Illinois Alumni Magazine

Sword Play

Tue 23 Apr 2013 08:45 CST

As emcee in Roman-era extravaganza, Joseph Steven Klus made life-and-death calls on gladiators in combat

By Clara Bush

When Joseph Steven Klus ’78 MEDIA met two young Frenchmen in California in July 2011, he thought it was funny that one of them was training to perform as a Roman gladiator. He certainly wouldn’t have believed he’d almost be a gladiator himself 17 months later.

The pair helped connect Klus, who lives in Venice Beach, near Los Angeles, with the French Roman gladiator training group Histor’Event. This in turn led to him playing Praeco (a Roman term for arena narrator or emcee) in Spartacus and the Roman Legion, a four-act show presented in Griffith Park Equestrian Center’s Equidome in Burbank, Calif., Dec. 15 and 16.

Klus says his role was fun to play because he was able to invite the audience into the action. He narrated the show from a sound booth until the fourth act, when he assumed the role of Praeco. Fought on the sandy terrain of Griffith Park, the battles were never staged; they had different outcomes every night. Klus even got on the wrong side of a sword once.

“The other fighters came away with some serious scrapes and bruises, and cuts they tended to ignore,” he notes.

And the audience chose if the loser should live or die.

“Each fight is based on the athlete’s effort,” Klus says. “It’s exciting to watch.”

Klus got involved not just because he looks the part, but also because he can speak French, and he’s in the acting business, appearing in various supporting and character roles for film and TV. In 2012, following another visit with more re-enactors, Klus was asked to play Thomas Jefferson in a film (still in the development phase) about the president’s time in France. Klus kept talking with the group, becoming a liaison to help them find resources so Spartacus could be produced in the U.S. He helped as a translator, host and business contact.

“It was a lot of work putting the production together,” he says.

Then came the show itself, where Klus had to call the fights and interact with the audience. “At one point, you’re trying to communicate scholastic information, but you also have this side of you that has some inside jokes with the audience,” he says.

“I have to build a rapport with a 1,000 or more people that are sitting in the stands.”

A student in the College of Media and spring intern for the UI Alumni Association, Clara Bush graduated as a Bronze Tablet scholar of the University of Illinois Class of 2013.

Game On

Tue 23 Apr 2013 08:36 CST

A passion for the hidden stories motivates Michael Osacky’s world-class trade in baseball memorabilia

By Annalisa Rodriguez

For the first 30 seconds that Michael Osacky ’02 ACES holds a baseball card, he just takes it all in. There are emotions and there are smiles, but for the first 30 seconds he doesn’t say a thing. Every piece of memorabilia is different, but the process of observing and then asking questions about the history and story behind each item remains the same.

A former future and options trader, he has found that in memorabilia collection and appraisal, just as in financial trading, “you have to trust your gut instinct, you have to rely on prior knowledge and you have to spit out the first thing that comes to your mind based on your expertise.”

Osacky estimates that he has seen tens of thousands of baseball cards, but it all started with a shoebox of just 25 cards, a gift from his grandfather on his 17th birthday.

“When I saw that old shoebox, it got me on the hunt of trying to find all those old cards,” he says. “That kind of really got me on the hunt not only to find these cards but to educate myself on the history of card collecting, the history of every single card, and that’s been my passion over the last 15 years.”

After graduating from the University of Illinois -- where he studied consumer and textile marketing -- Osacky began working at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. When his grandfather passed away, he thought it was as good a time as ever to pursue his true passion and in 2007, he launched the website of Baseball in the Attic, a company where he appraises and invests in vintage baseball card and sports memorabilia.

“I’m meeting with people who have inherited collections that have been passed down from generation to generation, some of them over 100 years,” Osacky says.

He says he does it for the stories. He does it for Babe Ruth-autographed items -- people rarely believe him when he tells them they are authentic and that the baseball legend signed for everyone because he grew up in an orphanage and loved kids.

He does it for “tobacco cards,” tobacco-stained baseball cards that were sold from 1909 to 1911 as inserts inside of packs of chewing tobacco. He knows about Cracker Jack, which for two years in the early 1900s also inserted baseball cards into boxes of the snack. Now they are hard to come by, but are most usually found in New York City or Chicago, where there were manufacturing plants.

He also does it for the chance to educate others about the stories and generate in them enthusiasm for a hobby that he sees a dying interest in, but that he believes holds tremendous value.

“I’m like a kid in the candy store when I hear these stories,” he says. “It’s my job to not only remember these stories but hopefully to tell them to future generations down the road.”

A senior at Illinois and spring semester intern at the UI Alumni Association, Rodriguez will become a Pulliam Fellow at The Indianapolis Star in June.

Tip A Canoe and Concrete, Too

Fri 8 Mar 2013 16:55 CST

Proposed decades ago by a UI professor, an improbable idea still stays afloat

By Deb Aronson

The genius emanating from the University of Illinois fills many pages in the book of all things remarkable: the invention of the LED; the discovery of archaea,
a third branch of life; the development of Netscape, the first personal Web browser; and many others.

What may not be quite as well-known is that Illinois also is the birthplace of the concrete canoe.

Stop chuckling – this stuff is as serious as being up the creek without a paddle.

The idea that a vessel as silent and graceful as a canoe, a vessel typically made of aluminum – or, even more poetically, birch bark – could be constructed of something as heavy and inelegant as concrete appears to be, well, like a fish out of water.

The sheer off-the-wallness of the concept may explain why something begun as a class project more than 40 years ago has evolved into an international obsession. That obsession started with the late Clyde Kesler ’43 ENG, MS ’46 ENG, a UI civil engineering professor and concrete expert who encouraged his students to think out-of-the-box.

Ergo, the concrete canoe.

When fellow Big Ten engineering students at Purdue learned of the Kesler caper, they challenged the Illini to a race. Facing off on May 16, 1971, at Kickapoo State Park’s Inland Sea, the teams were tied 2-2 going into the fifth and final race. Despite being prettier and lighter at 125 pounds, the Purdue boat capsized, giving the first championship to Illinois and its 360-pound creation, Mis-Led.

In just a few years, the craze had spread, with hundreds of teams competing across the nation. In the mid-1980s the American Society of Civil Engineers became interested and more formally organized the races. Today, concrete canoe competitions take place not just in the U.S. but in Israel, China, Japan, Germany, Australia, Oman, Turkey, South Africa and elsewhere.

Students spend thousands of hours on the project and earn no credit, but their enthusiasm is as boundless as their nights are sleepless. These students “learn lots of unteachable skills,” says Armen Amirkhanian, MS ’12 ENG, a UI graduate student and an adviser to the Illinois team. Plus, the whole idea is just plain wacky, and isn’t wackiness what makes college so memorable?

The competition’s required ingredients are Portland cement, water and aggregate. Teams experiment with substances, including microscopic glass bubbles (for lightness) and latex (for flexibility), and try to balance stability against speed (no one wants a tippy canoe). Sometimes these new ideas fail spectacularly, as in the case of the Illinois canoe that dissolved during the 2009 paddling competition.

Thanks to Amirkhanian’s efforts, the U of I is hosting the nationals (June 20-22) for the first time in 40 years.

Amirkhanian hopes Illinois can paddle to victory again. Either way, the Boneyard Yacht Club will have helped keep one of Illinois’ great – if unsung – traditions afloat.

Aronson is a freelance writer living in Urbana.

Shakespeare In The Cellblock

Fri 8 Mar 2013 16:37 CST

From classics to science to statistics, volunteers in the Education Justice Project bring upper-level college courses to Danville Correctional Center students

By Dave Evensen
Photos By Rebecca Ginsburg

Approximately 40 miles east of the University of Illinois campus sits a tight configuration of hard-angled buildings surrounded by fields. If you approach this place in the evening, as do many members of the Education Justice Project, you might not know what it is until you come close.

That’s when you see the tall fences and gleaming coils of wire, the looming guard towers. This is Danville Correctional Center, a medium-security prison home to 1,800 male inmates, including some of the most dedicated UI students you can find.

One rainy December evening, 60-some inmates – students – dressed in the standard “state blues” and bright white sneakers gather in the chapel of the correctional center to meet with members of the Education Justice Project, a robust, volunteer-based program initiated at the University of Illinois in 2006 to bring upper-level college education to the prison.

This was an organizational meeting, with curricula, scholarships and new programs on the agenda. There were no guards in the room. Speakers were greeted with loud applause, with the loudest reserved for a slim, soft-spoken woman named Rebecca Ginsburg.

Ginsburg, a UI professor of education policy organization and landscape architecture, co-founded EJP and serves as its director. Possessing a striking visage and a powerful belief in the value of a solid education, she came to Illinois from the University of California Berkeley, where she worked as a graduate student in a similar program at San Quentin State Prison.

Ginsburg’s efforts, along with those of the roughly 60 faculty, staff, students and other volunteers, are fueled by their concern over the societal impact of the cost of incarceration and the financial and emotional effects on prisoners’ families and communities – currently, some 2.3 million people in the U.S. sit behind bars, with millions more who have been released from prison facing an uncertain future. EJP volunteers believe in-prison education is a prime tool to address those issues.

A “win-win” situation
The chapel buzzes. It is no small achievement to be part of EJP. If an inmate wants to join, first he must have a high school diploma or its equivalent (and many don’t, with the average DCC inmate entering prison with a sixth-grade reading ability), along with at least 60 college credit hours, the same as a UI transfer student.

The credits can be earned through the prison’s community college programs, which provide 100- and 200-level courses. Although the state of Illinois had a long history of being in the forefront of offering higher education in prisons, says Ginsburg, today the only place where inmates can receive upper-level classes is at the Danville facility. Currently, approximately 100 inmates are enrolled.

EJP brings many academic opportunities to the prison, from science, cultural and writing workshops to courses in history, statistics, linguistics, engineering and how to teach English as a second language. Inmates have performed theater and organized art exhibits that feature their work on the UI campus. There is talk of learning media production through a new EJP program being aired on community radio in Urbana.

EJP, which is funded entirely by grants and donations, cannot yet offer degrees, but inmates are awarded college credit.

Through year-round course offerings, workshops, discussion groups and other efforts, EJP has earned deep respect – from inmates all the way up to administrators at the Illinois Department of Corrections.

Instructors talk about the project as changing “their orientation to the world, the way they teach, the way they learn, their ideas about who they are and what they can accomplish,” Ginsburg says with passion.

As for the inmates, “EJP opens up a whole new world to students, where achievement and opportunity exist,” says Debbie Denning ’84 (UIS), DOC’s chief of programs and support services. “That’s generally not within their realm of being, especially when they’re in prison. It’s not often that a major university knocks on our door and offers us the opportunity to have free programs and upper-level education opportunities.” Denning calls EJP a “win-win” for everyone.

That includes the University, whose land-grant mission involves engaging with the outer community. EJP’s engagement, says Ginsburg, is both moral and strategic, as studies prove that an uneducated population is a drain on society.

Engaged and focused
They come from various backgrounds, from young men to those who’d gone gray behind bars. Among the students is Samuel Santiago, 40, standing 6 feet tall and weighing roughly 250 pounds. With his shaved head, he would be intimidating but for his thoughtful demeanor.

EJP volunteers say they seldom speak with students about why they are in prison, but the inmates can be so friendly that it begs the question. When Santiago was 18, his life embroiled in drugs and gangs, “someone got hurt real bad,” he says.

He reconsiders the phrase and adds, “Somebody lost their life.” He has been under maximum or medium security ever since.

Today, Santiago’s path to redemption includes Shakespeare, theater, film noir and classes in education, all of them provided by EJP.

“After being in maximum security for so long, you become jaded,” Santiago says. “Being in EJP, it allows you to stimulate your mind and reminds you of the good nature of society.”

Ginsburg emphasizes that the inmates’ course work is evaluated in the same way as that of students at the Urbana campus, and that on the whole, the inmates’ work is on par with typical undergraduates. She points out that in a landscape design class taught last semester, Urbana students took the top and bottom marks, with Danville inmates enrolled in the same class falling in the middle.

EJP instructors add that the absence of smartphones and other distractions banned by prison rules, along with a sense of purpose among inmates who view education as key to overcoming their past, helps create particularly focused class environments – so focused, in fact, that one EJP instructor handed out a syllabus the first week of class and upon his return a week later, found that his students had already completed the list of readings.

With half of EJP instructors being female, the women volunteers say they feel safe teaching in a prison environment. Rachel Rasmussen, EJP’s tutor coordinator, and Nicole Brown, a UI doctoral student in sociology, taught an EJP class on feminist theory and say that, aside from the necessity of abiding by prison rules, their sessions felt like a normal, albeit lively, classroom.

The women say that one of their favorite moments in the discussion group came at the start of class. Students would file in and take their seats around the circle of chairs. The guard would leave, the door would close, and for the next three hours, it wasn’t a prison – it was a discussion.

And other behaviors rise to the fore as well.

“Every time I so much as pick up a Kleenex box, they run across, saying, ‘Let me carry that for you,’” Rasmussen says. When you’re incarcerated, “you don’t get to give anymore. … It’s interesting how meaningful it becomes for them to do something for someone else.”

At one time, programs like EJP were widespread, Ginsburg says. In 1994, however, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act eliminated Pell Grants for prisoners. Stripped of their funding source, hundreds of college prison programs closed over the next decade, including all in Illinois that offered baccalaureates. Today only a handful of programs like EJP remains.

‘People are good’
Back in the chapel that December evening, the meeting runs two hours
and ends as the inmates say goodbye to the EJP volunteers.

“We have a tremendous respect and admiration for the instructors,” Santiago says, before heading back to the cellblock with the others. “It reminds you that people are good.”

Ginsburg says that when Santiago first joined EJP, he was hard to read. He was quiet, she recalls, and it was difficult to tell if he cared.

But she would soon learn that, like so many of the others, he did.

He was quiet because he listened very closely.

Evensen is a freelance writer in Champaign.

Learn more about the Education Justice Project.

The Aha Moments

Fri 8 Mar 2013 16:02 CST

Like all good entrepreneurs, Illinois students and young alumni are finding new niches and introducing innovative products ranging from low-cost prosthetics to protein dispensers

By Mary Timmins

The University of Illinois has long been a place where ideas come to be born, a crucible for the life and products of the mind, from novels to Nobels, technology to theory, practical applications of agriculture to the furthest glimpses into the structure and meaning of the universe.

Now as never before, inspiration is emanating not only from those who teach and do research at Illinois but from those who study here. More and more ideas are germinating and taking root among students and recent alumni, yielding collaborations and business plans and licensing and patents and products that work, often for the greater good.

As Goethe once observed: “Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward: They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.” What follow are the stories of six such gambits and the intrepid Illini who are moving the pieces forward.

Arms for the world
For Jonathan Naber ’11 ENG, the idea for the arm came when he was a sophomore, in a rush of altruism. He was contemplating an item called the Jaipur Foot and the statistics that produced it: 20 million people in the developing world are estimated to be missing limbs, with 90 percent of those having lost their legs. Hence the Jaipur Foot, a simple rubber prosthetic developed in India that costs approximately $28 and is distributed there and in countries worldwide.

But what, the young man wondered, about arms?

Naber put the problem to his friend Adam Booher ’11 ENG, and the two engineering students started raiding recycling bins and dumpsters, looking for expendables and disposables that could be used to fashion an inexpensive prosthetic arm. That was four years ago. Today, their company, Bump, is headquartered at EnterpriseWorks, a business incubator in the UI Research Park. Using an old, heavy-duty Singer sewing machine salvaged from someone’s aunt’s barn, Booher and other members of the growing company stitch together OpenSocket prosthetic arms, which come in small, medium and large sizes and can be fitted and tightened using an ingenious design that Booher likens to “the tongue in a shoe.”

As for Naber, he’s been spending more or less all of his time in Central America, where Bump has established its presence at several clinics (an effort launched in 2010 with the help of David Krupa ’02 LAS, a biology major who has pioneered services for amputees in Central and South America).

At $300 base price, the Bump OpenSocket isn’t so inexpensive as the Jaipur Foot, but it is far cheaper than a custom-fitted model. Support has come through grants and awards, and the Rotary Club has in place a sponsorship program through which donors can fund arms for those in need. Beyond the countries of Central America await developing nations throughout the world. Need is so great, says Naber, that Bump will never be able to meet it.

But the work is a start. At press time, 40 amputees in Central America and India have OpenSocket arms in place of limbs lost, mostly in accidents and other traumatic incidents, and a team of prosthetists will shortly introduce the arms in Sierra Leone. When a patient is fitted with a limb, Naber observes, “sometimes the families cry because they’re so excited.”

Spin story
As an undergraduate, Scott Daigle ’09 ENG, MS ’11 ENG, became quickly and painfully aware of the Urbana campus as “a big place where everybody has to get around” – including people who do not have the use of their legs. Partnering with Marissa Siebel, a UI doctoral student who trains wheelchair athletes, Daigle formed a company called IntelliWheels and set about designing a wheelchair with gears.

The outcome of several iterations over several years, the IntelliWheels Easy Push is a set of wheels that fits any standard wheelchair. An Easy Push moves in low gear when the person seated pushes on the wheels. Moving the outer rims of the wheels engages an ingenious geared system with a 2-to-1 ratio, allowing the chair to, in effect, roll forward twice as easily.

Backed by more than $500,000 in venture capital funding and awards from grants and competitions, IntelliWheels is headquartered in EnterpriseWorks (where, until recently, it shared space with Bump). Daigle and Siebel have been joined by Josh George ’07 MEDIA, a Paralympian gold medalist who directs their marketing. Things look good for the business plan. The Easy Push is patent pending and has been approved for Medicare reimbursement. Twenty-five sets of wheels went on the market in January, targeted to residents of nursing homes and assisted-living facilities. Next project: a manual-shift version with three to five gears.

“The sky’s the limit,” says Daigle.

“People have worked on geared wheelchairs before,” he adds. “But we think we’re the first to do it right.”

Growing pains
Steve Heiss chose a practical major – perhaps the most practical major – when he entered the University’s highly rated accountancy program. In May, he will stride away with his degree, pointed toward Chicago and a job in consulting with Price-waterhouseCoopers. He’ll also leave behind a garden. This is not a totally good thing.

The garden came about through an annual competition sponsored by the accountancy firm Ernst & Young, which offers three awards nationally for business plans designed to make a difference in the community. Heiss and his interdisciplinary student team laid out their idea to create C-U Garden in a north Champaign park near an elementary school where 90 percent of students qualify for federally subsidized lunches. As Heiss and his team envisioned it, the garden would flourish on several levels. Pupils would study the plants, following a curriculum written as part of the project. The school cafeteria would serve the vegetables. More produce was to be sold at a farm stand, proceeds to benefit the community. Inexpensive individual plots ($10 for a season) were available to neighborhood residents.

The plan won the competition in March 2010, netting a $10,000 award. Press releases were sent and photos taken. Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn and First Lady Michelle Obama expressed support. Ground was broken, boxes built, a shed put up, seeds planted.

Then real life began to happen.

That fall, vandals smashed the garden’s crop of pumpkins and broke open the shed, tearing holes in the door and the roof. Worse, someone permanently removed a water pipe that was critical to the garden’s survival. A project that Heiss envisioned as a national model – schools could purchase the curriculum he and his team developed, which was the beauty of the whole thing as a business plan – receded into timbered boxes full of weeds with a broken shed in the background.

Currently, Heiss is at work on a succession plan, seeking partners to take over the garden and get it growing again. He fears the project could otherwise become for north Champaign “one more project in a series of projects of privileged University students coming and saying, ‘This is right for you.’”

But whatever grows or withers and dies, when Steve Heiss is at his desk in Chicago, he can remember the business he founded for a good purpose and a garden dug on a beautiful spring day by people from all over the community and the University.

“There is no other thing I’ve done on campus that has given me the life lessons that have come from this,” he concludes, and while his eyes are pained, his smile remains wide.

Fresh idea
For Zeba Samad Parkar, PHD ’11 ENG, ingenuity turned out to be a family affair.

Parkar came to the United States in 2006 from Mumbai, India, to study materials science and engineering at Illinois. When her father, the dean of Bombay Veterinary College, came to visit, she brought him to her workplace to meet her mentor, UI professor James Economy, an expert in water purification.

“All three of us were talking about materials that can kill bacteria in water,” Parkar recalls.

“My dad said, ‘We have a problem [preserving] milk in India – can this [process] be tailored for food products?’”

Parkar took her father up on his suggestion, and within two weeks concluded it “might have some promise.” Thus was born Milkshield, a simple insert that can be placed in any container of milk to preserve it for up to 72 hours at temperatures up to 100 degrees. For farmers in India, who routinely sell milk from the few cows they own for their livelihood, a spoiled product means the family goes hungry.

As Parkar refined the technology, her husband, Nihal Parkar, MS ’10 (UIC), got involved. With a background in food science and chemical engineering, he supervised the quality and taste of milk that had been exposed to the shield, which is a screen injected with nanoparticles of silver, known for its anti-microbial properties.

The University continued to play a part in Parkar’s venture. She co-founded Silverscreen, a company to commercialize the idea (with Economy), and received funding, networking opportunities and lab space at the UI Research Park via Illinois Launch, a program that supports entrepreneurship. UI business students helped with financial planning, while law students drafted the first patent proposal.

While Milkshield remains in a transitional phase, Parkar’s flair for ingenuity is continually honed at her current job at 3M in Minneapolis, where she is a research engineer. Every day, Parkar says, she strives to “invent something for the common people, something that’s useful. I try to get funding, try to get interest. So I continue to be [an entrepreneur].”

For Zeba Parkar, fresh ideas never stop.

Objects lesson
Kevin Karsch not being a young man inclined to aha moments, his genius idea – and “genius” does not seem to be an exaggeration – took shape over a period of years, beginning with his undergraduate career at the University of Missouri, where he studied computer science because he wanted to make video games. Heading to Illinois to continue computer studies in doctoral mode at the College of Engineering, he encountered computer science professors Derek Hoiem and David Forsyth, who pointed him toward work in 3-D computer graphics. The upshot has been the development of a program of eerie character and profound implications.

Karsch can take a digital photograph and electronically insert one or more objects into it, creating a completely convincing but essentially fictional new version of the image. He has written software that adapts the photos, proportioning and lighting the new objects, materializing each in a manner that recalls a David Copperfield magical appearance in reverse – now you don’t see it, now you do.

When refined and streamlined, the technology could prove useful to, among others, furniture companies (how would that IKEA sofa look in the living room?), educators (the Colosseum in its heyday pictured in the cityscape of modern Rome, for example) and photographers (camera viewfinders that one day could allow selection and insertion of an object into a picture – Grandma, say, or the dog).

Far beyond such practical applications, though, Karsch’s research is about teaching computers how to see by delineating the parameters of photographic imagery. “If we can get a robot to understand a scene by taking a picture of it,” he explains, “the robot can then try to figure out how to move in that scene.” Difficult to grasp, yes, but an obvious advance over the Roomba.

And a big leap past Photoshop – an observation not lost on Adobe. The visual software company licensed Karsch’s technology from the University and hired him as an intern.

And that, for now, is as close to the business world as Karsch intends to get. “A startup is a lingering possibility,” he says. “But first I want to finish my doctorate.”

The EasyGo guys
The aha moment arrived on an Army plane making the long, long flight back from Afghanistan. Blake Schroedter ’08 LAS had been deployed there for a year, and when he came back out of the dust and blood, he was thinking about, well, protein shakes. Soldiers in the field stay alive on them, cutting the bottom off of an empty water bottle to serve as a funnel, then pouring the powder through it and into a second bottle containing water. Shake, quaff, toss, go. Efficient but messy. Couldn’t there be, Schroedter asked himself as he sat on the plane, a better way?

He teamed up with two other Illinois National Guard members: Mike Pett ’07 LAS, an old chum from the U of I and, beyond that, from Iraq; and Tony Genovese, a comrade from Afghanistan. The three brainstormed the EasyGo Pro, a container that stores, measures and dispenses protein powder. (The bottle of water still forms the disposable end of the process.)

They’ve been at work on the company for more than three years, funding it with their own money and soliciting pre-orders on Kickstarter (a website for entrepreneurs seeking support for their ideas). Through the Cozad New Venture Competition on campus, the trio got space in EnterpriseWorks; their operation has since moved to Chicago, where all three live, work and study. (Genovese is a student at the University of Illinois at Chicago.) When EasyGo launched in October, “we hit the ground running,” Schroedter says.

Unfortunately for the business plan, conflict of interest rules enjoin direct sales to the military. (A special program does allow folks back home to purchase individual dispensers for personnel in the field, and approximately 100 have made their way to Afghanistan.) The guys are shaking out plenty of market potential elsewhere, including bodybuilders, dieters and post-op bariatric surgery patients who aren’t allowed solid food. To date, EasyGo has sold more than 500 units in the U.S., Canada and Australia. The diminutive EasyGo Baby, specially created for mixing infant formula, is in design and expected to go on the market this spring.

Thanks to teamwork learned in the Army, Pett says, “at the end of the day we know how to get the job done,” while acknowledging “loss of sleep and fear of the unknown.”

Kind of like a soldier in the field.

Bringing it on
Such stories may never have happened without a cross-campus array of resources, from the encouragement of professors to the various programs and centers that support new University-related business ventures.

