The Distinctiveness of UIC

Access to Excellence

The University of Illinois at Chicago, one of the state's two publicly-assisted comprehensive research campuses, joins scholarship with access.

Through awards, grants, prizes, honors and leadership roles, its faculty win recognition nationally and internationally. With research expenditures exceeding $250 million a year, it ranks among the 50 foremost universities in the United States for federal research support. It confers degrees from the baccalaureate and professional to the doctorate and includes the only public academic medical center in Illinois, making it the principal educator of health-care professionals for the state.

At the same time UIC has an urban mission. Many of its 25,000 students come from families of limited financial means, recent immigrants or their children, and racial and ethnic minority groups. Many are the first generation in their families to attend college. They are ambitious for academic attainment: they seek education engaged with urban life, they are attracted by the excellence of specific academic programs, and they are excited by an unprecedented mix of races, ethnicities, religions, languages and national origins.

Further, the complex problems of a great city and region call upon UIC to respond with greatness. What UIC calls its Great Cities Commitment transforms the traditional university concept of public service into a vital engagement with its neighborhood and the greater metropolis, bringing the campus's wealth of research capacity and human creativity to the challenges facing Chicago and urban life worldwide. The commitment is manifest across the campus, from engaged social-science research to partnerships in the arts and humanities, contributions to economic development, innovation in emerging technologies, and collaboration between UIC's professional schools and the professions they serve.

That is why UIC is distinct. By bringing an elite research faculty to an urban mission, UIC forges an identity that aligns it with the other leading universities but makes it different. In the heart of the city, UIC offers extraordinary opportunity to all who seek learning in an intense research environment. It is urban and elite; it is elite but not exclusionary; it joins access with excellence.

Other universities conduct research as UIC does, or serve its range of students, or are deeply involved with their communities - but they do not do all three at the level UIC has reached and continues to raise. The campus experiences every day the tensions between access and excellence, but if the achievement were easy it would be common. UIC affirms the social and moral value of access to excellence and its direct and positive impact on all aspects of the campus. The diverse students at UIC are taught by distinguished faculty who set uncompromising standards. UIC focuses on healthcare for under-served areas along with the advancement of biomedical knowledge and practice. It combines its Great Cities Commitment with traditional strength in the core arts and science disciplines. It values both connections to its local and regional communities and affiliations in research and education across the globe.

By emphasizing world-class research along with a commitment to students who reflect the diversity of the United States and to the pervasive relationships beyond its boundaries that arise from its embrace of the city, UIC defines the dynamic and vibrant new urban university.

Eric A. Gislason,
Interim Chancellor