies also has been an important collecting area for the UIC library. It offers extensive materials on twentieth-century American Indian history and has one of the best collections of modern Native American literature and criticism.

Founded in 1958, the CIC is the academic consortium of the Big Ten universities and the University of Chicago.

New this Year
In fiscal year 2002, UIC established new degree programs, including M.S. and Ph.D. programs in bioinformatics, College of Engineering; a Ph.D. in educational psychology, College of Education; and a bachelor of fine arts (B.F.A.) in performance, College of Architecture and the Arts. UIC is home to the nation's only Ph.D. program in disability studies.