Hosted by the College of Engineering, the Technology Entrepreneur Center is an engine for startups. The College of Business houses the Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership as well as the Social Entrepreneurship Institute. Business students can also pursue course work and a major in entrepreneurship.

The Research Park nurtures student startups with space in a supportive environment. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications recently announced the launch of SPIN (Students Pushing Innovation), offering mentors and internships.

The annual Lemelson-MIT Illinois Student Prize carries a $30,000 award and has become synonymous with excellence in ideas and entrepreneurship. Prizes went to Naber (of Bump), Daigle (of IntelliWheels) and Karsch in 2010, 2011 and 2012, respectively.

Grace Under Pressure

Wed 19 Dec 2012 10:26 CST

After spine surgery and the possibility that she might never perform again, Emily Schaefer has danced back into the Illinettes spotlight

By Alyssa Szynal

In 2011, Emily Schaefer was a freshman living out her dream. A member of the Illinettes, the University dance team that performs at football and basketball games and with the Marching Illini, Schaefer was doing what she loved. Blonde, graceful and quietly ambitious, she spent almost every day bonding with her teammates and practicing hard. Then one day, she began experiencing pain after practice – and began a roller coaster ride of diagnoses, doctors and recovery.

Schaefer was at a practice with the Illinettes in January 2011 when she felt shooting pains down her legs. Her sister Megan, a senior at the time, took her to Carle Foundation Hospital in Urbana, where she received pain medication. A few days later, after going home to Crystal Lake because of the continuous pain, Schaefer was referred to Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, where doctors performed MRIs that revealed a benign tumor in her lower spine.

Because of the intense pain she was experiencing – and the fact that she wanted to get back to school and back to the Illinettes – she underwent surgery just four days after being diagnosed with the tumor. After surgery, Schaefer was not allowed to bend, twist or lift anything for four weeks. During this time of recovery, her surgeon stayed positive and uplifting, but not every doctor she saw had the same outlook.

“There was one surgeon in particular who came and talked to us. He was like, ‘There’s no way you’re going to go back to school, and there’s no way you’re ever going to dance again,’” Schaefer recalls.

Not willing to let that scenario become her future, Schaefer returned to school a week before she was allowed to bend, twist or lift. Just two or three weeks after being cleared stood a test of her strength: tryouts for the next year’s Illinettes. She determinedly tried out for the team – with no practice beforehand, and with the support of a back brace. And as a testament to her skills and passion, Schaefer made the team, the judges unaware of her condition.

Schaefer missed a total of five weeks of school between the diagnoses, surgery and recovery. After returning to Champaign, she went through two months of physical therapy and did work for her classes online, managing to finish the semester as a full-time student. Initially, she returned to her surgeon for MRIs and check-ups every three months, but now only does so once a year. “There's always the possibility of [the cancer] coming back, which is scary, but the surgeon thinks he got most of it out, so he does not believe it will,” she says.

A junior studying elementary education, Schaefer has opted out of joining the team next year because of her plans for student teaching. However, she hopes to stay involved with the team and her friends, who were her greatest support system throughout her recovery.

“Honestly, Illinettes is our lives,” Schaefer says. “We’re all really close, they’re my roommates right now. We do everything together. They would call me every single day, they would write on my Facebook every day. They inspired me to try my hardest.”

Szynal is a junior studying news-editorial journalism in the College of Media and was a fall intern at the UIAA.

The Big Jump

Wed 19 Dec 2012 10:09 CST

As Virgin Galactic’s chief adviser for the Abu Dhabi Spaceport, Steve Landeene wants to launch commercial travel beyond the stratosphere

By Nicole Moore
Photos courtesy of Virgin Galactic

In July 1969, the American flag was standing tall among craters 200,000 miles away from Earth, put there by the first man to set foot on the moon as the country cheered. As President John F. Kennedy had said some years before, “We need men who can dream of things that never were.”

Steve Landeene ’86 ENG is such a man. Under his direction – and contingent on gaining U.S. government approvals – the Abu Dhabi Spaceport is in the conceptual planning stages to offer Virgin Galactic commercial flights on which passengers will soar to 356,000 feet. Duration? Two hours. Cost of a ticket? $200,000. Feeling of weightlessness? Incomparable.

The flight program is expected to debut in early 2014 from Spaceport America in New Mexico. It will deploy the premiere spaceflight system the WhiteKnightTwo, which Landeene describes as a “majestic and unique 140-foot wingspan aircraft made entirely of carbon composite.” The plane, which carries a smaller, six-passenger craft known as the SpaceShipTwo (SS2), will soar to approximately 50,000 feet and release SS2. The second craft will then rocket upward, attaining an altitude of approximately 356,000 feet in approximately 60 seconds. Those on board will have three to five minutes of weightlessness, whereupon the SS2 will turn around, reenter the atmosphere and land, for a total joyride of about two hours. While flights initially are expected to cost $200,000 per person, Landeene is confident the price will become more affordable over time, observing that the goal of Virgin Galactic owner Sir Richard Branson “is to open space for all.”

For Landeene, getting the job with Virgin Galactic was no small feat. After graduating from Illinois and working for such firms as Honeywell Aerospace and Landmark Aviation (now Standard Aero), he learned in 2007 about an opening in New Mexico as executive director for Spaceport America – a state government facility that had secured Virgin Galactic as its anchor tenant. “The opportunity to work with such powerful brands,” Landeene recalls, “made the possibilities seems endless.” Asked in the job interview why he should be hired over highly qualified launch specialists, Landeene emphasized his business development and strategy skills, technical background and education. And in the end, “I was the right candidate for the job,” he notes.

Arriving in New Mexico, Landeene was faced with extreme and diverse pressures that ranged from taxation issues and environmental impact statements to launch site licenses and getting Virgin Galactic to commit to a 20-year lease. Had he not been able to accomplish all of these things within a year, he says, “Spaceport America would not exist today.”

In April 2012, Landeene’s post with Virgin Galactic was announced at the Global Aerospace Summit held in Abu Dhabi. Aabar Investments PJS, an Abu Dhabi company that invests in a select range of industries including aviation, took an investment in Virgin Galactic in 2009, paving the way for an eventual spaceport in the United Arab Emirate. Virgin Galactic was seeking “someone with spaceport development experiences,” notes Landeene. “I am pleased they asked me to help bring the Abu Dhabi spaceport to reality.”

More frequent and affordable space travel means more potential for scientific research, a prospect that Landeene finds extremely exciting. He believes such advances “may hold some of the answers in terms of understanding our fragile ecosystem, how to feed a growing population, powering a world with ever increasing demands and discovering new medicines to cure diseases.”

Moore is a University of Illinois junior majoring in English and linguistics. She was a fall 2012 intern at the UI Alumni Association.

Musician, Mentor, Leader

Tue 20 Nov 2012 13:59 CST

Dan Perrino leaves behind scores of memories and friends at the University of Illinois

By Vanessa Faurie

Early in his musical career, Dan Perrino ’48 FAA, MS ’49 FAA, may have been known as “62 Inches of Swing” (in reference to his height), but his lasting impact on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will forever loom large.

A beloved campus figure whose charm, talent and sincerity felled any and all he met, Perrino died Aug. 17 at age 91. More than 500 people flooded in from across the country for the musical celebration of his life, held at the Alice Campbell Alumni Center in September. The event underscored the message of empathy and empowerment that stood at the core of Perrino’s existence.

In terms of mere occupational titles, Perrino was a musician, band leader, professor and administrator. He also served on staff at the UI Alumni Association from October 1992-December 2001, planning programs for senior alumni and retired faculty in the area. Well-known as a mentor of young singers, he helped cultivate their talents and bring them to prominence in the local community.

Titles, however, don’t adequately reflect Perrino’s pioneering influences on longstanding traditions and institutions at the U of I.

His work to enhance and maintain life at the University created a more welcoming campus home and gave many students experiences they would never forget.

The Black Chorus (1968). African-American Cultural Program (1969). Quad Day (1971). La Casa Cultural Latina (1974). As dean of student programs and services from 1968-1976, Perrino had at least one hand, not to mention a very big heart, in the founding of these organizations and traditions, which continue to be cherished at the University to this day.

And then, of course, there was the Medicare 7, 8 or 9 Dixieland Jazz Band (1969).

What started out as an impromptu coming together of faculty and student musicians to quell the campus unrest of the late 1960s evolved into one of the most popular groups of goodwill ambassadors the University has known. A flexible ensemble that featured more than 120 musicians over the years, the Medicare group performed for University and alumni audiences throughout the nation until the late ’90s.

Thousands of students and alumni have been touched by these and other outreach efforts created at times when people who needed to understand one another better sometimes weren’t inclined to do so. But Perrino was a master bridge-builder, and his legacy lies in the ingeniously simple ways he developed to bring about a lasting human connection.

Faurie ’86 MEDIA is the UIAA vice president of corporate communications and interim associate chancellor of alumni relations.

A Long, Hot Summer

Tue 20 Nov 2012 13:20 CST

An alumnus recounts joining the Illini Alabama Project as an undergraduate and making civil rights history

By Ralph Tyler
Illustration by Mark Braught

Editor’s note: The Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1964 and 1965, respectively, were landmark pieces of legislation that declared racial segregation and discrimination unlawful. At the University of Illinois, students responded to the massive social changes of the ’60s in various ways, including the formation of the Illini Alabama Project, a registered student organization with 19 inaugural members, whose stated purpose was “to sponsor summer volunteer projects in the area of voter registration, political education and community organization.” In a June 4, 1966, Daily Illini story, student writer Rick Harper ’66 LAS recalled his hopes, frustrations and constant fear while working on the Illini Alabama Project in Greene County the previous summer and stated his intent to return. “I also remember,” he writes, ‘“that we had some good times, and that a change needs to come.” That summer, a young UI student named Ralph Tyler joined the Illini Alabama initiative. This is his memoir.

In 1966, I was 19 years old and had just finished my freshman year at the University of Illinois. The experience of that summer 46 years ago was too important to my development for me not to retain vivid memories. I remember the satisfaction of being with a group of people who worked together in common purpose on something which mattered; I remember times when I feared for my personal safety; I remember the deep pain and sorrow of a fellow worker’s accidental drowning and his tear-filled funeral; and I remember the dust and heat of July and August in rural Alabama.

I knew that student activists from other universities had assisted desegregation efforts in the South, and I decided that was what I was going to do. I believed then and I believe now that you try to find ways you can make a difference. At first I applied directly to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but when I found out about the Illini Alabama Project workers via their table in the Illini Union, I went with them.

Limited resources, rudimentary conditions

More than 80 percent of Greene County’s residents then were African-Americans (a term not yet in use), few of whom were registered to vote and none of whom held public office. The level of African-American poverty and deprivation in the county was extreme. As my co-worker, Rick Harper, wrote in The Daily Illini, their “condition is only hinted at by the fact that median annual family income for Negroes is still less than $1,000” ($7,110 in today’s dollars).

Segregation was practiced aggressively in Greene County. The minority of white citizens controlled all of the institutions of power and had no interest in sharing power or opportunity with the African-American majority. The condition of the streets in Greene County graphically captured the disparity between the races: In the white sections, the streets were paved; in the African-American parts, virtually all were unpaved and sometimes deeply rutted.

The three University of Illinois students who worked in Greene County were Harper, Bob Felber ’67 LAS and I. Our office was a one-room building located at 317 Greensboro Road, Eutaw, Ala., and had a desk, a couple of folding chairs, a pay telephone on the back wall, a hand-cranked mimeograph machine and Bob’s sleeping bag and record player. Bob slept on the office floor, while Rick and I slept in a spare room in a house a short walk away.

Saying that we “worked” in Greene County does not mean that we were paid. Rick had done some fundraising on campus prior to departing for Greene County, and each of us had brought a little money. We used our limited resources to pay for food, office supplies and gas for the much-used Chevrolet which Bob drove to Alabama and which we used to travel throughout the county. After we exhausted our funds, friends in Illinois, including my aunt, Priscilla Tyler, then a professor in the UI Department of English and College of Education, provided additional financial support. Aunt Priscilla always accepted my collect calls. During one such call, she agreed immediately to wire money so we could purchase a whole pig for the approaching Greene County “Roots Day” barbecue, an annual community event.

Our daily work involved going door-to-door, i.e., sharecropper shack to sharecropper shack. I found their living conditions to be very rudimentary, with uninsulated buildings, few belongings, poor clothing and poorer nutrition. While some people certainly were fearful of taking steps that might evict them, others were amazingly brave. Their reception of us was generally positive as we organized sharecroppers, talked to people about registering to vote, accompanied them to registration and spoke to students and their parents about having the courage to integrate the still all-white Greene County High School that fall.

Our communication strategy also involved newsletters and notices, all of which we wrote, produced and distributed, starting early on Sunday mornings at churches around the county. These fliers announced upcoming “mass meetings,” held in the evenings in various churches, where everyone sat in the plain wooden pews, and people, particularly the women, tried to cool themselves with hand fans. The speakers, many of whom were local ministers, would talk about what was going on in the “movement,” plans for future actions, how much remained to be done and the need to get more people involved. In between passing out the leaflets and attending the night-time meetings, we’d drive to the county’s far south end and cool off by swimming in the warm and murky water of an abandoned gravel pit.

Boycott, jail time and vindication

One Saturday morning in July, Bob, I and Libbie Kirkland, a local African-American teenager who frequently participated in our activities, were on the sidewalks of Eutaw’s shopping district, passing out fliers urging people not to patronize the local stores that refused to hire African-Americans and to shop instead where African-Americans had jobs. This activity upset both merchants and local law enforcement authorities and led to our arrest. As Greene County Sheriff Bill Lee escorted us to a police car, he asked whether we had read Alabama’s anti-boycott law. If we had replied to his question, which we did not, the answer would have been “no.” Lee assured us that he never acted without first becoming fully versed in the relevant law and suggested we would be well-advised to follow his example.

Bob and I were put in separate cells in the jail’s relatively upscale “white section,” and Libbie was taken to the “colored section.” Segregating us by race seemed ironic, given what we were doing in Greene County and the conduct which triggered our arrest, but our jailers didn’t seem to appreciate it.

Once we were released from our brief stint in jail, we learned that Sheriff Lee had a point. Alabama law made it a misdemeanor to circulate “any notice of boycott … [or] publishing or declaring that a boycott or ban exists or has existed or is contemplated against any person, firm, corporation, or association of persons doing a lawful business.” While law school was still several years away, I was able to discern that we had done what the law prohibited.

We had the great good fortune to be represented by a fine lawyer, Donald A. Jelinek, who had an office in Selma, Ala., where he did civil rights work, including representing civil rights workers. T.H. Boggs, the local district attorney, dismissed the charges against us after Jelinek commenced a federal lawsuit challenging Alabama’s anti-boycott law on First Amendment grounds guaranteeing free speech. When all the legal proceedings were concluded in the case Kirkland v. Wallace 403 F. 2d 413 (5th Cir. 1968), we faced no charges, and the law was declared unconstitutional.

Later that summer we used Jelinek’s services for a case to be brought on behalf of African-American farmers in Greene County and elsewhere in Alabama. Filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., against the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the case challenged the system of elections used to select members for the local bodies that determined cotton crop allotments. The election system was rigged to prevent participation by African-Americans, which, of course, meant that they fared poorly in the allotments they received.

I drove a borrowed VW van to transport African-American farmers from Greene County to D.C. for the preliminary injunction hearing in the case. We drove through the night, both there and back. After stopping to eat in Virginia, my friends told me that was their first experience of dining in a restaurant with white people. While in Washington, we stayed in the Georgetown home of two prominent lawyers, Jean and Edgar Cahn.

Our trip to Washington was a success. The court issued a preliminary injunction, ordering that the elections in Alabama be postponed. That allowed for more time to encourage candidates to run, increasing the likelihood of a fairer and more racially inclusive process.

Legacy of the Illini Alabama Project

Every summer vacation comes to an end. When we left Greene County, Rick went to graduate school at the University of Chicago, and Bob and I returned to Champaign. I moved into a room in Townsend Hall for my sophomore year.

What, then, is the legacy of the Illini Alabama Project? As far as I know, it did not last beyond 1966, and that was as it should be. The role of white people in the civil rights movement was somewhat fraught from the outset, and by 1966 that issue had become a divisive distraction. There was also the undeniable fact that racial separation and discrimination were (and are) national, not regional, afflictions, thus making the idea of “going to the South,” rather than to, say, Chicago, Cleveland or Detroit, an anachronism at best.

While the legal framework of segregation has been dismantled, barriers and disparities between the races remain enormous. None of this diminishes the fact that the Illini Alabama Project had its place and served a worthy purpose. I have no doubt that all those who participated in and supported the project in 1965 and 1966 did some good and that each learned from the experience. One cannot ask more from a college activity.

I hope that students currently on the three campuses of the University of Illinois are finding worthwhile ways to become engaged, to learn and to test their evolving beliefs against the reality of the world. One of the great luxuries of going to college is that it is a time set aside to prepare for the lifetime to follow, one which I hope includes fulfilling work to make the world a more peaceful and more equitable place.

Tyler ’69 LAS, a partner in the law firm of Venable LLP, works in the firm’s offices in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. He is the former deputy attorney general of Maryland, Baltimore city solicitor and chief counsel of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Rules Of The Game

Tue 20 Nov 2012 10:25 CST

How Kim Vandenbroucke got to be a top player in the challenging world of game invention

By Mary Timmins
Photos by Callie Lipkin

Rule 1: Games are invented.

Not created.

Not developed.

And not hammered together by Santa in his North Pole workshop. Elves do that.

Games are invented.

This caveat may never turn up in Hoyle’s Rules of Games. But it is key to understanding the world of Kim Vandenbroucke ’02 FAA. Vandenbroucke is a member of the wee coterie, the small curious community that supplies game companies with compelling diversions wrought in boards and cards and dice and consoles that squawk when you hit them. It’s a world where the playing goes on forever, but the rules change and never at a quicker pace than now. It’s a world where Vandenbroucke is ascending to the top – of her game.

Visit with the inventor in her airy, pleasant Chicago townhouse – where she plays at least one game a day with her husband, Paul Grzybek ’99 ACES, a firefighter – and she will propose that you yourself now play a game with her. She sits at her desk, a long, flat wall unit extending deep into the windowed closet that she has neatly shelved and platformed and aligned into a workspace. You sit next to her. She gets down the game: Cover to Cover, which involves a scavenger hunt through headache-bright teen magazines. You must find plaid pants, among other items, while she seeks a face with freckles. She finds the freckles and hits the console, which would squawk if it had batteries. So she wins. You knew she would. But you are laughing.

“If a game makes you feel bad for losing,” she tells you, “it’s not a good game.”

Copy that. It’s Rule 2.

----------

In the alluring realm of creative things that sell, games are rather like books. Whether Jane Austen or John Grisham, well-known authors can go paging profitably on forever – likewise for beloved diversions such as Monopoly and chess. And as with breakthrough bestsellers, newcomer games require an elusive – even magical – combination of elements and luck to propel popular success. Most games need a really long time “to get hot,” as Vandenbroucke puts it, yet retailers sweep shelves ruthlessly clear every quarter or so to make way for the next new-new thing. This economic clash of conditions – slow development vs. quick sell – means the toy and game market belongs to big manufacturers, who license the work of individual inventors and small firms and favor well-known brands. Royalty checks are involved. Big sales are hoped for. Long shelf life is the Holy Grail.

In this challenging milieu, Vandenbroucke has invented a brilliant career, licensing or co-licensing a dozen-odd games to date with such major manufacturers as Mattel, Winning Moves, Cranium, Briarpatch, Pressman Toy and Hasbro. Her work sells in toy stores worldwide. She writes for industry magazines and is a featured speaker at industry events. Two thousand people follow her on Twitter. Her blog, The Game Aisle, is the first of its kind, drawing 1,500 visitors a month to read her reviews and winning her the title Wonder Woman of Toys, a distinction conferred in 2011 by Women In Toys, a professional association, and Playthings Magazine, a respected trade journal.

In March, Vandenbroucke gave an address at the Smithsonian as part of the museum’s Innovative Lives series, speaking on what it means to be an inventor. Since her days in the early aughts as an industrial design major at the University of Illinois, she says, she has liked “coming up with little inventions, little mechanisms and stuff like that.”

The use of “little” makes for something of an understatement. Last year, Vandenbroucke was nominated by a vote of her colleagues for a Toy & Game Inventor Award of Excellence. Among the industry’s very highest honors, this kudo tends to go to inventors of much longer experience.

“Kim is absolutely one of the top game inventors,” observes Mary Couzin, president of the Chicago Toy and Game Group. “If she were a musician, she’d be on the cover of Rolling Stone – she’s that good.” According to Couzin, Vandenbroucke has a genius for the mechanics of how games work and for inventing “clever games that are alluring but familiar” and that keep players rolling back for more.

“She has a really broad spectrum – from adult party games to preschool,” notes Peggy Brown, a game inventor based in Milwaukee. Running this gamut is, Brown points out, a good thing for game inventors to do. “That way you don’t compete with yourself.”

Thus we meet Rule 3.

Success, early and astonishing

Vandenbroucke began specializing in board, card and dice games (a relatively small segment of the $2 billion toy and game industry) in 2004, shortly after she went to work for Meyer/Glass Design, a Chicago toy and game invention firm. She landed there among other Illini recruited by senior designer Randy Klimpert ’82 FAA, who noticed first-hand that the U of I produces exceptional inventors. His observation proved correct. Within six months, Vandenbroucke invented Cover to Cover, the game played at the beginning of this story.

Cover to Cover involves magazines and a console and cards with short descriptors – like “plaid pants” and “freckles” – and an appeal aimed at the 9-14 age group known as tween girls. Tween girls are a desirable but elusive consumer target. At times toy and game manufacturers attempt to lure tween dollars with new games. At other times the same companies reintroduce new editions of old games and hope the tweens (or their mothers) buy those. Vandenbroucke – who likes inventing mass-market games in general and is not focused on any one particular consumer segment – describes tweens as “fickle.” Hasbro executives reviewed Cover to Cover after Vandenbroucke invented it. They were in high new-tween-game mode at the time and licensed Cover to Cover, agreeing to produce and distribute the game for a set period of time. It was the first game Vandenbroucke ever invented. Such immediate success was astonishing, both at Meyer/Glass and in the industry as a whole.

Cover to Cover went retail in time to get nominated for a couple of awards and go on the shelves for the 2004 holiday season. But tweens did not buy Cover to Cover. “The excitement level just dropped off, and all of a sudden it was in KB Toys for five bucks,” Vandenbroucke says, adding of such disappointments, “You have to be OK with that.

“You have to know that you’re still going to be able to survive if one of your items falls out of the mix.”

And that would be Rule 4.

----------

Meyer/Glass closed in 2006 – in a market increasingly dominated by manufacturers, few such mid-size invention firms now survive. Vandenbroucke, on the other hand, went on to major licensing success. In 2009, she invented Scattergories Categories, a game that calls for players to find words that begin with each of the letters from a category name and are related to the category. The game is an addition to the mighty Scattergories line of word games.

“She took [the original] Scattergories and actually made a better game of it,” Couzin points out.

Vandenbroucke invented part of Scattergories Categories on her honeymoon. This was not in her original nuptial plan. A month or so before she and Paul flew off to Dominica, she had submitted a proposal to Scattergories manufacturer Winning Moves. Manufacturers being the way they are, she wasn’t looking for a speedy reply. But en route home, she checked her email. “I was, like, ‘Oh, my gosh!’” Vandenbroucke recalls. “They want more categories by two days from now!” So there in the airport in Puerto Rico, awaiting their flight back to Chicago, the newlyweds began frantically writing categories and words related to the categories. One of the categories they came up with was MARRIAGE. When Winning Moves executives saw the work, they asked her to complete the game and license it to them. Scattergories Categories has since sold in the tens of thousands. It is by far Vandenbroucke’s most successful game. It is also her favorite. Not just of the games she’s invented. It is her favorite game of all games of all time.

“I love it,” Vandenbroucke says. “And I love it when I win.”

And loving it when you win makes a pretty good Rule 5.

Seeds, windows and brainstormsSeeds, windows and brainstorms

Vandenbroucke invents her games in the same progression that Hemingway once said bankruptcy comes on – gradually and then suddenly. She carries a little notebook with her and writes down ideas as they come to her – she calls these experiences “seeds.” Mostly the “seeds” sleep in the notebook until fertilized by opportunity, such as the openings to talk with manufacturers provided at major toy and game shows. (There are two annually, in New York and Chicago.) She knows the kinds of games that appeal to different manufacturers, and she’ll zoom in on new ideas accordingly. She calls this “inventing into windows,” and windows are good places to sprout seeds. Once Vandenbroucke has the idea for a game, she writes it up. She also fashions a playable prototype that she can demonstrate, creating board, cards and pieces as appropriate and even engaging in what she describes as “light electronics” – used, for example, in consoles that squawk when you hit them.

Vandenbroucke also sidelines in brainstorming. She uses techniques for creative thinking developed in her Meyer/Glass days to facilitate sessions for companies that want to find new ways to do the things they do. Better paper goods, furniture, collectibles, bakery items – brainstorming can help improve all kinds of products, and Vandenbroucke facilitates it as long as the products involved are not toys and games. “I wouldn’t want to inadvertently steal an idea,” she explains.

Good work, plus it balances the games, kind of the way a pole balances a tightrope walker. Business at her company, Brainy Chick, fluctuates. This year has mostly been games. Two years ago was mostly brainstorming.

That’s one thing we always tell new inventors,” she says. “Have another source of income.”

Hello, Rule 6.

Trends and play

When people ask Vandenbroucke whether the kinds of games she invents are dying because of video games and phone apps, she has a two-word answer for them, and that’s “totally not.”

Games, she insists, are as in demand as ever, sought by, among others, young adults and families who want inexpensive entertainment (the recession working in favor of business, for once) and libraries looking to broaden their services and appeal. Couzin of the Chicago Toy and Game Group confirms this: “More people are playing games than ever before in history.”

There are even strong new trends, such as games coming from Europe that demand long playing times and extensive practice for mastery. While Vandenbroucke herself favors mass-market games with playing times of 30 minutes max, the popularity of the new generation of “Euro games” means she can consider imbuing her games with more complicated strategies.

Vandenbroucke admires how tablet computers, such as the iPad, are now being incorporated as a functioning part of the board in some games, though she regards this more as innovation – a strategy for companies to expand their popular brands – than inspiration.

She’s less enthusiastic about gaming apps for mobile phones, dismissing them as the purview of manufacturers who have the resources to develop and market such spinoffs.

I am not,” she concedes, “a technology-heavy inventor.”

For Vandenbroucke, games aren’t about “something to do when you’re standing in line at the grocery store.” Games gather friends and family for fun. She herself grew up in a household of game-players. She loves games and plays them all the time, inviting friends over to test out the new games that manufacturers keep sending her. In her reviews on The Game Aisle, Vandenbroucke goes out of her way to chat with the inventors and include their remarks, offering the warmth of good publicity in what can be a pretty chilly calling.

For Kim Vandenbroucke is a player in more ways than one.

This year alone I’ve had a bunch of games pushed back. One dropped,” she says. “And there’s nothing you can do to see it coming. It’s hard. It’s definitely not for the faint of heart.”

Notes her colleague Tim Walsh, a game inventor and industry historian: “I’ve never seen Kim in a bad mood. She’s very upbeat and has a great sense of humor. That serves her well in an industry that says, ‘No,’ all the time.”

And so to close with Rule 7: Winning isn’t everything. But it helps.

Now Hear This: Alumni's Greatest Hits

Sal Nudo — Wed 26 Sep 2012 14:35 CST

From Chances R to REO, Illinois graduates share their music memories from the rock ‘n’ roll revolution days on campus

“When I first came to UIUC in 1969, there was a local group that played all the little local joints -- bars, pizza joints, etc. We all thought they were pretty good, for a local band. Their name? REO Speedwagon.”

Bob Herlien ’73 ENG

“The best show I’ve ever seen was U2 back on Oct. 22, 1987, at Assembly Hall. This was part of U2’s ‘Joshua Tree’ tour, and U2 was just starting to get big. The energy and excitement on campus was absolutely amazing. Bono was all over campus, like he was just some regular guy, interacting with the students, including playing and singing at the Tri Delta house.”

Scott Isenhart ’90 ENG

“The Replacements in '82 or '83. Best of the bunch. Caught them at a pizzeria above the former White Hen Pantry on the [southeast] corner of Sixth and Green. They were touring for their bootleg cassette, which is still hiding somewhere in my parents’ attic. I had a beer at the pizzeria's bar with Paul Westerberg, who was drunk before they played their first song!"

Julie Siegfried Risenhoover ’85 ACES

“In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s it was Talking Heads, Joan Jett and the Pretenders at [Foellinger Auditorium]. We hung out at Mabel’s for live music, where chairs were passé … just pillows man!”

James G. Graham ’81 SW, MA ’84 LIR

“How good was the music scene? Good enough to walk a mile in sub-zero weather to pick up a date, then walk another mile to the club, then dance and stay late, then repeat the long walk home. Worth it? Oh, yeah. … The local music scene in Champaign was far better than the many far more famous groups I saw at Assembly Hall – Rolling Stones, Chicago, Blood, Sweat and Tears and on and on.” Stephen Chicoine ’72 LAS

“As far as live music and venues, you cannot beat the Canopy Club in my opinion. It is just the right size with the perfect lighting to enjoy a concert. … The Canopy Club is actually my favorite venue, and I have been to numerous venues all over the country."

Brandon Steffen ’03 BUS

“I saw Wilco live at Foellinger Auditorium. I remember that I was surprised that they were playing at Foellinger because I didn't think of that as a music venue ... only as a place where I had history class. So it was very cool to see Wilco perform at night, in the same building where I just had history class."

Brandon Steffen '03 BUS

“One of the funniest things I remember is hearing Steve Goodman singing an entire song praising the Assembly Hall, thinking he was there, then finding out at the end that we were in [Foellinger Auditorium]. He felt really foolish and was good at laughing at himself.”

Nancy Landeen Berendt ’78 LAS, MA ’80 (UIC)

“I recall going to a concert in about 1970 [or] ‘71 at the Assembly Hall. The warm up bands were B.B. King and Ike and Tina Turner. Then the Rolling Stones came out! Mick Jagger looked up at the shape of the Assembly Hall and said, ‘I feel like I've been swallowed by a giant clam.’”

Ken Bus ’72 LAS, MA ’75 LAS

“For U of I students, C-U was a local music mecca. You could hear up-and-coming talent in clubs around town for cheap.”

Mabel's on Green Street brought nationally known groups to campus.

Mark Bohrer ’77 ENG, MS ’82 ENG

“It's amazing how many acts recorded first at Pekin, Illinois’, Golden Voice Studios. Dan Fogelberg, REO Speedwagon and Starcastle all did their first vinyl there. Thanks for sparking so many good memories.”

Mark Bohrer ’77 ENG, MS ’82 ENG

“Most disappointing concert – Grateful Dead. They were wonderful live but hated being confined to a concert with a time-limit – and we knew that going in. When the Assembly Hall power was turned off to stop the concert, both the band and the crowd hated it.”

Joyce Snodgrass Donahue ’74 LAS, MA ’76 LAS

“There were the ‘dorm window concerts.’ On a nice day, people would be out lounging around on the grass, while others were blasting their speakers out the windows. The most popular two songs were ‘Smoke on the Water’ and ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ Ah, those were the days!”

Joyce Snodgrass Donahue ’74 LAS, MA ’76 LAS

“Mabel's was the place to go for live music right on the strip. I went there regularly with my friends to see Kool Ray and the Polaroidz and other local bands. Great place.”

Gail Schmoller Philbin ’81 LAS, MS ’83 MEDIA

“My favorite and shortest show was when Ozzy Osborne came to Champaign. He had this great Gothic stage set up. His band came out and started rocking. Soon the Oz man came out from below stage, took the mic in his hand and screeched, ‘Over the mountain.’ He then proceeded to collapse backward to the ground. His band played out the song and various roadies came out and carried Ozzy off stage. Everyone thought it was all part of the act until the lights came on, followed by an announcement that Ozzy was ill. What a great memory.”

Michael Comm ’84 BUS

“Spent lots of weekends at the Red Herring Coffee House in Urbana. Though Dan Fogelburg had already moved on, he was still considered a house favorite! REO Speedwagon played regularly in town; it seems like they were often at the Red Lion Inn in Champaign. Monday nights were dime beer night."

Mary McCarty Lewis ’74 LAS

“Met my husband at U of I in grad school. I dragged him to the Ravi Shankar concert in 1973. Being an engineer and not into the Eastern/Indian scene, he spent most of the concert exclaiming how unbelievable the acoustics were at Krannert Hall. … We're still married 37 years later.”

Isola Enger Metz ‘73

“Thanks for taking the time to write an article on the campus music scene! I can still look at my CD collection and remember when and where I purchased an album on campus, and the feeling of excitement as I completely immersed myself into being a heavy metal fan.” -- Steve Duvall ’02 AHS
“I remember going to a Peter, Paul and Mary concert at the Assembly Hall during the time I was at Illinois. It was just after the Assembly Hall opened, and the place was packed. What I specifically remember about that concert was a statement made by Peter, or maybe it was Paul. The audience had started clapping to one of the songs they [were] singing, and he said, ‘You can't clap because you can't clap!’ That stopped the clapping, and it has stuck with me for the last 50 years!”

Gary Herridge ’65 ENG, MS ’66 ENG

“In '86, I have vivid memories of seeing Journey at Assembly Hall. I wasn't going to go to the show, but a bunch of folks from the dorm I lived at freshmen year were going and they had an extra ticket. Couple that with the fact that there were a bunch of young ladies going, and I was in!”

Mark Giltmier ’90 ENG

“Saw U2 in 1982 at [Foellinger Auditorium] when I was a senior in high school. Took my daughter to [Sports Authority Field] this last year while [she was] a senior in high school to see U2, so a complete circle."

Steve Brown, MS ’85 ENG

“Farm Aid! Was there all day and can go on and on about that. Sun came out when [the] Beach Boys hit the stage. Mellencamp, Neil Young, Dylan, Billy Joel, Roy Orbison, Van Halen with Sammy Hagar, etc., etc.”

Steve Brown, MS ’85 ENG

“Big change in the 1980s had to be the emergence of Mabel's as the hot place for new local bands. I was especially big on Vertebrats and Combo Audio. I produced and directed the cable documentary of the Vertebrats at Mabel's. It was almost a compulsion – I had to do it; there was something about the band and their audience that fascinated me.”

G. David Frye ’79 ENG, MS ’85 ENG

“I am sorry to say that the current music scene does not really compare to what was happening here in the ‘70s and ‘80s. I don't think it's just me being an old fuddy-duddy. Truth is, there isn't the same drive to bring interesting but not necessarily famous acts to town. Back then you had the [Illini] Union, Channing-Murray, student organizations, churches and the local bars all working to provide entertainment every weekend.”

G. David Frye ’79 ENG, MS ’85 ENG

“Being a townie from Urbana, we started the bar/music scene at a young age. … Since we were all young and bullet-proof, we bought the ticket and took the ride. … I started at the U of I in '75 and didn't finish until '83, if that's any indication of how much fun we were having.”

Eric Jackson ’83 ACES

“Fortunately, I was at Illinois in the days before rock ‘music’ became popular. That was in the 1950s, when music consisted of big bands playing danceable tunes. So I regard the music trends since then as unfortunate and not worth wasting paper and time on.”

Homer Dalbey ’52 MEDIA

“By far the best local [band] was REO Speedwagon at the Red Lion for 50 cents. Although they had not yet made it big, they blew the doors off. Don't suppose the fire marshal would have approved the place jam-packed, but what a great time! You could fool around and do anything in the corners because no servers or bouncers could get around. But good luck getting to the bar to get a drink!”

Carl Palczewski ’75 ENG

“By far the best place to go dancing was Chances R in downtown Champaign. Didn't matter who was there, people were always willing to dance. They started playing early and it was hopping till closing.”

Carl Palczewski ’75 ENG

“I was the music director and 6-9 p.m. DJ on WPGU from 1977 to 1980 and had the best concert experiences on campus at [Foellinger Auditorium] and Assembly Hall, at the clubs and backstage.”

Kevin Johnson ’80 MEDIA

“One of the greatest things on the music scene in the '70s was the love affair between Illinois and Harry Chapin. He would come there two or three times a year. Most times he was doing the concert for charity. He usually did them in [Foellinger Auditorium] because the cost was less so more could go to charity.”

Max Helix ’75 ENG, MS ’76 ENG, PHD ’79 ENG

“The day of the [U2 ticket] lottery, I arrived at the Illini Union to take my place in line. The tickets were being dispensed from an office on the second floor, straight down the hall from the Alumni Association. The line, without exaggerating, ran all the way down the stairs, wrapped twice around the entire ground floor hallway of the Union, and then out the [southwest] back exit of the Union and out across the Quad.”

Jeff Abbott ’88 LAS

“I was walking down John Street on the same block as Presidential Towers, heading to dinner at my fraternity in the late afternoon around 4:45 p.m. A lone man was walking toward me, in a long trench coat with shoulder-length hair. As he [drew] nearer, I realized it was Bono. I said, ‘Hey, Bono, the concert was amazing,’ and he stopped and said, ‘Thanks, man, that really means a lot.’ I had a brief moment to share [with him] … and thanked him for including the University of Illinois on their tour stop.”

Jeff Abbott ’88 LAS

“I remember seeing Yes in 1991. I won the ticket lottery and got second-row seats. We were … able to shake some of the band members’ hands – although Steve Howe pulled away and wouldn't shake hands. He looked at me as if I had cooties. I think he had a phobia of germs.”

Sheri Steffes Menelli ’92 LAS

“Mabel's was the center of the universe for us back then, because of George Faber. … We students didn't have much money, but we always found a way to buy tickets for these shows!”

John Trumbull ’83 LAS

“REO Speedwagon was huge, justifiably, since they were local. … I only went to the Rolling Stones concert at the big cement flying saucer because my boyfriend was into them. I didn't much like [them] at the time. Love [them] now! I'd go again.”

Kathie Fagan ’72 LAS

“Kool Ray and the Polaroidz at Mabel’s! Eargasm at the Red Lion. Springsteen concert at Assembly Hall really stood out. Others were Heart, Billy Joel, REO Speedwagon and Santana. The concerts were a huge deal. There would be a lottery to determine the order in which you could purchase tickets.”

George Mocogni ’82 BUS

“A favorite memory of mine from the ‘60s was hearing the group One-Eyed Jacks, which performed locally as well as in area towns. … This group had terrific vocals and sound- system integration for their time, and I compared them to the Beach Boys in vocal quality and music arrangements.”

Bob Stiehl, MS ’77 FAA

“I was the local and live music host on WEFT 90.1 FM for eight years … and had my finger on the pulse of the local music scene, in what I consider to be the richest era of C-U's local music history. It was during the alternative/grunge boom of the ‘90s.”

Santanu Rahman ’96 LAS, EDM ‘00

“After I started going out with the woman to whom I have now been married to for 23 years, we realized we both were at [the same] party when we both remembered the Sturgeons playing ‘Blister in the Sun.’ I guess the gods didn’t want me to meet the love of my live that night, but [I met her] a few months later.”

Tim Dickson, MS ’88 ENG

“Rock music was a big part of my life during my years at the University between 1977 and 1981, to the point [that] I still have the Assembly Hall ticket stubs and a faded, now far-too-small Styx shirt. … I still love rock as much or more than I did then. I kept many of my LPs and fortunately married someone who loves the music and the stereo equipment as much as I do.”

Carolyn Vieth Boyles' husband loves music as much as she does.

Carolyn Vieth Boyles ’81 LAS

“At that time, the two best local bands were the One-Eyed Jacks and REO Speedwagon. REO Speedwagon did a killer imitation of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ by the Stones, which always got everybody going. The One-Eyed Jacks had some great-looking girls that went everywhere with the band.”

David Berman ’71 MEDIA

“We went to Mablel's a lot in the 1978 timeframe. I lost my hearing to George Thorogood the night that John Lennon was shot to death in New York. You should have seen that buzz move through the crowd.”

Chris Etcheson ’81 LAS

“Without a doubt, the heart and soul of the music scene [from] 1979-82 was the Vertebrats. You know how you read that everybody that was at the first Sex Pistols gig ended up starting a band or doing something interesting? That's how the early Vertebrats shows were.”

Cynthia Voelkl ’84 LAS

“For me, it didn’t get any better than listening to Duke Tumatoe & the All-Star Frogs at the original Red Lion Inn with a pizza and pitchers of cold beer. … Duke’s repertoire of R&B, rock, blues and funk was the best that came through C-U during my time on campus.”

Scott Pickard ’72 ENG, MS ’79 ENG

“It was a great time for music in the ‘70s. I remember fondly concerts at the Assembly Hall with Chicago, Blood Sweat & Tears, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and the time Loggins & Messina showed up late … [at] about 10 p.m., with finals the next day.”

Curt Lambdin ’74 FAA

“By far, my favorite place to see bands was Mabel's on Green Street. It was small, hot, loud and sweaty. It was the perfect place to see the up-and-coming bands. The bands were right there in your face; you could see the strings on the guitars and what kind of beer the band members were drinking. We were poor undergrads and used to pay the cover charge and sneak our own beer in to drink for the night.”

Lee D. Stromberg ’86 ACES, PHD ’91 ACES

“When R.E.M. came to C-U in [the early 1990s], they packed Assembly Hall. I was working as an usher and remember looking on … seconds before the show to watch [lead singer Michael Stipe’s] entrance. ‘This is going to be a great show,’ I said to no one in particular. A strong voice responded from behind with, ‘Yes, it is!’ and ‘Excuse me, love.’ As the stranger slinked by and bolted onstage, I realized it was [Michael Stipe], who immediately started with [‘Stand’], one of my favorites!”

Marjii Guichon Middleton ’92 BUS

“During my time on campus, the place for live music was always Mabel's. I lived at Lando Place Apartments, right there at Sixth and Green, and all the tour buses used to park in front of my building. I had the opportunity to meet a lot of up-and-coming bands, like Soundgarden, right in front of my place. My sorority pledge mom actually met her future husband there!”

Jeanne M. Bauer ’89 LAS, MA ’91 LER

“During my senior year, I frequently went to Mabel's to see such bands as Kool Ray and The Polaroidz, the Vertebrats and Combo Audio. We had so much fun dancing to these bands! I worked as an account executive in advertising sales for WPGU, so we often went to Mabel's for promotions as well.”

Julie Cato Guida ’81 MEDIA

“I met my husband [as an undergraduate] and we connected because of music. There was a great band called Otis and the Elevators that played at Mabel’s. I still have their LP and play it.”

Laura Luckman Kelber ’92 LAS, MBA ‘97

“I remember seeing the Ramones and the Talking Heads at [Foellinger Auditorium], though not at the same time. What a great setting. I was up next to the speakers at the side of the stage for the Ramones. I couldn't hear through my left ear for three days after that concert. I think all the great music I heard while at the U of I contributed to my somewhat faulty hearing these days.”

Catherine Friedman ’80 LAS, MS ’83 LIS

“First and foremost, Mabel's was a great place … no place else like it in C-U. I saw a lot of really good local bands there, and every now and then a bigger name would play. … It was cool to pay about $6 and be in the front row for great music … man, college was great!”

Mike Casteel ’88 BUS

“I was at the original Farm -Aid concert in 1985. Got there around 11:30 a.m. and stayed until the end. What an eclectic mix of dozens of bands, from X and Lou Reed to Neil Young and Foreigner. … Twelve hours of standing [at Memorial Stadium] in damp, chilly fall weather … a lifelong memory being made with about 15 friends who stuck it out with me.”

Mike Casteel ’88 BUS

“A few buddies … and I had a band back in the day called Feigning Hypodermia. What started as a way to cut loose on the weekends turned into quite the little experience for us. … Our lyrics ranged from goofy to just plain weird, and the music, although simple, was catchy. In fact, to this day, I have [a] copy of our album on my MP3 player. … Things ended for us when our lead guitarist, Colm, died in a car wreck over Christmas break. But before we lost him, he provided the lead vocals for our most locally germane tune, ‘Champaign-Urbana Blues.’”

Jon Van Benthem ’92 FAA, MARCH ’94 FAA

“I recall an all-night charity fundraiser/concert held at Huff Gym. I believe it was put on by one of the sororities. They had done a remarkable job of attracting some pretty respectable talent. I spent the wee hours of the early morning enjoying Harry Chapin sing his ballads. Harry had a certain affinity for the University of Illinois.”

Bill Kottas ’76 BUS

“The Red Herring opened on Friday, Sept. 15, 1967. It was absolutely packed that night, and my sister was one of the first musicians to play a stage set. I didn’t play onstage until September of 1970. The place was always filled with great singer/songwriters like Dan Fogelberg, Thom Bishop, Elliott Delman, Reinwand & Hamby, Les Urban, Linn Brown and Pete Swinnerton. … It was not unusual to see 600-800 people a night at Channing-Murray Foundation, which housed the Red Herring.”

Steve Cowan ’71 LAS

“I worked at the [Red] Herring from 1970 through 1973. … During that time I co-wrote a folk opera with Steve Melshenker called ‘The Ship,’ and we formed a group by that name which included Steve Reinwand (now Billy Panda), Mark Hamby and Todd Bradshaw. Getting gigs was never difficult on campus; there were many places to play acoustic music.”

Steve Cowan ’71 LAS

“When I transferred downstate in ’57-‘59, I hung out [at] Prenz Beer Joint and the Capitol. The Capitol had jazz like Brubek on the jukebox. My favorites [were] the “Going to Chicago Blues” and ‘Caledonia, Caledonia’ by Cab Calloway. It was great hearing a place full of people yelling ‘Caldonia, Caldonia,!’”

Carlene Lotty Blumenthal ’59 LAS

“I played in a campus band called the Mankind [from] 1966-68. We played at Kam’s and at many fraternity and sorority parties. Most of us were members of Phi Kappa Tau. But I remember the One Eyed Jacks as the best on campus at that time.”

Jim Oberweis ’68 LAS

“The Red Lion was the best! It replaced the Brown Jug as the go-to Thursday night place when the Brown Jug closed. I will always remember hearing REO Speedwagon here almost every Thursday night! This was before they made it big [on] the charts and on to Hollywood. Kevin Cronin was from my neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. They also played Rolling Stones numbers, and I especially remember dancing to ‘Brown Sugar!’”

Cathy Fitzgerald ’74 LAS, MBA ‘76

“Probably the best local band during this time period was the original REO Speedwagon with Terry Luttrell. They played at venues like Crystal Lake Park, Champaign County Fairgrounds, the Illini Union West Ballroom and the Urbana Civic Center. I could see them for $2 at the Civic Center in 1971! Great live show! Sadly, they were never the same after Luttrell left the band.”

Doug Carlyle ’77 ENG

Record Service on Green Street made the latest sounds available at affordable prices.

HOT SPOTS: C-U’s thriving music scene – then and now

Read “The School of Rock” article from the Fall 2012 Illinois Alumni magazine.

Memory Lane

Sal Nudo — Mon 17 Sep 2012 16:10 CST

Prior to personal computers, registering for class involved hits, misses and hoped-for home runs

By Dave Evensen

“I have an 8 a.m. English; does anybody have a 9 a.m.?”

Before the days of point, click and done, registering for classes at the University of Illinois went something like this:

“All I saw before me was
a blur of people.”
“It took me four hours – I still didn’t get what I wanted.”
“I was mad at everyone … I just
felt like walking out.”
–1973 Illio

A far cry indeed from today’s would-be scholars, those fortunate beneficiaries of the digital age, where class signup involves a cool 15 minutes with a computer. In the not-so-distant past (before going online in 1995), UI student registration was a much sweatier proposition, with combatants navigating a chaotic maze of lines, tables and fences, braving a mad round robin in the unair-conditioned and cinder-floored Armory.

Add in the shouting, laughing, bullhorns, police, Frisbees, roadblocks, solicitors, confusion and people fainting in the heat – and you understand why, the further back you go, registration remains a vivid – and most unforgettable – memory.

700,000 punch cards

Joseph Rank ’69 MEDIA, MS ’73 MEDIA, senior adviser and former vice president of membership at the UI Alumni Association, was employed as a student worker for registration during the 1960s. From a vantage point above the Armory floor, he says, student registration looked like Chicago’s Union
Stock Yards.

“These storm fences basically herded people,” Rank recounts. “You started at the southeast corner of the Armory, and you ended up at the northwest corner. It was like a big funnel.

“It was like going through the digestive tract.”

Using hard-copy course guides as thick as phone books, students would outline a schedule, obtain their advisers’ authorizations and then, at the appointed time, go to the Armory “with hordes of people,” says Ruth Cortright ’62 FAA, EDM ’67. “And you went to the class that was the most popular, and you stood in line for that one first.” Sometimes you could beg and plead your way into a closed section; if not, you’d be back at square one if you didn’t have an alternate plan.

“People tried to [trade] class cards,” recalls Becky Wauthier ’82 LAS, ’82 LAS, associate registrar for academic records who was a student in the 1970s. She remembers students trying to beat the system auctioneer-style: “I have an 8 a.m. English; does anybody have a 9 a.m.?”

Things became less hectic in the late ’70s, when registration by mail reduced Armory crowds to only those students needing course changes. Still, before personal computers were brought in to aid the procedure in 1982, approximately 200 staffers took three days to process more than 30,000 student schedules. Helping to smooth the way were 16 IBM keypunch machines; 700,000 punch cards; 68 windows to collect tuition and fees; police officers; and roadblocks on Gregory Drive.

Unsweet Surrender

In those days, virtually every conceivable University-related problem was settled on the Armory floor. A “surrender center” at the January 1976 registration drew nearly 200 students at their wits’ end. One of them was a young man from Mississippi who had misinterpreted the benefits of the GI Bill. He had packed his bags and set out for
Illinois, only to learn in the Armory that he still needed to apply for admission.

“He has gone back to Mississippi to start over, with a good deal of obvious sympathy and shared frustration,” the report read.

At registration, students also received tuberculosis vaccinations, dealt with parking permits and insurance, and had their ID photos taken (perhaps accounting for the large number of frazzled-looking students recorded in that period).
But it wasn’t all tension and tears.

“I personally loved the Armory, especially fall semester,” says Barb Wood, now a retired assistant registrar for record services.“Kids had been gone all summer, and they were coming back, and they’d see people they hadn’t seen. Lots of hugs. It was quite a social event,” she says. “Sometimes I really miss that. Sometimes I feel like we’ve taken something away from people.”

Evensen is a freelance writer living in Champaign.

The School of Rock

Sal Nudo — Mon 17 Sep 2012 13:19 CST

From Chances R to REO, the Red Lion Inn to All-Star Frogs, Foellinger Auditorium to The Finchley Boys, Illinois roared with the rock ’n’ roll revolution

By Doug Peterson

Chances R was packed, with smoke hanging low over the raucous crowd, as the band Cheap Trick prepared to begin its set. It was the early 1970s, and looking down on the stage from one of the club’s multilevel balconies were Geoff Poor ’71 LAS, from the group Feather Train, and George Faber, the shaggy-haired lead singer of The Finchley Boys.

As Cheap Trick began to play the power chords of its first song, a member of the band glanced up, spotted Faber and motioned for him to join them on stage. Over 6 feet tall and thin as a rail (“rock weight,” they called it), Faber was also one of the most electrifying showmen in the area, so he didn’t walk down – he leaped from the balcony, harmonica in hand, just as Cheap Trick launched into “Train Kept A-Rollin’.” He landed on the stage like a bolt from the blue and hurled himself into the music as the crowd erupted.

“That was the most magical rock ’n’ roll thing I had ever seen,” says Poor.

That is saying a lot because the 1960s and ’70s were a magical time for rock ’n’ roll on the University of Illinois campus. It was a heady time across the nation, but for a community the size of Champaign-Urbana, the ’60s and ’70s were unique, producing an astounding variety of music and bands. Major acts, such as The Eagles, played the UI campus bar scene, but the heart and soul of C-U music were the local bands that toured throughout the Midwest – The Regiment, Head East, The One-Eyed Jacks, Duke Tumatoe and The All-Star Frogs, Starcastle, Ginger, Feather Train, The Ship, The Rave, The Finchley Boys and so many more. Out of this mix, some would go on to make their mark on a national stage, most notably rockers REO Speedwagon and the late folksinger Dan Fogelberg ’71.

“The thing that always amazed our whole band was how competitive and how good the music was in Champaign,” says Gregg Philbin ’69 MEDIA, who played bass guitar for REO Speedwagon from 1968 to 1977. “I have been all over the country, and perhaps the only music scenes that were on a level or higher were, of course, Nashville, and Austin, Texas.

“Champaign has always produced incredible musicians.”

Chances R was the first important club to get it rolling, says Larry Fredrickson ’73, a music education major with the group Ginger. Chances R opened in downtown Champaign in 1966; shortly thereafter, the area’s second iconic club – the Red Lion – arrived at Third and Green streets. With the Brown Jug on Sixth Street rounding out the Big Three, the community had a continuous stream of sound seven nights a week.

'Music was all we had'

The influence of this singular time in Champaign-Urbana continues today, for the man who sits atop Billboard magazine’s 2012 list of the most powerful people in music is Irving Azoff ’70, HON ’03, who emerged from the UI scene. He was the driving force at campus-based Blytham Ltd., the most important booking agency for bands in the Midwest in the ’60s and ’70s.

Blytham was “incredibly aggressive and used a ‘take-no-prisoners’ approach to [signing bands] on their roster,” Philbin recalls. “They changed the Champaign music scene forever by getting the Big Three clubs into bidding wars, driving prices up.

“The bands began to make a lot of money.”

In fact, the ’60s and ’70s acts had a much better shot at making a living from their music than today’s groups. The Regiment, for example, made $69,000 in its second year – almost a half million in today’s dollars, says Ralph Senn ’69 MEDIA, who played rhythm guitar for the band, the first one that Azoff represented.

After leaving the area, Azoff went on to represent a long list of top-tier performers, including The Eagles, Van Halen, REO Speedwagon, Steely Dan, Jewel, Journey and Christina Aguilera. He now serves as executive chairman of Live Nation Entertainment, which was created with the merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation.

But the key to everything, honestly, was an Illinois graduate – Bob Nutt ’66,” says Poor. “Bob Nutt formed Blytham Ltd., and Irving [Azoff] was his second lieutenant. Bob Nutt created the rock ’n’ roll scene [on campus].”

“Bob was almost – not mystical, but he had that kind of aura,” adds Fredrickson. With his long hair and wild clothes, Nutt was the guru, while Azoff was the workaholic. Their super-agency was one of three converging influences that made Champaign-Urbana stand out among campus music scenes, Fredrickson observes. The other two were the booming local venues and the Chicago talent who came to attend Illinois and perform.

Feather Train plays for a Quad crowd in 1970.

You can’t understand the music of the times, however, without understanding the context – the broader culture, says Lawrence Grossberg, PHD ’76 MEDIA, a cultural studies scholar known nationwide for his work on popular music. (He taught speech communication at Illinois until 1994, introducing the University’s first course on rock ’n’ roll.)

According to Grossberg’s “Rock Formation” concept, to fully comprehend the music, you have to grasp what was happening in the concurrent civil rights, antiwar and counterculture movements. You also have to realize that rock music was the one thing that youth culture could then claim as all its own.

Part of what defined the music through the ’70s was also that kids thought the music belonged to them and no other generations,” he says. “So it was important that your parents didn’t like rock ’n’ roll. It was important that kind of music pissed people off.”

Television and film at that time were not aimed at adolescents, says Grossberg, now a professor of communication and cultural studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “We didn’t have the Internet. Music was all we had, and that’s why it mattered so much.”

Captain Rat, the Shirley Sisters and Led Zeppelin

This was especially true at U of I. Without lakes or mountains as diversions, “there wasn’t much else to do,” says Mark Rubel ’79 LAS, who has run Champaign’s Pogo recording studio since 1980. “Are you going to go out bowling if you’re a hippie?”

“Students were stuck here, stayed here and focused here,” Senn says. “It would be very hard to do today.

Rhythm and blues band All-Star Frogs

In the 1960s and ’70s, Champaign-Urbana music was a “scene,” Rubel says. “And each bar had its own scene. There were the regulars and the weirdos and the beautiful girls and strange people and the shady characters and the out-and-out criminals. It was like a cartoon.”

Among these “cartoon characters” was the very group that Rubel has played for since the ’70s – Captain Rat and the Blind Rivets. At the grand finale of a 1980 gig at the Intramural Physical Education Building, electric guitarist Tim Vear ’72 ENG, using a wireless system, skateboarded off the pool’s diving board and remained underwater for optimum effect. Uninformed of the stunt, the team of lifeguards leaped in to save him; the group was subsequently banned from performing at the complex.

Three other colorful characters in the University’s psychedelic scene were the Shirley sisters – Jane Shirley Hoch ’70, Mary Genevra Shirley ’76 FAA and Anne Shirley Faber ’77 ACES. The siblings started In Stitches, a Champaign-based business that made outfits for local and national rock musicians, including the Yardbirds’ capes, vests and fringed jackets.

Mary, who passed away in 2000, and Jimmy Page, the Yardbirds guitarist who co-founded Led Zeppelin, “had a thing for each other,” recalls Anne. In fact, she confirms the legend that Mary (called “Genevra” by people in the music biz), a top violinist who played with The Finchley Boys, helped Page as he struggled to write one of the most iconic rock songs of all time.

Page was trying to transpose a piece of classical music for the song’s beginning, “and he couldn’t get it right,” Anne says. “Mary showed him what the right chords were.” The melody became the intro for “Stairway to Heaven.”

In Stitches was just one of several dozen “alternative” businesses that sprouted up to complement the wild music scene. Included were the Metamorphosis restaurant, Good Vibes stereo shop and organic grocery stores such as Strawberry Fields, all enterprises that started with ’60s idealism and little concern about turning a profit.

At the center of this alternative universe was Record Service, founded in 1969 by Phil Strang ’72 MEDIA and his friends.

When regional and national bands hit town, they would inevitably hang out at the store. Record Service aimed to “serve people and not just make money,” Strang says, and it maintained its campus presence on Green Street until the “not just making money” philosophy transformed into a “losing money” one, due to the changing nature of the music biz. The iconic store closed its doors in 2004, leaving Strang to search for just the second job he had had in his adult life.

Boring? No way

In addition to the original Big Three clubs, Champaign-Urbana boasted many other musical landmarks, such as Panama Red’s, Ruby Gulch, Nature’s Table, The Alley Cat, Treno’s and The Red Herring coffeehouse at the Channing-Murray Foundation, where Fogelberg got his start before going national.

And then there was Mabel’s.

Blues/rock/psychedelic band The Finchley Boys

“It was insane, and it was great,” Rubel says.

Politics also played a role in local music, particularly in the folk scene. Kristin Lems, MA ’75 LAS, MA ’83 LAS, regularly drove her orange pickup truck right onto the Quad, where she would launch into songs about the Vietnam War and the Equal Rights Amendment for women.

The war galvanized the campus, culminating in protests and riots in 1970, which drew the National Guard and shut down Green Street.

But the music of the ’60s and ’70s, at its root level, was not really about politics and ideology, says Grossberg. He says the music was a repudiation of what youth perceived to be conventional lives.

“Rock ’n’ roll was about how it made you feel,” he points out. “The music was a celebration of not being bored. It was a rejection of a lifestyle, of not wanting to spend your life in a boring, terrible job making money.”

Growing talent at home

Which brings us back to one of the least boring people on the Champaign-Urbana scene – George Faber of The Finchley Boys. In the late ’60s, Faber began performing with a live boa constrictor in his hands, long before the rock band Alice Cooper made the stunt famous. (Some even claim that they got the idea when they saw The Finchley Boys perform.)

Whether it was snakes on a stage or REO Speedwagon “blowing the doors off” of the Red Lion (for a 50-cent cover), as Carl Palczewski ’75 ENG put it, the U of I rocked, and it continued to do so in the 1980s and beyond.

In fact, the band named Champaign hit the national charts with its 1981 rhythm-and-blues smash, “How ’Bout Us.” The group was even bigger in Europe, says Rena Day, one of the band’s singers, who recalls being mobbed by screaming fans in Amsterdam.

The 1980s also introduced the music world to Champaign bluegrass-country sensation Alison Krauss, who went on to win 27 Grammys, the most of any living performer. But the ’60s and ’70s still stand out as a unique time for music on campus.

“It was thriving,” says folksinger Lems. “We were definitely a center, and we grew our own talent, and then we sent it out into the world to sing.”

“How good was the music scene?” asks Stephen Chicoine ’72 LAS. “Good enough to walk a mile in subzero weather to pick up a date, then walk another mile to the club, then dance and stay late, then repeat the long walk home. Worth it?

“Oh yeah.”

Peterson ’77 MEDIA has authored 59 books, including the historical novels The Disappearing Man and The Puzzle People.

HOT SPOTS: C-U's thriving music scene -- then and now

Lost

Sal Nudo — Mon 17 Sep 2012 13:12 CST

In her quest to link cultural collapse and climate change, Lisa Lucero has pursued the secrets of the Maya – all the way to mysterious pools in the Belizean jungle

By Mary Timmins
Photos courtesy of Lisa Lucero

Imagine the ceramic water jar as it topples into the water, to drift down and down through improbable depths, falling endlessly in slo-mo, settling at last into the silt and the centuries. This is an arc that echoes, in a way, the trajectory of Lisa Lucero’s research, a journey of discovery that has taken the University of Illinois anthropologist into the jungles of Belize and through two thousand years of a civilization’s brilliant life and strange senescence. Her quest: to understand the demise of the Maya civilization. Her thesis: that the Maya kings were unable to shield their subjects from extreme drought brought on by climate change. Her evidence: waiting, deep in the water, on the brink of the underworld.

Water is ephemeral in the Central American lowlands. Some areas are endowed with lakes and rivers; many more are not. In years of plentiful rain, crops are plentiful, too. In years of heat and drought, not so much. The weather flows in a pattern of six months dry, six months wet. Some years simply bring more rain than others.

The revolution wrought by the rulers of the indigenous Maya civilization – which flourished spectacularly in the first millennium after the birth of Christ – was a revolution of water. When drought came, the people could drink, thanks to their rulers, who’d captured water in limestone reservoirs.

“Areas that didn’t have water – this is where you see the most powerful rulers,” Lucero notes. “If there was water, then the kings didn’t have anything to supply.”

For the past 20 years, Lucero has been traveling to Belize to study the connections among water and power and the events that tipped their equilibrium and forever changed life in Central America. In 1997, she received exclusive license from the Belizean government to excavate Yalbac, a site of six temples. (See map, p. 35.) Not far off lies Cara Blanca (“White Face”), a massive limestone deposit that cradles 25 steep-sided sinkholes. Called cenotes (see-NO-tays) in Spanish, these pools, perpetually fed by the region’s deep water table, were sacred to the Maya as portals to the underworld or Xibalba.

The deepest of these is known to Lucero and her team as Pool 1.

A civilization's collapse
Drawn to this mystery from a young age, Lucero was inspired to study the political dynamics of Maya life while still a graduate student at UCLA. Her work, Water and Ritual: The Rise and Fall of Classic Maya Rulers, describes how the Maya’s sophisticated water systems allowed the kings to link themselves to the gods (and political power) – until long-term drought upended their way of life. For Lucero, the story, as yet incomplete, of how climate change brought down the Maya is a narrative of vulnerability vivid with implications for the present times.

The more they relied on reservoirs,” Lucero observes, “the more they were impacted by drought.” This connection, she says, “really made me think about the impact of climate change on society.”

“Diving for – looking for – ancient Maya offerings is helping me explain how people respond and deal with climate change and climate change itself.”

Portals to the underworld
Each May for the past three years, Lucero has finished up her teaching on the Urbana campus, then boarded a plane for Belize. Meeting with her dive/video/archaeo/geo/bushwhack team, she has proceeded to an anthropological frontier exotic and intimidating as any in modern science. An azure circle in the green depths of the Belizean jungle, Pool 1 is 330 feet across with the ruin of a ceremonial building clinging to its western lip. The journey to the bottom, 220 feet down, is epic – a two-minute descent, a half-hour or so on the bottom, and the 90-minute rise necessary to avoid the bends (which divers also forestall by breathing a special mix of gases).

At approximately 100 feet, the slopes are girdled by two enormous striations of fossils – mostly undisturbed, though underwater videographer Marty O’Farrell brought up two huge bones from a giant sloth in 2011 and further specimens in 2012. Obscured by silt deposits and liquid layers of hydrogen sulfide, the pool also bristles with debris fallen from the surface – some centuries old, some from recent hurricanes. An enormous underwater cave remains an alluring enigma. For O’Farrell, who runs a dive shop and does work for National Geographic, “The pools of Cara Blanca are a diver’s dream – they seem to really get under your skin like nowhere I have dove before.”

The cenotes were sacred to the Maya as portals to the underworld, a key stop in the soul’s journey after death. The underworld was believed to harbor mythological beings and to give off real clouds, mist and thunder. Portals were imbued, Lucero points out, with tremendous power and “an ambivalence, a fine line between good and evil.”

“It’s very dangerous, the closer you get.”

Such places do not readily give up their secrets even when approached by modern technology. Across three years of diving at Cara Blanca, Lucero’s teams have surfaced with an eclectic array of evidence. Sediment cores have yielded ancient soil and pollen samples indicating lean and lush years, as well as gypsum signaling periods of drought. Tiny freshwater shells offer gauges of rainfall and temperature through time. Rings from trees long fallen into the pool may provide ancient records of growth through conditions dry and wet. And the fossil beds embrace huge stories of their own, yet to be told.

For Lucero, among the most significant finds are ceramic sherds of water vessels, some retrieved from the relative shallows of an underwater slope directly below the ruined ceremonial building. (Accessible only by deep trenches dug by looters, the structure, which still holds artifacts, is beginning, alas, to slide into the pool; absent funds for excavation, its secrets may soon be lost underwater – a matter about which Lucero struggles to stay calm.) “There’s increasing evidence that the people started to visit Cara Blanca much more frequently during the period between 800 and 900,” she says. “We find those jars, and they predominantly date to this period. And there’s increasing evidence of several multiyear droughts, lasting from three to eight years.”

By A.D. 900, she adds, “the whole area was abandoned.”

Lucero believes that people may have come to the cenotes both for water and to conduct rituals asking the gods to bring rain – rituals made at extremely high cost.

“During drought the Maya would sacrifice their young sons, who were the most important members of the patrimonial society,” she says. “Sons represent the continuance of family. To sacrifice them means desperation. It’s a last ditch. There is evidence for adolescent remains in the sacred well at Chichén Itzá.

“I expect to find the same thing at Cara Blanca.”

Climate change, past and future
In May 2013, Lucero plans to return to Belize and Pool 1, with – she hopes – sufficient grant money to find many more clues as to what befell the Maya. Her plans call for retrieving artifacts, studying the information preserved in the soil and the trees and the fossils through centuries of underwater entrapment, and excavating and restoring the ceremonial structure. As well as yielding more evidence of Maya visits to the sacred cenotes and the rituals they undertook there, the research will enhance the accumulation of climatological data about drought during the last years of the Maya civilization. Funding for the project is currently under review by the National Science Foundation.

“Everyone is familiar with the phrase ‘history repeats itself,’” Lucero observes. “That’s not necessarily a good thing. We’re out trying to look at history and evaluate: What can we learn? And what can we avoid? The major challenge is to get people to listen.”

Listen to the story of the Maya – a story of a changing climate and its impact on a people, a story whispered by ruins robed in the jungles of Central America and echoing up from the impossible depths of the cenotes at the threshold of the underworld.

Krista Harby McMasters

Tue 5 Jun 2012 10:58 CST

The first woman to head a top 10 accounting firm on stepping forward and not taking the path of least resistance

By Bruce Murphy

“I never knew a gender distinction,” says Krista Harby McMasters, co-CEO of CliftonLarsonAllen. “I think that is how I was raised.”

When she was appointed CEO of Clifton Gunderson in 2009, McMasters, 55, became the first woman to head a top-25 public accounting firm. Having guided the company through a 2012 merger, she now serves as co-CEO of CliftonLarsonAllen, one of the top 10 public accounting firms in the U.S.

I grew up in Catlin, a little town outside Danville, not too far from Champaign. There were 55 kids in my graduating class, and I probably went to grade school and high school with all of them.

I never knew a gender distinction. I think that’s how I was raised. Both of my grandmothers worked, and my mom worked. So that never seemed unusual to me.

In my senior year in high school I took a bookkeeping class. The class was more focused on people who were not going to college. But I took it and liked it, and I thought, “This sounds like something to do.” Both of my grandmothers were bookkeepers.

My parents weren’t wealthy. They were adamant that I wasn’t going to borrow money for college, and I needed to go to a community college first because of the cost. So I went to Danville Community College. I worked full time the whole time.

It’s hard to know how good you are when you’re in a high school of 55 kids. It’s not like I had a lot of competition. But I ended up getting the math award at the community college. It made me realize I had talent in that area.

At the time, the University of Illinois accountancy program was rated No. 1 or 2 in the country, and I was concerned that by not going till junior year I wouldn’t be able to compete. Back then the flunk-out course was intermediate accounting – that’s where a lot of students would end up switching to a business major. But I had a great professor for that course, professor Ronald Picur [now UIC professor emeritus]. The other course that was key for my career was auditing, and that professor, Richard Ziegler [now UI professor emeritus], was just excellent. He found ways to turn theoretical concepts into more practical applications, which is hard to do.

It was a tremendous educational experience. It kind of accelerated my success at Clifton Gunderson, because I had a great background that set me apart from the beginning.

I’ve read a lot about Eleanor Roosevelt. She always said you have to do the thing you really don’t want to, and that’s what makes you grow. There were a lot of things I forced myself to do.

Early on, my company asked me to get involved in what was then called the Accounting Standards Executive Committee in New York, which wrote standards for companies in the U.S. I didn’t want to do it. I felt I would be in way over my head. I was the only female, the youngest person on the committee, from one of the smallest firms. So it was intimidating. But I learned so much. It was a tremendous experience.

That’s kind of our firm: The culture is about finding what people’s passions and strengths are and putting them in situations that will build on that. I wasn’t happy with the materials we provided our people to perform audit work. So I went to the head of that practice, and he said, “Why don’t you do it?” Ultimately that involved creating a whole new manual for our firm. And as a result, I ended up being chosen the director of assurance services. I was only 32; I had only been with the firm 11 years.

Every time I raised my hand and said, “Here’s what I think we ought to do,” they would say, “OK, why don’t you do it?” After I was the assurance director, I wasn’t happy with the level of turnover – we were losing too many people. So I went to the CEO and said, “We need to do some things differently.” And he said, “Why don’t you write a white paper?” I ended up doing a lot of research and writing a paper on our strategic direction in the HR area. I never thought I would actually have to implement anything. But he ended up broadening my position beyond assurance, and I took over our HR function also.

Because I was head of HR, I was involved in how we were going to go about determining who the successor for the CEO was. A few of us wrote a plan. But it never occurred to me that the candidate was potentially me.

It was a non-issue in our firm for me to become CEO. I never faced any issues related to me being a woman. I do think it made it easier for me not having had children. I was traveling all the time. In these kinds of leadership roles, when you have 45 offices in the country, it’s a big travel position.

I didn’t see myself as a trailblazer, becoming the first woman CEO of a major accounting firm. But once it was announced, I got all kinds of questions, which made me realize this was a much bigger deal than I understood. It made me appreciate the importance of being responsible and showing women that they can be the champions of their own destiny.

Murphy is an award-winning journalist, editor of Urban Milwaukee.com and former editor of Milwaukee Magazine.

Dead-on

Tue 5 Jun 2012 10:51 CST

Founding editor of the website Deadspin, Will Leitch helped pioneer the postmodern world of sportswriting – all the news that’s fit to print, plus all the stuff that maybe isn’t

By Jamie Malanowski / Photos by David Friedman

Will Leitch

Less than two hours after shooing his parents out of the residence hall parking lot, Will Leitch ’97 media, already aware that he wanted to become a professional writer, moseyed into the offices of The Daily Illini and volunteered to work on the newspaper. Asked what his interests were, the University of Illinois freshman mentioned movies and sports, and the next day he was assigned to write an article about an intramural basketball game and to review a film. That was in 1993. Now, not 20 years later, Leitch, 36, is one of the most popular, widely read, in-demand sportswriters in the country and a film reviewer for Gawker.com. Insightful, witty and gifted with a breezy writing style, he is a mainstay at New York magazine and a valued contributor to GQ, The New York Times and other publications. Tempting as it may be to draw a straight line from the callow applicant of yesteryear to the polished professional of today, taking the shortest distance between two points seldom tells the most interesting story – or the most accurate. As with so many young writers, Leitch’s success did not come automatically, but after struggle. In his case, attaining a place in the mainstream media first meant becoming one of the breakout stars of the ragingly popular sports website Deadspin, where, as possibly the world’s first great postmodern sportswriter, he became a figure of adulation, scorn and controversy. As detours go, it was splendid.

“I had a pretty typical experience – YEAH!” says Leitch (pronounced “leech”), who is not cheerleading his own lines, but a layup by the Illini men’s basketball team, whose games he has religiously observed since his ladhood in Mattoon, a small town that lies approximately 48 miles on a straight drop south of the University. We are watching the game in the Downtown Bar & Grill in Brooklyn, not far from the leafy, brownstone-lined street where Leitch makes his home with his wife, Alexa, an interior decorator. (“She’s a fan of the Georgia Bulldogs, but in her wedding vows, she pledged to root for the St. Louis Cardinals. I didn’t force her to, but I’m holding her to it.”) Over several samples of local brews, Leitch, interrupting himself to cheer, moan and text his father who is at the game (“He got a seat behind the bench, although how I don’t know. We Leitches are upper-deck folks”), shares his version of the time-honored tale in which an aspiring neophyte invests several years of hard work before achieving overnight success.

Will Leitch, at far right, mugs along with other Daily Illini editors in a 1996 Illio photo.

Like many a hero of this kind of tale, Leitch made his way to New York City and for several years scuffled out a living, bumping from job to job, collecting enough clips to remain confident in his talent without ever quite managing to plant a second foot on the ladder of success, or for that matter, firmly securing one on the bottom rung. At one point, he spent a year answering phones in a doctor’s office, while continuing to write. “Quitting wasn’t an option for me,” says Leitch. “I knew if I left New York that it would be over for me.” After this phase of the experience, which usually culls the herd of the untalented and uncommitted, he emerged with more confidence, more connections and a good idea.

In 2003, along with several other young writers, Leitch started a site called The Black Table. He contributed a column called Life As A Loser, most famous for a first installment in which he tells the tale of being dumped by his fiancée hours before appearing as a contestant on the television game show “Win Ben Stein’s Money,” a comic predicament which Jimmy Kimmel, then Stein’s announcer, learned about and gleefully proceeded to bat about like a beach ball. (A sad tale, sure, but as any writer will tell you, love comes and goes, but a good, humiliating, faithless fiancée story is a joy forever.) “That experience was a turning point,” says Leitch. “I stopped thinking that I needed to get a job at an established place. I began to realize that if I wrote good stuff, people would find it.”

Which they did. In 2005, Leitch was approached by Lockhart Steele, the managing editor of Gawker Media. Gawker had at the time become a white-hot Internet company, housing several signature sites that covered media, politics and entertainment, all in ways that seemed to exploit the restlessness of the Internet reader rather than resist it. Steele invited Leitch to start a blog devoted to gambling but was refused. “I think gambling is bad,” says Leitch. “But I pushed him to do a sports site, a blog that would be a combination of gossip, humor, obsession – a place for people who want to talk about sports the way people really talk about sports.” Gawker eventually agreed to a trial run, and in September 2005, Deadspin debuted, with Will Leitch as the editor-in-chief (on a staff of two.)

“I knew this approach would work,” he says, stressing “knew” in the way people do when in fact they could not have possibly known anything but merely fervently believed in the face of great skepticism. “That was the summer when there was a story that [then Atlanta Falcons quarterback] Michael Vick was seeking medical treatment under the pseudonym of Ron Mexico. The particulars of Vick’s situation aside, the alias Ron Mexico was just hilarious. All of my friends were talking about and joking about it, and the mainstream publications were ignoring it. That’s when I knew there was an opening for us.”

The man and the moment met. Modern sports was built on the concept of greatness – let’s see what awe-inspiring feats and enduring accomplishments these moral and athletic paragons can perform for you this evening – and sports journalism has been the willing and handsomely rewarded handmaiden of that approach. But after years of selfishness and scandal knocked sports off its pedestal, the appetites of postmodern fans have morphed: They’re still interested in greatness, and in victory, but they also value entertainment. Fantasy baseball, Madden football, the explosion of fan gear – the fun could be had in a lot more places than the arena. And if politics and entertainment had already become targets of gossip and humor and deconstruction, how could sports remain immune? Leitch instinctively understood that the national sports audience that the leagues and the networks had so painstakingly constructed – an audience primarily comprising young men – wouldn’t mind a joke or two or 10. “If it made me laugh,” he says, “others would, too.”

Will Leitch shares a park bench in Brooklyn with an Illini gnome, though his top allegiance is to the St. Louis Cardinals. “Life is hard,” he has written. “Sports are where we go to hide.”

And so Leitch larded his posts and predictions with sarcastic asides about anemic hitters and incompetent managers, then mixed in items about odd fan promotions, scoreboard races, bizarre foreign sporting customs, sluggers who dye their moustaches, a reporter who resembled “a small Russian female doctor.” When video of an inebriated quarterback emerged, it emerged on Deadspin. When pictures of bullpen pitchers ogling female fans showed up, they showed up on Deadspin. When a studio analyst circulated a photo of his intimate anatomy among intimate friends, Deadspin gave the story a home. That was an instructive moment, and soon announcers were receiving as much attention from Deadspin as did athletes. “Covering what went on behind the scenes at ESPN was huge for us,” says Leitch. “Our readers spend so much time on that network, and they were like a frat house over there. People in [the ESPN broadcast studios] would leak memos, and gossip, and our readers ate it up.” Once again, welcome to Wide World of Postmodern Sports.

“The main thing for me,” says Leitch, “was that I always tried to be funny and to have fun. If I had been a Matt Drudge or a Perez Hilton, if I had had an agenda or was mean, then the blog wouldn’t have worked. It would have seemed unseemly, and sports fans don’t like to feel that way. Besides, I’m from Mattoon, man. I don’t want to feel dirty at the end of the day. I don’t want people saying, ‘Look at this scum bag.’ I love sports, and I wanted to convey the fun I have.” And so he did. For the next several years, Leitch wrote 18, 19, 20 posts a day. Deadspin was one of the most successful sites on the Internet, and almost single-handedly, Deadspin was the product of the tastes, opinions, whimsies and Weltanschauung of Will Leitch.

Which, in time, in some circles, rendered him Public Enemy No. 1. Or at least the Poster Boy, specifically the Wanted Poster Boy, responsible for the declining state of American intelligence and taste, not to mention the shrinking state of American print journalism. In April 2008, Leitch was asked to appear on a panel on the HBO television program “Costas Now,” hosted by eminent sportscaster Bob Costas, to discuss sports blogs. The other guests were Cleveland Browns wide receiver Braylon Edwards and the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Buzz Bissinger.

Bissinger was a man on a mission. After Leitch fielded a couple of softballs tossed by Costas to set up the discussion, Bissinger, scowling righteously, pounced. “I really think you’re full of [expletive],” he snarled at Leitch. “I think that blogs are dedicated to cruelty [and] to journalistic dishonesty.” And that was just the opening salvo. Bissinger continued to heap on the disdain, and Costas, in the role of the Not Much Better Cop, tried to get Leitch to confess to what the sportscaster termed “the reasonable criticism” of the blogs.

“I knew what was coming,” says Leitch. “I knew what Bissinger had said about blogs, and when I saw him backstage, clenching his papers tightly and looking very fired up, I could tell what was going to happen. It’s funny, but the night before, I spoke to my mom. I told her that I didn’t think Bissinger got what Deadspin was all about, or what I was trying to do, and that I was just being set up to be yelled at. And she said, ‘You need to be Obama-cool. No matter what happens, just smile, and let them be crazy.’ And I listened to her. By the time of the taping, Bissinger could have brought out a chain saw, and I would have said, ‘Sir, I may disagree with you, but you have a right to your chain saw.’”

Mom was right. Leitch calmly absorbed Bissinger’s onslaught, leaving the would-be crusader looking like the old man carping about how loudly those damn kids play that rock and roll. “I think they expected me to come out like [punk rocker] Sid Vicious and say, ‘Bollocks to your mainstream media,’ but I didn’t,” says Leitch. Costas, in wonderment, deigned Leitch “likable”; Bissinger, more grudgingly, likened him to Superman sidekick Jimmy Olsen “on Percocet.”

“The thing that bothered me most,” says Leitch, “is that it was clear that neither of them ever read Deadspin. They just wanted me there as a target. And I wasn’t even that good a target! If they had looked at The New York Times that Sunday, they would have seen an article by Buzz on one page and one by me facing it.”

Leitch left Deadspin later that year. One reason was that the site needed to change. As Leitch recently wrote in a post on the site, “It was only a matter of time until everyone else realized, ‘Oh, blogs aren’t so crazy after all,’ and went all Yankees and Red Sox on our Billy Beane [Oakland] A’s, taking our principles and putting more money behind them.” No longer is Deadspin a collection of Leitch’s daily observations; now a staff of 33 strives to break big stories for what has become a business- plan-affirmed, bean-counter-approved, search-engine-optimized website.

But there was another reason. “I was becoming more of a blog than a person,” says Leitch. “I couldn’t talk to anybody about anything but my blog anymore, and if I went out in public, the only thing anybody ever wanted to talk to me about was my blog, which was OK because it was the only thing I wanted to talk about. And it was too much. It was the first thing I thought about in the morning and the last thing at night, and it wasn’t just because I was being conscientious. It was because I was losing perspective. Believe it or not, it took a conversation with Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, to help me see. He told me that anybody who runs a blog starts to hang on every comment that readers make, which leads to an overinflated sense of his importance. And I came to agree with him.” (Leitch rejoined Gawker Media in February and contributes movie reviews co-authored with Tim Grierson.)

Two years later, it’s hard to argue with the decision. With a wife and son in Brooklyn, with family in Mattoon, with the Illini to root for and the St. Louis Cardinals set to defend their title, with a full schedule of assignments from New York and endless entreaties from editors elsewhere to do more articles and another book, Leitch seems to have in full blossom the life he began pursuing when he walked into the offices of The Daily Illini nearly two decades ago. “I try to say yes to everything,” he says, “because I’m sure that in two years it could all end.”

Possibly. But that wouldn’t be the way to bet.

Malanowski is the author of “And the War Came” and has been an editor at Spy, Time and Esquire magazines.

The Draft And The Deep-dish Delight

Fri 11 May 2012 16:47 CST

The story behind Papa Del’s pizza is deeply personal

By Tony Fitzpatrick

Papa Del’s

What’s in a Papa Del’s pizza? A famished campus, a floundering student and a failing fraternity are the unlikely ingredients of this culinary icon, a favorite among alumni and one of the most famous brands ever to come out of the University of Illinois campus.

Each week, Papa Del’s sends its pizzas to points nationwide; indeed, in summer 2010, 76 members of the San Francisco Bay Area Illini Club dined on 19 pizzas shipped to them cross-country for a trip down Memory Lane. It’s been rumored that the pie has smuggled its way into Japan, Europe and Asia, and it’s commonplace to find alumni within a 50-mile radius of C-U jettisoning their plans to visit the Green Street eatery and yield to their jonesin’.

While the first Papa Del Pizza restaurant opened in 1970 at the corner of Wright and Healey streets in Campustown, the story of how it got there really begins in the spring of ’68 when the Phi Sigma Epsilon fraternity needed at least 20 new pledges in order to survive.

The old man of the house
In those turbulent times, when many students disdained the Greek social structure, let their hair grow and remained prideful of their rebellious sides, fraternity president Bob Monti ’69 enticed freshman recruits with the tradition-smashing promise of a house with no hazings or rituals. I and about 20 others – mainly streetwise Chicagoans hoping that fraternity status would finesse us into becoming irresistible to sorority girls – took the bait.

One fall night in 1969, I had my first prototype of Papa Del’s pizza at the PSE house at 1004 W. Nevada St., Urbana. I’d heard that Monti, whom we fondly called Papa (in deference to his lengthy, five-years-and-counting status as an undergrad) and/or Del (in homage to the canned goods manufacturer), would be making pizza. I couldn’t fathom Pops doing anything more elaborate than what my mom or sisters did with a Chef Boyardee pizza kit, so I indifferently headed out to find a pickup basketball game. Back at the house, I followed my nose to the dining room, where a handful of guys languished contentedly around fare that looked to me like elephant ears or maybe ridgeless Belgium waffles. I had never seen a crust so thick nor smelled a pizza so aromatic. I took my slice with me and opened the swinging door to see a jumble of emptied, black skillets on the stove proper and Pops at the counter, wielding a big cutter, slicing open a creation garnished with half-dollar-sized pepperoni on crust that fairly oozed over the edges of a deep pan.

I closed my eyes and took a bite: heaven, the best pizza, to this day, that I have ever tasted.

To most of us, Pops, born in 1946 (the first year of the baby boomer generation), still seemed to have one foot back in 1945. While he wasn’t outspoken or overtly political, he was quietly conservative, traditional, old-school, delighting in telling stories of enigmatic, long-gone brothers and what we young-’uns thought of as antiquated pranks. During the years of the Vietnam War, Monti had bounced from major to major, uncertain of his future and staying, like many of us, one step ahead of the draft board through college deferments. His life changed the evening of Dec. 1, 1969, during the nationally broadcast draft lottery, when we heard Monti’s birthday go uncalled until the 340th ball was selected, meaning he never had to spend another minute worrying about being drafted.

Or choosing a major, either; he dropped out.

Bob Monti

A band of brothers
“I began to look for an empty campus building to open a pizza restaurant,” Monti relates. “I sold every used car that I had, borrowed money from my family and came up with just under $2,000 [and took over] the site of what had been Olympic Pizza.”

It wasn’t quite the blind plunge into the eatery business; food is in the Monti DNA. Both his grandfather and father were restaurateurs for a period, and Monti knew the tough commitment ahead, having worked in Bi-Gimini, his parents’ Lombard restaurant.

Heralded only by a leaflet campaign, Papa Del’s Pizza had a “soft” opening on a football Saturday the third October weekend of 1970. So far so good, but the lack of dinner in UI residence halls on Sunday evenings proved problematic. “We got slammed” with orders, he recalls. “I got on the phone and begged guys at the house to help me out.”

Monti’s PSE “band of brothers” came to his rescue on that day and many others in the coming years. Most of the guys who helped him were the same ones he’d recruited to the fraternity barely two years earlier, now toiling as suds busters, deliverymen, oven men or bookkeepers. All told, about a dozen fraternity brothers worked for Pops in their (and the establishment’s) salad days, as it were. “I always had the best help because nearly everybody was educated at the University of Illinois,” Monti says. “I’m not sure I might have survived in another environment.”

Although the tiny, 70-person dining room was perpetually packed, the delivery arm of the business took in 60 percent its revenues on Sundays. On the wall, workers charted production records – 125 pizzas in one day, then 150, 175, 200 – upward so quickly that Monti had to buy and install another set of ovens. But even before the records started to be set, Monti knew he’d turned the corner in January 1971 when his bookkeeper told him he’d made a modest profit of a few hundred dollars after barely three months of operation.

Monti opened a pickup and delivery branch on Green Street in 1975 and in 1989 expanded it into a larger establishment. In 2009, he set his sights on a market beyond Campustown when he established a pickup and delivery site, this one managed by his children, Andrea ’99 aces, Rob and Meredith, at Champaign’s Crossings Mall.

‘I created a monster’
Over four decades, during which his pizza has been routinely rated Champaign-Urbana’s best, Monti has gathered countless fond memories. In the early days, he regularly cooked a holiday meal of steak and lobster for his employees (with beer taps free-flowing). He saw numerous employees become so drawn to each other that they married (like Monti himself, who wed waitress Beth Bennett ’70 las in 1973). Lute Olsen would bring his Iowa basketball coaching staff to the restaurant on the eve of Illini games, devouring pizzas with “everything” (except anchovies). Monti closed the place to the public at 11 one evening to feed the Baryshnikov ballet troupe performing at Krannert; shipped pies to the hotel where Ol’ Blue Eyes and his pack were staying; and in 1998 delivered pizzas with sausage, bacon and pepperoni (“the Holy Trinity of pork,” Monti says) to President Clinton and staff on Air Force One at U of I’s Willard Airport. When the plane went off the runway, Pops and his crew theorized that the controls got away from the pilot, who may still have had grease on his fingers.

After more than 40 years in the business, Papa Del, who still manages the Green Street site himself, has no thoughts of stepping aside. “As long as I can rock, I’ll be there,” he says. “I created a monster, but it’s my monster – and I love it.”

As do alumni, who remember the wait that was worth it – 40 to 50 minutes from order to table – and the joy of that freakingly good deep-dish pie.

Fitzpatrick ’72 LAS is the author of “Signals from the Heartland,” featuring several UI researchers and alumni, and has recently completed a novel set in the 1980s Midwest.

A Voice of Her Own

Mon 26 Mar 2012 15:50 CST

University of Illinois Alumni Association Board member Colleen Callahan has broken ground – and glass ceilings – for women in agricultural communication

Colleen Callahan

“You come into this world with nothing, and you leave with nothing. It’s what you do in between that matters.”

Such was the advice bestowed on Colleen Callahan ’73 aces by her father when she was young – advice that she took with her as she moved from the family farm in Milford to the University of Illinois and on through a pioneering career in broadcasting, communications and public service.

As the child of parents who raised grain and purebred hogs and cattle, Callahan grew up showing livestock at local, state and national competitions. She also excelled at writing and public speaking. When she got to Illinois, majoring in agricultural communications seemed only natural.

“I really wanted to start a career in broadcast,” remarks Callahan. “However, there were no women in the field at the time.” Even the women in her agricultural classes were few in number – such as her agricultural economics class, where she was one of only three co-eds.

Beginning to feel rather lost and unsure of her potential career path, she sought counsel from her faculty adviser, Jim Evans, phd ’68 media.

“She brought great enthusiasm and dedication to the program, I recall, along with deep roots in agriculture and strong sense of mission in helping advance it,” notes Evans, now a professor emeritus of agricultural communications.

“Her communications skills were readily apparent.”

Callahan compares his response to her plea for advice to the response of a good parent. “Dr. Evans did not tell me what to do,” she recalls. “Instead, he asked me the questions until I came upon the answer myself.

“He said, ‘Well, would you rather get your degree in something that you don’t like and do that for the rest of your life, or would you prefer to get a degree in something that you do like and then try to find a job doing it?’

“I obviously chose the latter.”

When Callahan graduated in 1973, women broadcasters were still breaking into radio and TV. Fortunately, WMBD Radio and TV, a Peoria station with a commitment to serving the region’s farming community, was interested in taking a chance on her. She became the station’s first woman agribusiness director. After working at WMBD for three decades, she started her own communications firm.

In the course of her work she has traveled to Afghanistan, Iraq, the Middle East and Cuba and has gone on to win many accolades, including her recent induction into the Hall of Fame of the National Association of Farm Broadcasting (she previously served as the organization’s first female president). Callahan has also held a seat on the University of Illinois Alumni Association Board of Directors since 2006, chairing the board’s communications committee. (Her term ends in May.)

In 2008 her passion for public service took her into the race for the open seat in Illinois’ 18th Congressional District, an experience that Callahan details in her upcoming memoir, “Not Winning Doesn’t Mean Losing: My Run for Congress.”

The following year she accepted the post of director of United States Department of Agriculture rural development for the state. “She loves to advocate for rural people and rural communities throughout Illinois and contributes her energy and talents through investments totaling some $700 million a year for rural businesses, communities and housing,” observes Evans. Callahan works out of an office in Champaign, not far from Kickapoo, where she and her husband, Richard Burns ’73 aces, live on an Angus cattle farm. (Their daughter, Brittney Rae Burns ’03 aces, is an attorney in Chicago.)

“I do not have a single regret,” she concludes. “And I have learned to never say ‘never.’”

“Colleen has long been a role model and mentor for youths who have talents and passion for communicating within agriculture, and with the consumer public it serves,” Evans notes. “In her they see how to combine these interests in their careers. They see enthusiasm, enjoyment and the impact of dedication and hard work. They see her firsthand knowledge of – and concern for – the activities, issues and people of the land. They see her special ability to communicate with others.

“And they see Colleen's spirit of working with love.”

Editor’s notes: View a video retrospective of Callahan’s life and career.
Amanda Liberatore, a UI senior in English and communications and a spring semester intern at the UIAA, contributed to this profile.

Flash Forward

Thu 8 Mar 2012 15:13 CST

Teacher Jennifer Eirinberg conjures flash mobs for fundraising – and fun

By Mike Knezovich

Teacher Jennifer Eirinberg conjures flash mobs for fundraising – and fun

Growing up, Jennifer Eirinberg ’11 ed had one goal: to become a Broadway actress. “That was my dream,” she says. “Nobody was going to stop me.” There was just one problem: “I was super-untalented. But I thought I was the best.”

Her parents didn’t tell her otherwise. “They allowed me to continue because I loved it. Thank goodness.” Today, a whole lot of people she’s touched in her young life would say the same.

Thank goodness.

Eirinberg isn’t on Broadway – but she does perform. As an elementary school teacher in Round Lake, she blends rhyme and song with school lessons to engage her fourth-graders. Her innovative Dance ’N’ Donate classes mix good fun with good causes. A flash mob she organized last summer gave onlookers a thrill while raising funds for youth services in greater Chicago.

The constant has been dancing. She started with classical ballet training when she was 3; she added jazz in middle school and, later, hip-hop. In high school, she was a member of the dance troupe. One summer, she worked at a youth camp and discovered her other passion: “I fell in love with working with kids, so by my junior year I couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else.”

Next stop: the University of Illinois, where she focused first on academics (“I’m not a naturally bright girl, but I work really, really hard”) and then on dancing. Having taken dance classes at the Campus Recreation Center, she got the idea to rent space there and teach her own classes to her Sigma Delta Tau sorority sisters. The classes were a hit, and she organized and taught them for the rest of her undergraduate years – with a charitable twist.

Attendees paid a minimal fee – usually $1 for an hourlong session – and were asked to choose charities to benefit from the fees. These “Dance ’N’ Donate” sessions would draw as many as 60 students.

Fast-forward to 2012, when Eirinberg graduated and undertook a vigorous job search. She missed leading her Dance ’N’ Donate classes, and her father noticed. “My dad is super-cool and said, ‘Jen why don’t you do a flash mob?’” She thought they were “dorky” but then saw a flash mob on TV. That did it.

With proceeds earmarked for the nonprofit her father heads – Youth Services of Glenview/Northbrook – Eirinberg called on her UI network, her summer camp network and her dance network to assemble the various players. She lined up a shopping center in Skokie as the venue. And on July 31, shoppers got a 3-minute surprise performance to “Party Rock Anthem,” and Glenview/Northbrook Youth Services netted nearly $1,000.

Having also landed a fourth-grade teaching job at Round Lake, Eirinberg hit the ground running. Under her direction, a flash mob of 50 teachers at the school surprised an assembly of 600 K-8 students. She started an intramural hip-hop dance club. And she teaches a dance class to staff.

Eirinberg also regularly uses her performance skills to make learning fun in her classroom – a technique she learned as a student teacher at the U of I. Tina Cowsert, the cooperating teacher who supervised Eirinberg at Carrie Busey School in Champaign, regularly uses music, movement and rhyme in her instruction. Cowsert says that Eirinberg was “driven, motivated and very energetic. She walked right in, saw things that needed to be done and she did them.” Eirinberg took to Cowsert’s style, even dressing up as a stalk of broccoli during a campaign to encourage healthy eating.

Says Cowsert, who is regularly in touch with her former student, “She took a lot of what I do and ran with it. I get ideas from her now.”

Knezovich ’79 media, ms ’01 media, is a freelance writer in Chicago.

Enjoy Eirinberg’s flash mob at Westview Old Orchard Shopping Center – a 3-minute surprise performance on July 31 that netted nearly $1,000 for Youth Services of Glenview/Northbrook.

Here the teachers of Round Lake Elementary surprise and delight their students at a school assembly.

Help and Understanding

Thu 8 Mar 2012 15:09 CST

Shannon O’Brien reaches out to families affected by SMA

By Gloria Tucker

Shannon O’Brien ’09 ahs was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy when she was 2 years old. More than two decades later, she’s using her experience to make a difference.

As a support administrator for Families of SMA, O’Brien is there for those who’ve recently been diagnosed with the disease, which affects muscles used for crawling, walking, head and neck control and swallowing. It is the No. 1 genetic cause of death in infants. As well as counseling and sending out care and information packages, she helps manage the organization’s annual conference.

Based in Elk Grove Village, Families of SMA has funded and directed more than $50 million for research to combat the affliction, which tends to manifest in small children. The conference – the largest annual gathering of its kind in the world – brings researchers together with parents and children affected by SMA, and features networking, workshops, a kids’ program and a family fun fest and carnival.

“Families of SMA is an amazing organization that offers so much support,” O’Brien says. “I am very fortunate to be part of a caring organization that keeps us connected and current both on the research front as well as the day-to-day living issues we face.”

O’Brien says the majority of children diagnosed with SMA need respiratory support and a feeding tube to survive. “Families also have trouble getting insurance to cover the cost of all the equipment, therapies and supplies their children need to get around,” she explains.

O’Brien was first introduced to Families of SMA when her parents were given a pamphlet by a nurse at the hospital when she was diagnosed. Her family decided to attend a SMA conference, and she has been involved ever since.

She says growing up with SMA wasn’t too difficult because she has a relatively mild form of the disease – which means she only has trouble walking as opposed to eating and breathing.

O’Brien still lives in Grayslake, a town near the Wisconsin border where she grew up. While attending high school, she began volunteering for Families of SMA. “I helped out with a lot of office work,” she says, “and data entry as well.”

She kept working part-time work for the organization when she entered the University of Illinois.

“I kind of came in undecided to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences,” O’Brien explains, “but then I took a few speech and hearing science classes and decided I would like to pursue that for my major.”

She says her speech-language pathology major in the College of Applied Health Sciences helps in her work because some people who have SMA have swallowing and speech difficulties.

While at Illinois, O’Brien, who uses a wheelchair, lived in Beckwith Hall, a residence hall designed for students with physical disabilities who require assistance with the activities of daily living. (Beckwith has since been replaced by Nugent Hall, a state-of-the art facility which opened in 2010.)

“I learned a lot of good skills at U of I,” she says. “I think it kind of helped me get to know about people with a lot of different disabilities.”

O’Brien says she believes having SMA helps in her work. “I know what the families are going through,” she observes. “I can reach them a lot easier.”

Ken Emerson ’69 ahs agrees. “She’s one of the most inspiring people I’ve met,” says Emerson, whose 5-year-old grandson is affected by SMA. “She’s a sweet girl with a happy smile.”

Tucker is a junior in news-editorial journalism in the College of Media at Illinois and a spring semester intern at the UI Alumni Association.

Editor’s note: Ken Emerson, who is profiled on p.46 of the Spring 2012 issue of Illinois Alumni, is organizing a golf tournament to benefit Families of SMA. For details on the tournament, to be held in Lemont on Saturday, May 19, email him at jeanneeme@msn.com. To learn more about Families of SMA, visit www.fsma.org. The organization’s conference is set for June 21-24 this year.

Ready and Able

Tue 28 Feb 2012 17:16 CST

In the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant meltdown, scientist Nobuhiro Shiotani and the Skilled Veterans Corps are prepared to take the burden of cleanup off of the young

By John M. Glionna
Photographs by Tom Miyagawa Coulton

Nobuhiro Shiotani, of the Skilled Veterans Corps, which he co-founded. The group is offering its help in coping with the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster.

Outfitted in a bulky hazmat suit and oxygen mask, his movements restricted, his vision clouded by the fog of his own breath, Nobuhiro Shiotani, ms ’66 eng, was in a place few people could ever want to be – the poisoned realm of destruction that is Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

“I couldn’t move freely, couldn’t move my arms or look around. Even to screw or unscrew a bolt, even that sort of simple job, would be quite difficult under such circumstances,” the gray-haired physicist recalls of his trip last July into the ruptured facility, which was leaking radioactive cesium and other poisons into the water, soil and air. “A full face mask narrowed visibility, and breathing through charcoal filters was tough, voice communication was very limited; it was hot in
sealed overalls.”

Such were the extremes caused by far greater extremes of a few months earlier – March 11, 2011, to be exact, when an earthquake so mammoth that it shifted Earth on its axis struck northeast Japan, setting off a tsunami that deluged the coastline within 30 minutes. In one of the worst natural cataclysms in the island nation’s history, thousands of residents were drowned or swept out to sea by the wall of water. It also took out infrastructure, decimating whole towns, damaging roads and railways and leaving millions without electricity or water.

At the Fukushima Daiichi plant, a 1970s-era nuclear facility that sits on a stretch of scenic coastline 150 miles northeast of Tokyo, the tsunami knocked out the cooling system and set off the most devastating nuclear disaster since the 1986 explosion that destroyed the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine. As three of the Japanese facility’s four reactors began to melt down, some 80,000 nearby residents were evacuated, leaving behind a deserted landscape, incipient explosions of hydrogen gas and the ongoing release of radioactivity into the water and atmosphere.

For Japan, a nation that had staked its future on the safety of nuclear power, the catastrophe could mean only one thing: Rome was burning.

Critics lambasted a misguided energy policy reliant on a technology that could recoil and bite like a snake. People worried the food chain was poisoned. Fearful residents as far away as Tokyo began wearing protective masks, no longer trusting the air they breathed. Yet a few months later, Shiotani, a retired solid-state physicist, volunteered, along with four colleagues, to venture into Fukushima Daiichi’s deadly, pulsing heart.

He wasn’t even afraid. Instead, the 73-year-old widower, who had spent his formative years studying at the University of Illinois, felt a stabbing sense of guilt.

Keeping alive as a researcher
Shiotani looks like a scientist. He’s a small-framed man with oversized glasses and a deliberate demeanor, who likes to keep his sleeves rolled up, as if ready to launch some new experiment. He keeps a box of smokes in his right breast shirt pocket, a half-pack-a-day guy always ready for a contemplative cigarette break.

This modest demeanor conceals a boldness that goes back decades. In the 1960s, after graduating from the University of Tokyo, Shiotani took a job at a government-supported institute that was too underfunded to finance any first-rate research. Then, upon reading the Physical Review, a prestigious physics journal, he was “thunderstruck” by a paper on nuclear magnetic resonance written by T.J. Rowland, a physical metallurgy professor at the University of Illinois.

The upshot, as the two retired scientists saw it, was that at their age they would likely as not succumb to some other malady long before a radiation-prompted cancer could kill them. So why, they reasoned, should the nuclear plant’s operator subject the young to such perilous doses of radiation?

On an impulse, Shiotani dashed off a letter, seeking a spot on Rowland’s research staff. To Shiotani’s amazement, Rowland agreed and even helped provide funding. “Looking back, it was the start of my career as a physicist,” Shiotani says. “The campus had a cosmopolitan atmosphere, and I learned lots, including my English, which helped me later in many ways to keep myself alive as a researcher.”

It also was the beginning of a lifelong friendship between the mentor and protégé. Shiotani arrived on campus in 1964 and received a master’s degree a year and a half later. After that, he worked full time as Rowland’s research assistant.

At night, after dinner, the professor would often visit the lab where Shiotani was working, an area Rowland recalls being decorated by the origami birds and figures created by his student. Shiotani says of Rowland, “He taught me a lot of things during those evenings. Not just about physics but about life.”

Over the years, the two scientists have kept in touch, mostly by email, but whenever Shiotani attends a conference in the U.S., he visits his old teacher. Now a UI professor emeritus, the 84-year-old Rowland applauds the work his former student has undertaken in connection with the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. “I told him that it was a tremendous thing he’s doing,” Rowland recounted to the Los Angeles Times, adding that the project shows that “anybody who can prove they’re still a competent scientist can help if you ask them.”

The crippled Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station is seen through a bus window in Okuma Town, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, on Nov. 12. Three of four reactors at the facility, which is located approximately 150 miles from Tokyo, went into meltdown on March 11, 2011, after a tsunami knocked out the cooling system.

Shielding the young from a terrible legacy
Not long after the catastrophe struck, Shiotani and his friend, Yasuteru Yamada, met at a favorite Tokyo coffee shop. There, the retired scientists hatched a plan.

Nearly one-third of Japan’s population is over age 60, and the two feared that the old could be leaving behind a terrible legacy. “This nuclear reactor was the brainchild of our generation,” Shiotani told the LA Times. “And we feel it’s our job to clean up the mess.”

Their generation, he and Yamada knew, had benefited from nuclear power – using it to heat and light their homes and offices. It had even warmed the bottles they fed their infants. Japanese experts had been vocal proponents of the very same technology which had now seemingly betrayed them. While neither Shiotani nor Yamada, a retired plant engineer, had ever worked in a nuclear plant, they and many other scientists their age had lent their know-how, support and energies to the creation of such facilities.

The two men understood that the younger and often unskilled workers being sent to clean up Fukushima Daiichi could well become nuclear-lab rats, exposed to dangerous amounts of radiation and unaware of the long-term risks. The pair also knew that cells reproduce more slowly in the bodies of the old and that any radioactive-induced cancer resulting from cleanup-related exposure would take much longer to develop in them than in younger people.

The upshot, as Shiotani and Yamada saw it, was that at their age they would likely as not succumb to some other malady long before a radiation-prompted cancer could kill them. So why, they reasoned, should the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), subject the young to such perilous doses of radiation? Old-timers could do the job just as well, with far fewer residual effects.

Thus the pair decided on their goal: Enlist a battalion of fellow retired scientists and researchers to venture inside the nuclear plant and use their decades of expertise to help stabilize the still-smoldering reactors. In the months following the disaster, Shiotani and Yamada made phone calls and sent letters and emails to colleagues present, past and long-lost. Eventually, they assembled a crew of more than 600 volunteers, including former electrical engineers, forklift operators, high altitude and heavy construction workers and even retired members of the military special forces. Also on board are engineers who had belonged to the original design and construction team for Fukushima Daiichi, as well as technicians who had provided maintenance for the plant.

The youngest was 60, the eldest 78.

Shiotani and Yamada have named the group the Skilled Veterans Corps, formed to help mop up after a conflagration and protect the health of younger generations.

While the press has played up what it perceives as the particularly Japanese quality of quiet sacrifice on the group’s behalf, Shiotani calls this nonsense. “Remember 9/11?” he asks. “People in New York made a personal sacrifice to gather around Ground Zero to help [those] unfortunately involved in the disaster. Is that part of ‘American culture’? If so, then Japanese culture is no different.”

Without a wife or children, Shiotani didn’t have to ask permission to embark on his mission. Even so, he’s tired of the issue and sometimes feels as if he and his fellow retirees are regarded as little more than naive children. “The subject of ‘What did your wife say? What did your kids say?’ rarely comes up at the SVC,” he says. “Everybody [in the group] respects everyone else’s decision to join.”

“Remember 9/11? People in New York made a personal sacrifice to gather around Ground Zero to help [those] unfortunately involved in the disaster. Is that part of ‘American culture’? If so, then Japanese culture is no different.”

Yet Shiotani’s involvement surely shows how emotional strength can overpower physical vulnerability and personal loss. A decade ago, he lost his wife to intestinal cancer. Soon after her death, Shiotani learned he was stricken with the same disease. The widower was lucky; doctors caught his malignancy early. But the weight of such an illness does not go away easily. These days, Shiotani sees the young workers who have been hired to clean up Fukushima Daiichi’s nuclear spillage and imagines them, decades later, facing cancer as well.

The thought sickens him.

‘The first dot of light’
From the beginning, Skilled Veterans Corps members have faced a major obstacle: convincing both the government and power company to take them seriously. Last summer, group members approached TEPCO to show that they brought a serious scientific solution to the problem, not merely the musings of a bunch of loony old people.

Yasuteru Yamada and Nobuhiro Shiotani, second and third from left above, co-founded the Skilled Veterans Corps to help with remediation work at Japan’s crippled nuclear power plant. They were at a meeting of the group held in Tokyo in January.

In the initial meeting, TEPCO officials worried about the SVC’s legal status and then fretted about insurance coverage. But Shiotani and the others would not go away. The organization registered as a nonprofit corporation and is trying to upgrade its status to become a public one. The SVC also devised a plan to cover members with accident compensation insurance and health care.

Finally, TEPCO officials made an offer. They would take the scientists on a tour of a reactor. For Shiotani, the move was a start.

On July 12, Shiotani and four other SVC delegates donned protective gear and were escorted into the No. 4 reactor, which had been under inspection at the time of the quake and did not suffer any meltdown. The group spent approximately 20 minutes there, recalls Shiotani, who had never before been inside a nuclear power plant.

“It was dark. Streaks of light came in through holes in the damaged ceiling,” he says, describing how he eased up a narrow staircase to the building’s top floor. Soon, a meter that measures radiation exposure began ringing, signaling the group to leave the area. Perhaps cavalierly, Shiotani didn’t worry about the danger. “A certain amount of radiation does not pose any risk,” he says. “However, it was hot in there, and what I feared was heat stroke, not radiation doses.”

During the tour, Shiotani watched the unskilled contract workers, young and middle-aged alike, come and go – perhaps unaware of the extent of the dangers they faced each day. These were precisely the people that Shiotani and the SVC were trying to protect.

Afterward, SVC members began to suspect that TEPCO was merely paying lip service to their idea, so in August, the group made what Shiotani calls a “strategic retreat.” While they have not abandoned the idea of working within the Fukushima Daiichi plant, the volunteers have switched their energies to convincing the government to accept their help on another project: community radiation monitoring.

SVC members now hope to help plot radiation levels in communities within a 12-mile radius of the ailing nuclear plant – communities the Japanese government has evacuated because of the continued threat of radiation poisoning. While TEPCO engineers have been conducting the monthly monitoring program, gauging radiation levels at 50 designated sites, Shiotani believes there’s a shortage of qualified data collectors. Having persuaded officials to allow members to attend training sessions, SVC now has a radiation monitoring team. It’s headed by Shiotani.

He calls the development “the first dot of light we [can] see in complete darkness” since organizing the effort. But he remains cautious. “I have [personally] been contemplating reasons why the SVC’s offer of help has been neither accepted nor rejected by our government and TEPCO,” Shiotani says.

“The tsunami washed away man-made structures like moles, breakwaters, banks, houses, buildings, bridges, railroad beds … leaving the crippled reactors and devastated lands behind.

“But the tsunami did not wash away the Japanese nuclear energy Mafia, ‘Gennshi-ryoku-mura,’ which consists of politicians, bureaucrats, technocrats, scientists and engineers who earn their daily bread from the Japanese electric power industry,” Shiotani says. “They are closely united to protect their interests. They don’t want the SVC, a total outsider, to touch their dead babies – [which], although dead, [are] still potentially hazardous and dangerous.

“I am becoming less optimistic about the SVC’s future,” he says, “but at the same time, I believe now is not a time to give it up.”

Shiotani will continue to be driven by the dual forces of his understanding of technology and his acute – even painful – personal sense of the ethics demanded by the nuclear cataclysm in his country. The scientist recalls, as he has recalled many times before, his reaction to the news of March 11, 2011.

“This is the greatest disaster this nation has ever experienced,” he recalls thinking. “All the nuclear reactors aren’t safe. This accident is going to cause great damage to people in Japan.”

Not if Nobuhiro Shiotani can help it.

As Seoul bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, Glionna has covered the aftermath of the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan.

Deep Space Six

Mary Timmins — Tue 28 Feb 2012 16:55 CST

The Advanced Visualization Lab at Illinois boldly goes where no filmmakers have gone before

By Mary Timmins

Galaxies dance on the infinite background of the cosmos in an AVL visualization for "The Searcher," an ultra-high resolution planetarium show for the new digital dome at Chicago's Adler Planetarium.
Visualization by AVL, NCSA/UIUC; scientific simulation by Brant Robertson, U. of Arizona; copyright 2011 Adler Planetarium and NCSA/UIUC

Beyond that pie-plate thingy wobbling across the heavens in “Plan 9 from Outer Space”; beyond the streaming Technicolor vortex of “2001: A Space Odyssey”; beyond the ever-voyaging starship Enterprise and Brian De Palma’s fatal “Mission to Mars” and even beyond the surreal star-constructs snapped from on high by Hubble, await cinematic visions of space like no other.

These are the visions emanating from a laboratory at the University of Illinois.

Galaxies hover and wheel, detaching themselves to shoot individually past.

Stars are born in the pink-clouded womb of the Orion Nebula.

White-draped on a cerulean infinity, galactic strands of light weave skeined layers over the place where time began.

Flying through such imagery, enabled by 3-D glasses and a few terabytes of data, the viewer becomes the spaceship, zooming, swooping and diving, on a wild ride that merges science and imagination into ecstasy.

This is the realm of the University’s Advanced Visualization Laboratory, a heady place indeed, especially these days, with productions showing in planetariums, museums and IMAX theaters across the country.

Even Hollywood wants in. “The Tree of Life,” the Oscar-nominated Terrence Malick film, features AVL sequences of supernovas illuminating the early universe and a flight through the Milky Way.

In the past three years alone, AVL visualizations have screened in places from a Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert to Bring Your Kids to Work Day at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. Led by Donna Cox, the six-member group won three awards in 2010 from the Giant Screen Cinema Association for “Hubble 3-D,” a 43-minute film that has wowed IMAX theatergoers with the space telescope’s incomparable images, animated and rendered in exquisite, stereoscopic detail. That Leonardo DiCaprio’s voice is on the soundtrack makes for just one more sprinkling of stardust.

Narrated by Liam Neeson, “Dynamic Earth” is the latest piece to showcase AVL work; an immersive, giant-screen program about the changing global climate, it recently debuted at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Jodie Foster did voice-over on “Life: A Cosmic Story,” which premiered at the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco in 2010; produced by the California Academy of Sciences, the film includes a journey into the Milky Way of 5 billion years ago, choreographed by AVL.

For star power of different kinds is all to the good. “Our goal,” says Cox, at an interview in her office – which, despite her fondness for deep space and alternate realities, is a pretty regular kind of office, with two windows, a desk and surprisingly normal-looking computer – “is reaching the public with science and knowledge.”

This circularly shaped AVL visualization sends the viewer into the eye of Hurricane Katrina as it approaches the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005. The sequence is part of “Dynamic Earth,” a giant-screen dome program to premier this spring at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
Visualization by AVL, NCSA/UIUC; scientific simulation by Wei Wang, NCAR Earth System Laboratory; copyright 2011 Dynamic Earth Production Group

Copy that.

Then proceed along the directive of rock group Pink Floyd – and set controls for the heart of the sun.

The longtime home for AVL is the U of I’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications, one of the few places in the world with the machinery to crunch the numbers for the group’s data-intensive renderings. Cox has been involved in visualizations for NCSA since 1985, bringing to the effort her dual background as an artist and computer programmer versed at transforming data into imagery. In 1997 she took over leadership of the visualization lab, where her longtime collaborator has been Bob Patterson, a virtuoso in computer imagery who started out his career in filmmaking and advertising. Team members Alex Betts ’97 faa, Jeff Carpenter, Stuart Levy and AJ Christensen ’09 eng provide skilled technical support.

As Patterson describes it, AVL has “morphed and changed over time,” with the emphasis shifting from a support group for scientific visualizations to its present focus on public outreach. But always, he says, there has been “a great creative and innovative spirit at NCSA.”

Their deployment of University resources has been pure genius, from building on the immersive environment of the famed CAVE at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology (a 3-D room where one can do everything from planting a garden to playing squash) to creating high-resolution visual imagery for productions at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts (including a recent multimedia music concert inspired by the Mississippi Great Flood of 1927). Cox emphasizes interdisciplinary collaborations among scientists, artists and technologists – what she calls “renaissance teams” – and has established the Emerging Digital Research and Education in Arts Media Institute (eDream) to explore and promote the digital media arts at Illinois.

What drives the work of AVL, Cox says, is the desire to quicken science with art – and not just in outer space. In a visual sampler of the group’s work – which visitors touring NCSA get to enjoy in a small projection room outfitted with comfortable leather chairs and stereo glasses by the bushel – a spare grid of downtown Chicago whizzes with cars (a sequence created to study traffic patterns) and the cone of an abstracted Hurricane Katrina whirls hundreds of colored vectors of warming and cooling air, each undulant with uncanny motive power.

One of AVL’s latest techno-coups comes with the ambitious redo of the Adler Planetarium, completed in the summer of 2011. Chicago’s venerable star venue – the first planetarium in North America, built in 1930 on the Lake Michigan waterfront – now boasts a new dome theater with a 20-projector system that produces the largest single digital image in the world. The ensuing vision of the night sky is akin to viewing the stars from the middle of a desert or other vantage point far from the lights of civilization.

One of AVL’s most famous atmospheric visualizations is of an F3 supertwister as seen by a storm-chaser. Based on computational atmospheric research by scientists at the U of I and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the 1.5-minute sequence uses shape, color and movement to dramatically illustrate the forces within a supercell storm. Cones show wind direction, speed and temperature on the ground; streamtubes reflect the movement of air masses; and spheres depict the tornado vortex in the powerful storm system.
Visualization by AVL, NCSA/UIUC; scientific simulation by Robert Wilhelmson, Matthew Gilmore, UIUC and Lou Wicker, NSSL/NOAA; copyright 2006 NCSA/UIUC

Such is the venue for a 22.5-minute film that rushes and glides into realms where no one has gone before – or ever may go. Part of the planetarium’s “Deep Space Adventure” program, “The Searcher” wows schoolchildren and astronomy enthusiasts with colliding galaxies, a supernova explosion and a black hole ripping apart a star. It is, according to Adler’s chief technology officer, Doug Roberts, “the most ambitious planetarium show ever done.” The show emerged from a collaboration between AVL and a team led by Roberts. In preparation for the show’s July debut, AVL worked with Adler online, watching screen tests of the show on a specially constructed mini-dome at the planetarium and fine-tuning the programming of the imagery.

An astronomer who worked at NCSA in visualization for the better part of a decade back in the ’90s, Roberts offers praise for AVL that is at once personal and professional.

“They do,” he says, “the best work of this type in the world.”

Adler visitors are correspondingly star-struck. “We have had overwhelming positive response to the show,” says Cox. “People love the convergence of beautiful fantasy art with hard-core, data-driven science computation.”

AVL is now at work on a second show for Adler, expected to debut next year.

AVL visualizations are made possible by tools created in-house by the team – some customized for specific data sets and others for more general use. Once the raw data and imagery have been prepared – including overlays of color and shape up to 54 layers strong, which create depth and beauty in the manner of an oil painting – Virtual Director, a propriety program developed by AVL, allows team members to evoke perspective and movement.

The program’s 3-D environment is akin to a video game, where avatars of AVL team members and collaborators work and interact and, as Cox puts it, “fly around.” It strangely echoes filmmaking in the real world, with a virtual camera that hangs on a grid in the cyberspace of the AVL computer screens. The filmmakers use a trackball to pan and zoom visual material of the data, and create fluctuating perspectives that maximize scale and drama. In one “Hubble 3-D” sequence, the viewer sees the universe through eyes approximately 50,000 light years apart. The imagery is animated in two separates sequences, one for each eye, which merge to produce a three-dimensional viewing experience that is beyond stunning.

“That’s been one of our hallmarks in recent years – long, multi-scale, seamless journeys,” Patterson notes.

Once the Virtual Director programming is complete, the animation must be rendered, meaning that – as with all animations from flip books and “King Kong” on – images are created, repeated and altered to endow the imagery with realistic movement. So much information is involved in AVL visualizations that the final animation rendering, done by supercomputer, “may take days,” Cox says. “This is a very complex process.”

Now this incredibly versatile technology is headed into a new and unlikely realm – that of the antiquities of planet Earth. Through a collaboration with the Cyprus Institute – an international nonprofit organization for science and technology research and education, located on the Greek island that is, Cox fondly points out, “the birthplace of Aphrodite” – AVL is creating tools for virtual exploration of cultural sites, such as theaters and monasteries. These tools allow archaeologists to explore virtual versions of the ancient world, experimenting with restoration of structures and surfaces and placement of artifacts – which have been laser-scanned at an incredible level of detail – and even meeting up with other archaeologist in cyberspace environments.

From recreating old temples to mapping today’s Chicago traffic to zipping in hyperdrive to the place where time and space merge into one, the work of AVL evinces both scientific and aesthetic integrity – a rare and alluring combination made possible by an extraordinary intellectual community. As Cox concludes: “There’s no place on the planet we could’ve done the work that we’ve done – except for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.”

Editor’s note: To find out more about the work of AVL, visit the group’s website at avl.ncsa.illinois.edu. Information on “Deep Space Adventure” – including testimonials from audience members – may be found on the Adler Planetarium website: www.adlerplanetarium.org/experience/dsa.

Special Delivery

Thu 2 Feb 2012 17:57 CST

The following letter was written by Chinese alumnus Ding Zeng Wang after he was commended for his lifetime accomplishments by UI President Michael J. Hogan. Wang, who returned to China in 1938 after finishing his studies in architectural engineering at Illinois, helped design many of the modern structures in Shanghai.

Dear President Hogan:

Seventy-three years after graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, at the age of 98 I received your letter and memento. It is beyond my wildest imagination for such an honor. It is more special because your letter and gift were delivered to me through Jiaotong University, where I began my education in the university’s preparatory boarding school when I was 10 years old.

Thank you for your kindness of thinking of me in your busy schedule. I am grateful for [Interim] Chancellor Easter who brought your letter and memento all the way from UIUC to Shanghai. Listening to the letter, which was read to me, and touching the emblem [a brass seal of the University] again and again, I am deeply moved, and the memory of my youth spent at UIUC and its profound impact on my life have all come back vividly.

In 1935, after graduating from Jiaotong University with a degree in civil engineering, with the dream of pursuing further education in architecture, and seeing more of the world, I boarded the ship President Jackson, which sailed from Shanghai to the United States. It was a long journey that took two weeks on the ship to cross the Pacific Ocean before we reached Seattle. From there, I traveled by train to Chicago and Urbana-Champaign. When I arrived, I was introduced to the Bailey family – professor Bailey (in accounting), Mrs. Bailey, their young son Bruce Bailey, and the grandma. I stayed in their house, 806 W. Nevada St., for the entire time when I attended UIUC.

I enrolled in the School of Architecture in the College of Fine and Applied Arts under the name of Ting Tseng Wang (which was the old way of spelling Chinese names before the Pinyin system was introduced). I had to take some remedial undergraduate courses before I enrolled in the graduate program. I cherish the three years at UIUC very much. I still remember the Architecture Building at south campus where I spent most of my time, learning design and learning the history of architecture, including the periods of Corinthian, Ionic, Doric and Tuscan. I also remember the names of my professors – Morgan, Newcomb, Provine and VanDerpool. The life at UIUC was quite good as well: 35 cents for lunch, 45 cents per dinner, including apple pie à la mode for dessert at the University’s cafeteria.

The education that I received at UIUC has made a great impact on my life. Although I visited the United States a few times in the 1980s, unfortunately I did not have an opportunity to visit my Alma Mater. Returning to UIUC, the Architecture Building and 806 W. Nevada St. where I stayed is impossible for me now. But these places will always be in my dreams, and the memory of my time at UIUC will always be with me as well. Compared to my time at UIUC, the present Sino-U.S. educational exchange programs are continuing and flourishing in a much stronger fashion. I am firmly convinced that the collaborations of our two great nations will continue to make a difference to the world.

Ding Zeng Wang ’37 FAA, MS ’38 FAA
Shanghai, China

Editor’s note: To read about the longtime educational exchange between China and the University of Illinois, read “Enter the Dragon" from the Winter 2011 issue of Illinois Alumni magazine.

When Illinois Got Wise

Thu 15 Dec 2011 14:02 CST

The career of new Illinois Chancellor Phyllis Wise has taken her from a laboratory job to top administrative posts at two of the foremost universities on the planet. Along the way she has won kudos both for her endocrinological research and her administrative ken.

By Mary Timmins

In the three-campus U of I system, Wise rounds out a full complement of female chancellor/vice presidents, further consisting of Paula Allen-Meares, MSW ’71, PhD ’75 SW, at UIC, and Susan J. Koch, named to the post at UI Springfield in April.
UI News Bureau/L. Brian Stauffer Photo

Fabled for starting over again every spring, life broke with tradition this fall and began anew on Homecoming Saturday, Oct. 1, when Phyllis Wise became chancellor of the Urbana campus and vice president of the University of Illinois system. The evening previous, she had ridden in an open car at the head of the University’s traditional Homecoming parade — an amazing welcome, almost as though the beautiful evening and orange-and-blue-intensive crowd had converged especially to cheer her arrival.

And while, consistent with her scientific training and accomplishments, Wise is not one to much indulge such whimsy, she does allow that taking on her new job amid the spirit and splendor of Homecoming Weekend at Illinois has reaffirmed her long-standing belief that sometimes fate steps up and takes over.

“Some of the most wonderful things in my life,” she observes at a late-afternoon talk around the conference table in her Swanlund office, “have happened despite my planning.”

UW President and Role Model
And certainly, forces far beyond Homecoming seem to have conspired in enticing Wise back to the Midwest. It’s almost four decades since she completed postdoc work at the University of Michigan and headed for the University of New Mexico. Beyond that first job, a laboratory research position, awaited work at institutions around the nation: on the faculty of the University of Maryland Baltimore; as a department chairman at the University of Kentucky Lexington; then deanship at the University of California Davis. In 2005, somewhat to her own (self-confessed) surprise, she became provost at the University of Washington, one of the world’s premier research universities.

“I went from being the dean of a relatively small college with about 120 faculty to [an institution with more than 3,500 faculty] and a budget that was multiple times over what my [previous] budget was,” she recalls. “That was a big jump.”

Five years and innumerable cups of coffee after Wise arrived in Seattle – “I became addicted to lattes,” she confesses, with characteristic charm and candor – UW’s president departed, and she became his interim replacement. Wise was to lead the institution through a period of severe cuts in state funding; among her achievements was successfully convincing Washington state legislators that UW needed the authority to determine its own tuition increases. She also assumed the status of a role model, as the reportedly first (and, by best reckonings to date, only) Asian-American woman to head a major research university.

Ana Mari Cauce, who worked for Wise as an administrator at UW and is now dean of that university’s College of Arts and Sciences, describes her former boss and colleague as “an extremely caring, generous and thoughtful person, who is also determined, decisive and extremely energetic.

“She always puts people (students, faculty, staff) first,” Cauce noted in an email. “She has little patience for ‘we’ve always done it that way.’”

While interim head of UW, Wise declined to apply for the post herself – declined indeed to seek any other job, including the Illinois chancellorship (that search began in December 2010) – having promised the university’s board to stay until she had shepherded UW into the care of its new permanent leader. That juncture came last April. Approached then – for a second time – about the U of I opening, Wise decided to apply. The rest is history, abetted by fate.

“I honestly didn’t think I would be moving again from Seattle,” she says.

Happy to say, she likes the coffee here, too.

‘The Full Package’
Wise’s arrival at Illinois ended the campus’s own time of interim leadership, under veteran professor and administrator Bob Easter, phd ’76 aces. Challenges included the aftermath of a state-appointed panel’s investigation of admissions practices, and a consonant shift in the University’s topmost leadership, as well as ongoing state budget disappointments. Amid epic administrative and budget restructuring, the quest to fill the chancellorship took eight months and attracted candidates drawn “from a very distinguished group” in the view of search committee chairman Doug Beck, a UI physics professor. “It is important to realize how strong the support is for our campus in the broader higher education community,” he says.

Even among such a rarefied coterie, Wise evinced “tremendous experience,” according to Beck. “She has shown leadership in all her activities.” Her appointment, made by President Michael J. Hogan and the UI Board of Trustees based on recommendations from the search committee, was announced on Aug. 3. In his statement, Hogan – himself president of the U of I system for less than a year at the time – described Wise as “the full package.”

“She is a proven scholar, with a deep commitment to public higher education, and has an exceptional reputation as a leader at some of the nation’s top universities,” Hogan said.

Chris Kennedy, chairman of the BOT, observed “that a strong presidency results in strong chancellors, that strong chancellors result in strong deans, that strong deans result in stronger professors, and together they combine to attract stronger students in all respects.

“We now have an exceptionally strong chancellor in Urbana continuing that tradition,” Kennedy concluded in the announcement.

Since arriving on campus, Wise has expressed her determination to work with Illinois state legislators in boosting support for the University, as she did in Washington. She has asked her predecessor, Easter, to take a new interim role as vice chancellor for research. And she has set out on what she calls a “listening and learning tour.” Her intent? “To meet with groups of faculty, staff and students, and external stakeholders, alumni, businesses in our community to try and learn as much as I possibly can what people are passionate about,” Wise says. (A similar project, which she carried out at UW, yielded new information about the institution’s diverse strengths in environment-related disciplines, which led to establishing the College of the Environment.)

“Comprehensive research universities like this one or the University of Washington are a matter of trying to bring out the best in each unit and bring out the synergies that make the sum greater than the parts,” Wise says. “The beauty of academic leadership at this level, whether it’s as a provost, or a vice-provost, or a president, or a chancellor, is that they get to see how that tapestry is formed.”

On Sept. 30, the day before she officially assumed the post of UI chancellor and vice president, Wise rides at the head of the Homecoming Parade as grand marshal — an extraordinary welcome for the new leader of the Urbana campus.
L. Brian Stauffer Photo

Research and Recognition
While for Wise the allure of scientific research has gradually given way to the fascination of leadership, this transition in no way belies her decades of achievement as an endocrinologist. Her most celebrated work focuses on female hormones and brain function, investigating how estrogens regulate the reproductive cycle and how they interact with the brain during aging, particularly their influence on memory and recovery from stroke.

Such contributions “put her at the very forefront of neuroscience,” says her colleague Bruce S. McEwan, an award-winning researcher in neuroendocrinology at Rockefeller University, who describes Wise as “an outstanding ‘diplomat and ambassador of science.’”

Her lab has garnered tens of millions in funding from the National Institutes of Health, including two prestigious MERIT awards for continuation of ongoing research. Recognition has flowed liberally, from membership in the National Academy of Sciences to an honorary doctorate from her undergraduate alma mater, Swarthmore College, to a range of other awards, distinctions, honors and prizes, recognizing her teaching and leadership as well as her research. Author and co-author of hundreds of journal articles, Wise is well-known for her mentorship. Her postdoctoral students have landed at institutions ranging from the University of Chicago to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to pharmaceutical giants Eli Lilly and Pfizer.

“It’s telling that she’s named her dog ‘Maestro,’ which means ‘teacher,’” notes her UW colleague Cauce. “She has a deep understanding of the unique kind of teaching and learning that can take place at a student-centered research university.”

“She is a proven scholar, with a deep commitment to public higher education, and has an exceptional reputation as a leader at some of the nation’s top universities.”
— Michael J. Hogan
President, University of Illinois

As well as balancing her academic work against increasingly demanding administrative posts, Wise has also embraced the cares and joys of motherhood. With her two children now grown, she remains fond nonetheless of describing her life as a series of experiments: as cooking (“short-term”), research (“mid-term”) and her children (“my long-term experiments”).

She herself is the American-born daughter of Chinese parents; they came to the U.S. when her father received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to pursue a doctorate at Northwestern. With return to China planned for Dec. 12, 1941, fate intervened in their lives – and Wise’s, still to come – when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7. The couple settled in the U.S.; her father became a neurologist at Columbia University’s medical school (among other distinctions, he was hired by NASA in the 1960s to address the problem of motion sickness in astronauts), and her mother taught at Cornell and advocated for the then-emergent profession of nurse-practitioner.

Wise still remembers visiting her father’s neurology lab at Columbia on Saturdays. (“How do you NOT do biology after that?” she inquired in a local interview with The News-Gazette.) Inspired by his example, she was to become the first woman in the graduate program in zoology at Michigan and would go on to weather such setbacks as rejection by a prospective mentor because she had a young child at the time. Encouraged by more generous colleagues, Wise expanded her interests into educational administration, even as she zealously pursued her research. “In some ways I was given more opportunities because I was a woman and Asian-American, and there were not many of us around,” she says. Like her father, Wise now holds a medical school appointment – with the UIC College of Medicine – as well as a tenured faculty position in cell and developmental biology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Illinois.

On a sunlit afternoon of orange and blue, Wise and Loren R. Taylor, UIAA CEO and president (right), present the Lou Liay Spirit Award to Alan Puzey ’74 ACES, an authority on food and agricultural research. The presentation took place at halftime of the Oct. 1 Homecoming game.
L. Brian Stauffer Photo

Winding Down and Starting Anew
With signature frankness and practicality, Wise says of her scientific work: “I am putting down my funded research. I hope I can continue to do research in a different way, but my NIH grant will be done on July 31, 2012.

“I have to say I loved doing research,” she adds. “When you plan an experiment, you usually know whether the experiment worked or not within a year or two. And you go on from there. You don’t repeat the same experiment. You do the next experiment. When you’re in administration, there are steps. You don’t get the immediate return on suggestions you make. You don’t have the control that you used to have, but I think the impact is broader.”

“I really believe a chancellor should be an enabler,” she concludes. “I hope that I can work to make sure that this University becomes even better than it is now.

“And when the University is already excellent, it’s hard.”

But it helps when life starts anew – and fate seems to be on your side – and the coffee tastes as good as ever

Editor’s note: Share in Phyllis Wise’s observations and thoughts about the University of Illinois at her Chancellor’s Blog. Visit https://illinois.edu/blog/view/1109/.

Getting To The Promised Land

Thu 15 Dec 2011 14:01 CST

Architect Ed Jackson helps bring King Memorial to the nation’s capital

By Cyra Master

The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial
Photo courtesy of Master Lei Yixin

It was 1963, and 14-year-old Ed Jackson Jr. ’73 faa wanted to be part of history as civil rights leaders flocked to the District of Columbia.

“When I was young in McComb, [Miss.], and the March on Washington was taking place, I really wanted to be present,” Jackson says. “But my mother was fearful to travel across the South in those days. I couldn’t understand it, but she did.”

She told her son his time would come.

“She said, ‘You’ll have the opportunity to make your mark,’” Jackson says and pauses with a smile.

“Mama was right.”

Nearly 50 years later, the architect’s mark is on display in our nation’s capital for the world to see. Nestled amid the cherry blossom trees on the northwest bank of the Tidal Basin stands the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, honoring the man – and martyr – who served as the engine of the U.S. civil rights movement. Jackson, executive architect, has been a shepherd and a steward of the project for more than a decade.

“People want me to express my emotions” now that the memorial is complete, says Jackson, a retired Army major. “But in the military, if you become emotional, you lose your competitive edge.

“I look at it as though it’s a mission. ... I have, for the last 15 years, looked at it that way.

“I’m sure the time will come when I will step back and have a moment to exhale like a lot of people do when they come here.”

That’s exactly what visitors do. The memorial, dedicated on Oct. 16, has been open to the public since August and draws steady crowds. School tours mingle with groups of World War II veterans as people pose for pictures and admire the view.

Jackson makes clear that this is not a monument – a fixture that marks an event in the past – but a “living memorial” to Dr. King and his ideas.

The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, the only one on the National Mall not dedicated to a president, includes massive stonework; flowing water; a 450-foot, curved wall bearing King’s words; and nearby cherry blossom trees whose April flowering will coincide with the month of his assassination.
Photo courtesy of Master Lei Yixin

From the Military to the Memorial
During his undergraduate years at the University of Illinois, Jackson was a member of the Reserve Officer Training Corps, and it was through his ongoing military service that he became connected to the memorial.

Stationed in South Korea in 1995, where he was assigned to design military hospitals, Jackson drew the attention of a colonel who asked him if he had ever pledged a fraternity.

“‘I see [you’re the type who] can make a difference,’” Jackson recalls the colonel saying. “‘In order to make a large contribution, you need to be part of a larger organization.’”

The wheels were put in motion in 1996, and Jackson, then in his 40s with a doctoral degree in architecture, found himself in a situation similar to that of a college freshman – hoping for entry into Alpha Phi Alpha, a prestigious African-American fraternity whose long list of prominent members includes former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and King himself.

Barely six months after selecting Jackson, the fraternity approached him about taking on a special project. For years, the organization had been working to create a memorial to King, a goal first discussed in 1983 by five fraternity brothers casually sitting around a table. The group expected construction to take two years and cost approximately $2 million, Jackson says. In the end, the completed memorial cost $120 million, with Jackson devoting nearly 15 years to managing the project from initial design to final completion. “Their passion was infectious, and I got swept up in it,” he says.

Not Without Controversy
The tribute to King aligns with the Lincoln Memorial (designed by UI alumnus Henry Bacon, Class of 1885) and the Jefferson Memorial. Forming the core of the design is a line from King’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech: “With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.”

Two large stones representing that mountain form an entrance to the memorial, while the “stone of hope,” from which King appears to be emerging, pushes forward into the plaza. Engraved on a surrounding wall, 14 quotations from the eloquent leader speak of justice, democracy, peace and love.

Despite the long-awaited opening of the memorial, King’s likeness has drawn controversy, just as King himself did in guiding the civil rights movement of the last century. Some say the face of the civil rights icon looks too confrontational. Jackson shakes his head at that, as though he can nod away the fuss.

To decide upon the visage, sculptor Lei Yixin offered four possibilities, from which King’s children indicated the one that most resembled their father. When daughter Bernice saw the final product and said, “That’s Daddy,” Jackson says it was “the only confirmation I needed.” For his part, Jackson thinks King looks “professorial,” with a scroll clutched in one hand.

The choice of Yixin, who is Chinese, as the sculptor of record also raised eyebrows. It’s clear that this frustrates Jackson, who had searched diligently to find the best artist to portray the minister, a recipient of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize.

“The people who make these comments obviously have not embraced what Dr. King was all about – an inclusive society,” Jackson says.

During the lengthy process of finding an artist, the design team had stumbled across a stone carvers’ symposium in St. Paul, Minn. It was there, among the world-renowned sculptors assembled, that the team found Yixin.

“All the other sculptors said, ‘Yes, I’d like to do this.’ He said, ‘Yes, I can do that,’ and that struck a chord,” Jackson says. “He pulled Dr. King out of stone.”

Executive architect Ed Jackson Jr. has spent more than a decade managing the King memorial project from the glimmerings of an idea to its final completion.
Hoon Designs, Inc. Photo

Inspired by the Quad
Born in Aurora, Jackson and his family settled in Mississippi when he was 9 months old. Returning to Illinois for college was an adjustment.

“I didn’t even own a coat that would keep me warm,” Jackson says. He also had to adjust to cultural differences. While only a small number of minority students were on campus, Jackson says the U of I “went out of its way to open doors” for them.

“It was difficult to have an immediate rapport with people,” he recalls, so a fellow African-American student asked the University for a house where minority students could work and gather. “It was not a fraternity but a social setting,” Jackson says. “That was necessary for us to succeed in that environment.”

Those were years of upheaval across the nation. As the Vietnam War was winding down and the Watergate scandal was coming to a head, Jackson concentrated on his education. “I was so concerned about being successful in architecture that I never attended an Illinois football game,” he says. But it wasn’t all work. Jackson spent a lot of time on the Quad.

“It is such a magical space,” Jackson says. His architect’s eye sees a well-executed spot that is full of life, even in the dead of winter.

When a UI class required him to enter a national design competition, Jackson’s favorite space served as inspiration. Charged with the task of designing a city plaza that would entice people to gather, Jackson thought of the Quad and the community it created through common space. He finished second, with the top spot going to a professional architect.

“One thing I looked for on every campus after was the magic that was created on the Quad,” Jackson says. And the elements that evoke that allure – a combination of openness and intimacy offering places to sit and vistas to see – are also incorporated in King’s memorial.

“If we created a space to give magic to the experience,” Jackson says of the design’s intent, “people would want to come and spend time and read the quotes on the wall.”

How Far America Has Come
While Jackson has been a key figure behind the memorial, he is quick to deflect praise to his team – and it’s obvious that it is his team. He talks about the roles of everyone from the sculptor to stonemasons, many of whom he knows by first name. Jackson’s ardor and attention to detail influenced all of the workers.

“The passion they brought to the task is reflected in the product,” Jackson says of his group. “I’m obviously proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish.”

At the end of the day, Jackson was most concerned about making his fraternity brothers and King’s family proud. He believes he has kept his vow to King’s widow, the late Coretta Scott King, that the memorial would “befit the sacrifice she, her husband and her family made on behalf of this country” and would “encourage others to take up [King’s] message.”

Having fulfilled those promises, Jackson now looks to the public to judge his work. Generally unrecognized by the crowds, “I stand among them and listen to the comments,” he says. “My satisfaction is drawn from their satisfaction. They are in awe of the likeness and the quality of the environs. … They’re the ones I really try to reach out to [now in order to] produce something that moves them in a profound way.

“[The memorial is] representative of how far America has come,” Jackson says. “I think a lot of that is reflected upon when people come and look at this piece.”

Master is a freelance writer and editor in Washington, D.C.

Enter the Dragon

Mary Timmins — Thu 15 Dec 2011 14:00 CST

Dating back more than a century, the connection between the University of Illinois and China continues to deepen and grow.

By Mary Timmins

Early in the 20th century, UI President Edmund James established ties to China through minister Ting-Feng Wu; both are pictured above, respectively flanking the woman in dark gloves.
Photo 0000267 courtesy of the University of Illinois Archives

A century ago, the journey from China to Illinois cost at least a month’s travel by ship and rail. Today, sleek jets make the main jump in 13 hours, arcing poleward – up out of Beijing, across Mongolia, along the Beaufort Sea, over Canada and down into Chicago, the far-below terrain ticking by, remote as the past. Once buried in its vastness and obscured by its language, China has exploded into a present of access and opportunity, becoming a global powerhouse of manufacturing and upward mobility – a transformation in which the University of Illinois has been engaged since opening doors to students from the Middle Kingdom more than a hundred years ago.

What’s changing about the relationship is what’s changing about everything in the new millennium – the speed with which technology makes communication and collaboration possible. Yet China remains, in the depth of its history, the distinction of its culture and the huge promises and challenges of its future, an enigma to the West and perhaps even to itself. What follows is not so much an overview of the relationship between the U of I and China as a series of stories that have emerged from that relationship.

For, East or West, stories are how we understand.

‘My Risk-Taking Venture’
The remarkable tale of Bo Zhang, ms ’92 eng, phd ’99 eng, is not just about one individual’s amazing rise but the profound changes that have come to China in the past half-century. Separated from his parents at the age of 8 by the cruel logic of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution – which decreed that the educated must change places with the peasantry – he and his sister were transported to the chilly, remote province of Qinghai and essentially left to fend for themselves.

Four decades later, Zhang is an international businessman whose past and present manufacturing ventures include electronic motors, medical imaging, motor shafts and hydraulic rescue equipment (used after the devastating 2009 earthquake in Sichuan). One component of this stupendous success is the sheer perseverance that got him into school, then university, then a government post, then – and this move was exceptionally courageous because he had to leave his secure job – graduate school in agricultural engineering at the U of I.

But also singular to Zhang’s story has been his ability to bend and move with the changing global times. He came to Illinois and earned his doctorate. He returned to China and built his business. He then relocated to Chicago to raise his family and continue his ventures (a move possible only after the opening of trade between China and the West). Most remarkable of all, he has since returned to China and now divides his time between the two countries, pursuing business interests that span the globe.

In 2009, the University honored Zhang with the Madhuri and Jagdesh N. Sheth International Alumni Award for Exceptional Achievement. The following year he was voted a member of the University of Illinois Alumni Association Board of Directors. He returned the compliment recently when he helped host a state trade delegation to China led by Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn.

“My risk-taking venture at the University of Illinois,” Zhang has said, “rewarded me many times over.”

James, UI president from 1904-1920, believed profoundly in connecting with China, writing to President Theodore Roosevelt on behalf of Chinese students and opening the way for them at Illinois.
1909 Illio Photo

A Century of Connections
In 1906, Edmund Janes James, president of the University of Illinois, composed a letter.

“China is upon the verge of a revolution,” James wrote. “The nation which succeeds in educating the young Chinese of the present generation will be the nation which for a given expenditure of effort will reap the largest possible returns in moral, intellectual and commercial influence.” He then sent the letter to President Theodore Roosevelt.

The federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had made it essentially impossible for working-class Chinese to come to the U.S. James, who led the University from 1904-1920, held a very different view of the Middle Kingdom. He sought out Ting-Feng Wu, Chinese minister to the U.S., creating a direct connection between China and the Urbana campus. He set up the first office for foreign students at any university in the United States. He secured housing for Chinese students – local landlords being reluctant to rent rooms to non-Americans – and encouraged young Chinese women as well as men to come to Illinois to study. Between 1911 and 1920, the U of I was educating a third of all of the Chinese students in the U.S. By the ’40s, the roster of Chinese people holding degrees from Illinois shone with influential names: H.Y. Moh, Class of 1913, cotton manufacturer and government minister; Tao Xingzhi, an Illinois student from 1915-16 who become a great populist educator in China; Co-Ching Chu, Class of 1912, known as the “Father of Chinese Meteorology”; architectural engineer Edward Y. Ying, ms ’39 faa, influential in the planning of modern Shanghai.

Through the stories of such individuals, the name of the University of Illinois has become embedded in modern Chinese history. Like that of Wang Ching-Chung, an interpreter who became the first Chinese doctoral student in American higher education; after completing a doctorate at Illinois in railway management in 1911, he transformed China’s train system. And Lin Qiao Zi, Class of 1915, a female doctor who received her medical degree from Illinois, becoming the first Chinese citizen to be educated in Western medicine. And Loh-Kwan Chen ’24 eng, a civil engineer who built most of the airports in China before World War II – and later spearheaded the destruction of many of them as part of efforts to thwart the Japanese invasion.

The Illini connections to China have only grown through the succeeding decades. The Urbana campus alone claims at least 7,433 alumni in China today. (The actual number may be much greater because of the difficulty of tracking graduates at such a distance.) Shanghai resident Ding Zeng Wang ’37 faa, ms ’38 faa, who studied architectural engineering at Illinois, sent a letter recently to UI President Michael Hogan, in which he wrote of the campus and environs, saying that “these places will always be in my dreams.

“I am firmly convinced that the collaborations of our two great nations will continue to make a difference to the world.”

Accountancy alumnus Chris Lu, CEO of Deloitte & Touche China, meets with business student Esteban Lee and others during a recent visit to campus. In the 17 years since Lu took over the company, headquartered in Shanghai, business has exploded, with the staff growing from 35 to more than 11,000.
UI College of Business Photo

Change as Old as China
Stroll through Chicago’s Grant Park and the structures glitter and climb, proclaiming a city’s pride in architecture and the rebuilding upon black ground cleared by a Great Fire of 140 years ago. Walk along Shanghai’s riverfront (known as the Bund), and soaring office towers telegraph in neon and sci-fi shapes the wild news of the sky-high future over the world’s most populous nation.

Chris Lu ’80 bus, mas ’81, works in one of those skyscrapers – the Bund Center, a 50-story granite tower crowned in gold like an empress. As CEO for the international accounting firm Deloitte & Touche LLP China, he is one in a vigorous new generation of Chinese citizens who grew up in the capitalism-friendly times beyond the Cultural Revolution. The company, which leases 10 floors of the tower for its Asian headquarters, employs 11,500 people in China and Taiwan. When Yu took over the office in 1994, the staff numbered 35.

“It’s been a fabulous ride,” he said during a visit to campus in October.

Lu, who travels to the States on business several times a year, was back at Illinois to give a talk to students in the College of Business about his country’s massive economic shift and its implications for the U.S. and the world. Hundreds of millions of citizens have streamed into China’s cities, where factories and facilities produce cheap and plentiful goods and offer workers more prosperous lives. China’s middle class has swelled to an estimated 161 million – the equivalent of almost half the entire population of the U.S. – and a whole new tier of multimillionaires has materialized.

For Lu, such limitless growth carries with it huge challenges, which include a changing social structure, demand for limited resources and questions of sustainability. “This is uncharted territory,” he said. He believes that major opportunities await the University, particularly in setting new international accounting standards that can be used in China and worldwide. “This is really the institution when it comes to the science of accounting,” he says of Illinois. “And you need to assume that leadership. Since you’re already there, you need to assume that global role.

“Because no one else has come, in my mind, even close to the U of I.”

The Enchanted Circle
Intellectual leadership in China – and, for that matter, around the world – is, of course, a long tradition for the University. Illinois presently has more than 50 partnerships and collaborations in place with Chinese institutions in locations from Macau to Inner Mongolia. These programs range from agriculture, engineering and architecture to the humanities, business and even firefighting. Through an increasingly popular “three-plus-two” arrangement, Chinese undergraduates spend three years at a university in their homeland, followed by two years of graduate study at Illinois, leading to a master’s degree.

Thus the number of Chinese students drawn into the enchanted circle of Alma Mater has burgeoned, growing to more than 3,000 in the fall of 2011. Sun Wen ’05, an international women’s soccer star who took English courses at Illinois, recalls how the beauty of the campus when she arrived formed “the most splendid and unforgettable scene in my life.” Now head coach of the Shanghai women’s soccer team, she credits her studies at the U of I with helping her recently pass a coaching course administered by Fédération Internationale de Football Association in Malaysia.

And where once Chinese students at Illinois found housing through the grace of Edmund James, they now receive support in the form of University services and clubs and interest groups. The most popular is the Chinese Students and Scholars Association: the Illinois chapter of this international organization was founded in 1910.

When the students return to China, continuing connections back to the Urbana campus await them in the alumni chapters and other UI connection points of Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

“The extent to which China values education is a very powerful force in their future,” says Bob Easter, phd ’76 aces, who has been visiting China on the U of I’s behalf for more than 20 years, first as a professor and dean of the College of ACES and more recently as interim chancellor. “The Chinese are in a very sweet spot where they could well become the innovators of the world.”

Lu Wan Zhen arrived at Illinois “on a clear day in fall,” as she has described it – 65 years ago. Lu, who returned to China with a master’s degree in chemistry and went on to a highly distinguished career, is pictured above with her granddaughter, Mellisa Yu, a UI sophomore.
Photos courtesy of Lu Wan Zhen

‘Such a Long Time Ago’
While many students return to China, many others will endeavor to stay. Consider the story of Lu Wan Zhen, ms ’48 las, and her granddaughter, Mellisa Yu.

Lu came to study chemistry at Illinois in 1946, arriving on “a clear day in fall,” as she describes it in an email, when “I saw a university sitting in the middle of a wild corn field.

“The campus, the classes, the professors and regular people on the street in Urbana-Champaign were very important to me because they were my first look and interaction [with] the Western world and culture,” Lu recalls. “The humble personalities and the hardworking work ethic of the people there gave me a very nice impression.”

Having received her master’s degree in a year and a half – during which she spent most of her time studying and also improving her English – she joined her husband at Ohio State, earned her doctorate and worked Stateside for several years. Returning to China in 1955, she went on to a highly distinguished career with the Research Institute of Petroleum Processing, winning fellowship in the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1991.

And, each time she achieved success, “I [could] feel that the solid training I obtained in Urbana-Champaign had helped me to achieve [this progress],” Lu writes in her email.

Today, Lu’s granddaughter, Mellisa Yu, is a thoroughly American sophomore majoring in dietetics at Illinois. She belongs to a sorority, performs with Legend Dance Company and has a leadership position in Volunteer Illini Projects (VIP). Yu, who grew up in the U.S., has been back to China several times on family visits and also stays in touch with her grandmother by video chat. When Lu found out her granddaughter would be attending Illinois, Yu recalls her saying in delight: “It’s such a small world that this would happen!”

While Yu hopes to find an internship in China over the coming summer, she has no expectation of ever living there permanently. “It’s so different over there than the way I grew up, the way the U.S. is,” she says during an interview in the Illini Union. “I’m here now.”

But, she concludes: “It’s cool that I’m here where my grandma was 60 years ago. … It’s very special to know that I’ve created a life for myself in Champaign. … And this is where my grandma was such a long time ago.”

Swell Job

Wed 9 Nov 2011 18:21 CST

Illinois grad swims English Channel for ALS research

By Sarah Fischer

Exhausted but overjoyed, McConnell stands smiling at Cap Gris Nez, the beach where he came ashore.
Photos courtesy of Doug McConnell

Crossing the English Channel is, for open-water swimmers, like summiting Mount Everest for mountain climbers. Actually, it’s harder. Since the first successful swim – made in 1875 – from the white cliffs of Dover to the French town of Calais, just 811 people have completed the 25-mile stroke-fest, half the number who have reached the peak of Everest.

Up until a couple of years ago, Doug McConnell ’79 bus had never swum more than five miles straight. He had very little experience with saltwater and had never swum in cold water. Yet in 2009 he decided that he was going to swim the English Channel.

Seventeen hours after getting settled in Dover on Aug. 21, McConnell was in the water, headed east. “The biggest worry was jellyfish,” he said. “And cold water.” McConnell also faced winds of more than 20 miles per hour and swells that, as he wrote in his blog about the experience, gave him the feeling of “just getting slapped around by the waves, taking in lots of seawater and trying to keep on course.”

“You have to be ready for the unexpected,” he added in a telephone interview for Illinois Alumni.

Swimming the Channel allowed McConnell to blend a collection of personal goals. Foremost was memorializing his father, David McConnell ’54 vm, dvm ’56, who died in 2006 after a 14-year battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

To raise funds, McConnell partnered with the Les Turner ALS Foundation, which joins Northwestern University in supporting ALS research and patient services. In his first meeting with the foundation to discuss his goal, McConnell said, “I made up a number: $50,000.”

Turns out he was more than on the money. His campaign, A Long Swim, met its $50,000 mark on Aug. 3, two and a half weeks before McConnell’s plunge into the icy waves of the English Channel. By the start of September, he and his team – which includes his wife and sister – had raised upward of $150,000.

A cruise ship dwarfs alumnus Doug McConnell as he strokes his way toward France in August.

McConnell attributes much of his preparation to his four years as a swimmer at the University of Illinois. Under the guidance of swim coach Don Sammons ’55 ahs, ms ’60 ahs, McConnell began as a freshman walk-on for the swim team. He quickly excelled, earning “Most Valuable Swimmer” back-to-back years and breaking the varsity record in the 200-yard butterfly – a record he held for 10 years. McConnell even took over as captain of the team in his senior year, the same year he placed 18th in the NCAA finals. He frequently credits Sammons for giving him the confidence needed to tackle the Channel. “One of the things you learn is to reorder your thinking, so you think, ‘This is really something I can do. I can do whatever I want,’” McConnell said.

And, in the case of his long swim, he did. On Aug. 22, at 3 a.m., 14 hours and 18 minutes after leaving England, through six hours of 5-foot swells, seven hours in the dark and 40,538 strokes, McConnell became the 48th person over age 50 to successfully swim the English Channel.

By his side floated his family, including his wife, Susan, who took photographs; three of their kids, who kept silent about menacing jellyfish quietly encroaching upon the boat; and a family friend, who stayed busy the entire time. All of them helped to keep McConnell on course – despite their own seasickness. “A Long Swim team is awesome,” McConnell said. “I feel privileged to be on that team. I am overwhelmed with the feeling of how lucky I am to have my family, to have them play such critical roles on the … team and the opportunity to be able to undertake this crazy swim at all.”

Asked if he plans to continue fundraising for ALS, McConnell eagerly replies that he has his eye on a number of swims. “Something about this story seems to resonate with people,” he adds. “I’d love to keep it going. No reason to stop now.”

Fischer, a fall intern at the UIAA, is a junior in rhetoric. She will be studying abroad at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, United Kingdom, in the spring.

The Secret's Out

Mon 7 Nov 2011 16:56 CST

Chicago artist emerges after years of hiding his talent

By Mary Beard

Adam Clement

5 a.m. – it’s dark, quiet and avoided by most people. Adam Clement ’83 las is not most people. At 5 a.m. while his house sleeps, he’s awake and living a double life. In a few hours he’ll go off to work as Adam Clement: deputy chief information officer in the Bureau of Technology for the Cook County Board. But for now, hidden away in his basement, he is Adam Clement: artist.

Inspiration
“I grew up in a house with parents who were interested in everything modern – whether it be art, architecture or design,” remembers Clement. He recalls constant discussions of the new buildings being added to the Chicago skyline and an instance where his parents bought a traditional house and promptly ripped out the old staircase. “I think that is where I acquired my ‘less is more’ taste,” he says with a laugh.

As a Chicago teen, Clement never took art classes but dabbled in geometric sketches. After high school, he took a year off to draft at the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill architecture firm in Chicago under the late, great architect Walter Netsch hon ’08 (uic).

“I was in heaven,” recalls Clement, admitting that Netsch was a huge influence. “Walter told me, ‘Don’t worry about school – just keep drawing.’” Clement didn’t, however, always heed the architect’s advice.

A set of competing interests
Clement did worry about school at the University of Illinois; for him, a long family history with the institution made the choice easy, but choosing his field of study proved more difficult. After considering different options, he decided to major in political science rather than pursue a degree in art and design.

On campus, when he wasn’t studying or spending time with his wife-to-be, Jean Ziengenfuss Clement ’81 ed, Clement was drawing. He began experimenting with techniques, switching from ink to pencil. “The best ideas flow so fast, I didn’t have time to get them down,” he says of his college days.

After graduating, Clement returned to Chicago to begin working as a program officer for the Joyce Foundation, a charitable organization that serves the Great Lakes area. There he helped recommend proposals that would receive funding, including non-profit art groups. “That job was just incredible,” he recalls. But despite close encounters with the art world, he kept his own skills to himself.

Putting himself out there
Life went on, and Clement worked and raised his children, Michael ’00 las, Leana and Jessica. But he also kept working with patterns, symmetry and free-flowing art. “Once I realized I wasn’t going to stop doing it,” he says, “I decided to put myself out there.”

At a friend’s birthday party, a conversation about the economy took an unexpected turn. Clement soon discovered that he wasn’t speaking with just another partygoer, but with Laurie Glenn, founder of the Th!nk Art Salon. After they spoke, he sent along his work and was chosen as Th!nk’s Featured Emerging Artist from October-December 2010.

“My goal was just to get it out there and get a reaction,” Clement says. A reaction was what he got from his friends, many of whom had no idea he was artistic at all. “When I told them what I was doing, they just looked at me and said, ‘An exhibition of what?”

Since that initial exhibition, Clement has been busy. This fall, the artist displayed work at two separate exhibitions in Chicago. In August his drawings were featured in the exhibit “Hand Drawn Geometry” at the Chicago Union League; he returned to Th!nk alongside fellow Chicago artist John Miller for the exhibit, “An Alternate Reality.”

Would he do things differently if he could go back?

“I feel very comfortable with the fact that I have no formal training and how this all unfolded,” he says. “It all came out, and I haven’t really looked back since.”

Beard is a senior in the College of Media news-editorial journalism program and was a fall intern at the UIAA.

Inquiring Minds

Mary Timmins — Thu 8 Sep 2011 15:03 CST

Why academic freedom is important – at Illinois and everywhere

By Mary Timmins

UI Creative Services/Public Affairs Photo

When Patrick Henry wound up the words “Give me liberty or give me death,” then hurled them in the general direction of the British, he likely knew the challenge would go some distance. Would he have foreseen it redounding to American education some 236 years later? Maybe. What is certain is that colleges and universities – and the teachers who are at the soul of these institutions – have liberty to thank for their very existence. Long revered and spiritedly reaffirmed, academic freedom is a principle receiving fresh support at the University of Illinois now, in the fall of 2011. What follow are some observations and reflections on why.

A well-respected legal scholar and feisty member of long standing on the faculty of the UI College of Law, Matt Finkin occupies a second-floor office in the Law Building, where he is wont to be found preparing lectures and conference papers, and, on some days, taking calls from the media on labor and employment issues in the breaking news. So meticulously overstacked is this space that it is not practical to try to carry on a conversation with Finkin while he is at his desk, seated behind the piles of legal volumes and briefs. Wandering downstairs instead and at last settling at a table in the cafeteria, where small knots of law students wind down the week with coffee and note comparisons, Finkin talks about one of his most pressing recent projects – proposing new language to be added to the University Statutes, language that affirms the principles of academic freedom to which those who teach at Illinois are entitled.

The process of revising the statutes, initiated last year by the UI Academic Senate’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, springs from recent court cases that have limited the right to free speech on the part of public employees. While faculty at academic institutions received special status in the most far-reaching of these decisions – Garcetti v. Ceballos, heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2009 – that consideration has been overlooked in subsequent lower-court rulings, prompting widespread concern and launching renewed efforts by universities and colleges, including Illinois, to affirm, uphold and protect academic freedom.

Like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, such freedom may seem self-evident to some. To others, it may appear to be a trend that should be curbed so as to foster broader views on campuses.

Finkin explains his view.

“Academic freedom is misunderstood,” he says, “as freedom of speech. To the public, you have freedom of speech, therefore what do you need academic freedom for? Nothing more is added. And the answer to that is: They’re not the same. They’re simply not the same. Freedom of speech – yes, the groundskeeper can stand on a soapbox in front of Swanlund [Administration Building] and say, ‘The Earth is flat.’ You can’t fire him for that. A professor of astronomy who did that can be fired.

“The standards are different,” he says.

The language that Finkin has crafted defines academic freedom this way:

the freedom to teach, both in and outside the classroom, to conduct research and to publish the results of those investigations and to address any matter of institutional policy or action … [and] to speak on any matter of social, political, economic or other interest to the larger community.

What academic freedom underwrites, in other words, is much broader than freedom of speech. Academic freedom means the freedom of discourse and inquiry. This is not uncontroversial. Beyond knowledge and ideas germane to teaching and research, academic freedom means freedom to discuss knowledge and ideas in general, and to advocate for or argue against. This is the freedom that makes education possible and that accounts for the world-reaching success of American colleges and universities. This is the freedom that both embraces and debates the full spectrum of political views. From this freedom has sprung the singular phenomenon that is the 21st century land-grant university – institutions birthed to bring prosperity to farms and people, which have gone on to attract genius the way avalanches gather snow.

Now, as has a way of happening time out of mind with the many kinds and forms of liberty, academic freedom is under pressure – notwithstanding the enormous good it has produced and continues to produce.

Because of academic freedom, “we have thousands upon thousands of American faculty members who teach the things they love to teach and do the research they love to do, and their students get to see what passionate intellectual commitment really means when it’s freely chosen,” observes Cary Nelson.

“And that’s given us the best educational system in the world.”

An English scholar of considerable stature, Nelson is most widely known in the academic community as the long-bearded face of the American Association of University Professors, serving as its president since 2006. He has written many books and provoked many, many more debates with an insistence on the rights of faculty that brooks no compromise. At an interview in the long living room of his Champaign home, crowded with mementos from his four decades of teaching, he reflects concerns, writ larger and larger in higher education today, about challenges to academic freedom both external and internal.

From the outside, Nelson worries about pragmatic public pressures on universities to provide white-collar vocational training and to produce lucrative research. While both of these functions have obvious benefits, the belief in education as valuable in itself – a process that helps society become a better place in which people live better lives – is enduring and compelling, lodged at the very center of what learning and progress are. Democracy, too. “From English to engineering, there are things you teach that help make students better informed citizens,” Nelson observes. “It just takes a lot of different disciplines to really put together a good education for critical citizenship.

“Theoretical physics may not develop products very often,” he continues. “Research with the Hubble Telescope into the origins of the universe probably doesn’t develop products very often. But I just don’t want to lose those things. Because they’re critical to the development of human understanding and to our understanding of the world. And that’s what a major university should be able
to do.”

Perhaps the most profound concern is that economic realities might curtail academic freedom far more drastically than administrative or political decisions. Joyce Tolliver, a Spanish professor and outgoing leader of the UI Academic Senate, voices the difficulties faced by her discipline and others that don’t produce job-holders or bring in research dollars.

“In the humanities,” she says at an interview in her office in the Foreign Languages Building, a striking brick structure just off the Quad, “we teach, and we write articles, and we further knowledge. And that’s very hard to put a price tag on.” Now, she notes, “there’s also this view of education as a commodity, that you have to produce a brand that you have to sell. All of this is just really bad news for the research institution and, of course, for liberal arts and the humanities.”

As to challenges faced by institutions themselves, both Nelson and Tolliver point to the trend toward contingent and adjunct faculty – instructors hired without tenure or hope thereof. This, says Nelson, “really has undermined academic freedom in a major way.”

Contingent faculty “typically do not fare well if they get involved in controversy,” Nelson points out, noting that “when parents complain or a legislator complains or students complain that they’re offended by something someone teaches,” that person may find his or her job at risk. While contingent instructors are especially vulnerable, tenured faculty can also be affected.

Yet giving offense doesn’t necessarily mean going to extremes. For every professor who makes the news through ill-considered public remarks or inappropriate classroom behavior, there are myriad teachers legitimately challenging uncounted student assumptions: Such assumptions range from the idea that light moves solely in straight lines to the notion that the U.S. is the best-fed country in the world. Engaging students and getting them to respond to and assimilate new ideas is what teachers do – and (as anyone who’s ever taught knows) discovery and discussion are integral to the process. As Finkin writes, “Independence of mind is an active virtue, not a passive one. It cannot be drilled into students; it must be drawn out of them.”

Obvious as the virtues of free thought, inquiry and discussion may be to educators, history shows that such perspectives are not always shared by others. The 20th century is scored from beginning to end with episodes that range from the firings of faculty alleged to be pro-German during World War I – “Michigan dismisse[d] a dozen different people for doing things like failure to buy enough Liberty Bonds,” educational historian Tim Cain observes – to an attorney general’s recent subpoena to a professor at the University of Virginia over the latter’s research on climate change. Cain, who is on the faculty of the College of Education, has made a study of the continuing history of conflicts over research and discourse in American universities and colleges, which begins – well, nearly at the beginning.

“One of the more famous cases was a faculty member at Cornell, Henry Carter Adams, who gave a talk in 1886 ... Sort of a pro-labor-type talk,” Cain observes at an interview in his office, a small space pitched by modernist rafters and lined with books. “The chief of the board of trustees went into the president’s office and said, ‘Get rid of him, or you’ll never receive any money from me again.’ So [Adams] was not renewed.”

In response to such early incidents, the AAUP formed in the early years of the 20th century, issuing its Declaration of Principles in 1915. This iconic document affirms that academic freedom “comprises three elements: freedom of inquiry and research; freedom of teaching within the university or college; and freedom of extra-mural utterance and action.”

Central to the Declaration is the German concept of “Wissenschaft” – a word without synonym in English, which affirms the value of pursuing knowledge for its own sake. Wissenschaft emerged in Europe as the antithesis of religious orthodoxy, sprung from centuries of intellectual darkness during which people were tortured and killed for observing and questioning. The wellspring of academic freedom in Germany both for individuals and institutions, Wissenschaft found its way across the Atlantic after the Civil War and was welcomed into American higher education.

A key difference from Germany – where universities and colleges are administered by faculty – is that U.S. institutions of higher education have, for the most part, traditionally been overseen by governing boards. Singular to academic freedom in American higher education is the idea that faculty are appointed, rather than employed, by the boards of the institutions they serve – an affirmation that they possess expertise that can only be judged by their peers and that they thus cannot be summarily terminated. When faculty members are dismissed for questionable reasons, the AAUP advocates on their behalf. Such inquiries are based not on the principle that scholars should be able to say anything they like, but, as Finkin puts it, “the absolute freedom of thought, of inquiry, of discussion and of teaching, of the academic profession.”

Tolliver, whose successor as head of the executive committee of the UI Academic Senate takes over at the beginning of the fall semester, observes that: “We are much better off than in many institutions because we have a history of respect for real shared governance and for consultation.”

In the end, academic freedom in America draws its authority from the compact that colleges and universities have with society to advance knowledge. An educated citizenry is also part of this excellent bargain, through which prosperity has flowed on an impressive scale through Illinois and the country. (One need only look at the social transformation wrought after World War II by the GI Bill to see what education can do for a nation.) “The draftsmen of the 1915 Declaration sought to establish principles of academic freedom capable of ensuring that colleges and universities would remain accountable to professional standards rather than politically or financially beholden to public opinion,” Finkin writes. “They hoped to construct institutions of higher education as instruments of the common good.”

The language on academic freedom to be added to the University Statutes has been passed by the Academic Senate and is making its way through the University, with the ultimate goal of approval by the Board of Trustees. Of these words, Finkin observes: “Is it thinkable that our trustees would suddenly fire a professor because he criticized them?

“I don’t think it’s thinkable, but you want to have a rule to make sure they don’t.”

He adds with a chuckle, “As Madison and the Federalists said – if men were angels, we wouldn’t need any government.”

Patrick Henry would surely have agreed.

Booster Shot

Thu 8 Sep 2011 14:48 CST

The CeaseFire program treats violence like a disease – and it works

By Dave Wieczorek

Gary Slutkin, far right, and other CeaseFire workers gather with residents of Chicago’s West Side. Slutkin’s mission – to examine the causes of violence and how to prevent it, just as one would do in combating disease – has led to marked drops in dangerous incidents in the cities that have adopted the CeaseFire program.
Photo: Jon Lowenstein / NOOR

It was late 1980s Somalia, a country writhing in the death throes of an indiscriminate disease, and Gary Slutkin ’71 las had stood uncomfortably in the midst of it for three years. Two decades later, the memories remain hauntingly real.

“One of the more devastating images that comes to my mind regularly is that of hundreds of horrified Somali women screaming in high-pitched, howling cries into the night sky while standing among dozens of newly dug makeshift graves in the desert – new graves of their buried friends, relatives and children,” said Slutkin, an epidemiologist and physician.

The stockpiling of the dead was the result of a cholera epidemic sweeping through Somalia’s refugee camps.

“I felt like I was in an indescribable horror, one that could have taken place hundreds or thousands of years ago, and which was otherwise hidden from the world in a very eerie, distant time and space.”

He and his colleagues “worked and then cried, worked and cried, trying to come to terms with a too-fast-moving epidemic. Some things I don’t want to remember. Somalia was very hard. I was affected by it greatly and am affected by it still.”

While he prefers not to elaborate on how deeply those experiences embedded themselves in his emotions, this much is clear: Slutkin has devoted his life to eradicating infectious diseases that kill people in alarming numbers and destroy communities. The infectious disease he has spent the past 16 years attempting to tame, however, might surprise some people – the scourge of violence.

“Violence is like AIDS or tuberculosis or cholera,” Slutkin said. “It’s a disease, it’s transmittable, and it’s reversible.

“Violence,” he emphasized, “is an epidemic.”

Seeking scientific solutions
Slutkin, a professor of epidemiology and international health at the University of Illinois at Chicago and senior adviser to the World Health Organization, is the founder and executive director of CeaseFire, a program administered by the Chicago Project for Violence Prevention and operated out of UIC’s School of Public Health.

The groundwork research for CeaseFire began when Slutkin returned to Chicago in 1995. After battling infectious diseases overseas for 10 years, he was looking for another challenge in the public-health field and zeroed in on urban violence, thought by some to be a hopelessly intractable problem.

“Most of what was being used or suggested to combat violence in the U.S. – for example, tougher punishments or non-specific community measures – didn’t make sense to me from the point of view of behavior and strategy,” Slutkin said. “Part of it is because I was trained at the World Health Organization in doing strategy. We did not take ideological solutions to problems. We were looking for scientific, practical and data-based solutions to problems.”

He believed that violence could be arrested like any other infectious disease and devised a strategy based on behavior change and epidemic-control methods: minimize the transmission of violence and block retaliation.

“CeaseFire is an evidence-based, scientifically proven intervention, a movement, and a campaign to change the thinking,” said Slutkin, who launched the program in Chicago in 2000.

The CeaseFire model relies on two sets of workers: trained violence interrupters to intervene in and defuse conflicts, and outreach personnel to promote alternatives to violence (by changing the accepted “norm” of retaliatory violence, primarily shootings). Supported by local, state and federal funds and the philanthropic world, CeaseFire hires men and women who at one time were gripped by violence themselves and can communicate with those who seek to resolve grievances with a gun. The interrupter’s job is to “talk down” a potential shooter. An outreach worker then steps in to guide that person’s long-term behavior away from deadly force.

“Violence is like AIDS or tuberculosis or cholera,” Slutkin said. “It’s a disease, it’s transmittable, and it’s reversible.”

Regarding the blood-for-blood cycle of violence, Tio Hardiman reads headlines like these far too often: “5 dead, 25 hurt in Chicago shootings in 36 hours” or “Toddler fatally shot in the head on Chicago’s South Side.” Growing up in some of the poorest, most dangerous South Side and West Side neighborhoods in Chicago, Hardiman never did time in the penitentiary, but he says he “saw it all. I’ve been involved in violence. I’ve seen people get hurt. I’ve hurt people. But I turned my life around.”

Hardiman, who earned a master’s degree in inner city studies from Northeastern Illinois University and is now director of CeaseFire Illinois, was a community organizer when he met Slutkin in 1999.

“He talked to me about some of his plans to address violence by treating it as an infectious disease,” said Hardiman. “I thought he was from another planet. In the neighborhoods [where] I grew up, we never looked at violence as being a disease or an epidemic. It was a way of life.”

Hardiman thought that while outreach workers were proving effective in counseling youths and young adults on the value of school and helping them get jobs, they weren’t reaching the hardest cases – those most likely to commit violence, like Hardiman himself at one time. In 2004, he suggested to Slutkin the idea of using interrupters to reach those most reluctant to put down their guns, some of them “stone-cold killers.”

According to Hardiman, CeaseFire workers have made more than 1,300 interruptions since then. He estimated that 30 percent of those interruptions prevented retaliations (someone got shot, but interrupters prevented the victim or the victim’s relatives or friends from retaliating) and 35 percent prevented shootings on the front end (meaning that no one got shot to begin with).

“Somewhere along the way we have to break the cycle for generations to come,” Hardiman said. “With CeaseFire, we’re winning one person at a time.”

An independent study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice and released in 2008 revealed a 41 percent to 73 percent drop in shootings in CeaseFire zones overall; of those drops, CeaseFire is credited with directly affecting 16 percent to 34 percent of them in four neighborhoods. In addition, five of eight Chicago neighborhoods showed a 100 percent success rate in reducing retaliatory killings.Those are the kind of results CeaseFire’s supporters had hoped to see.

“We try to fund breakthrough ideas that take on what often looks like an intractable problem and propose a different solution,” said Jane Isaacs Lowe at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a major funder of CeaseFire, whose annual budget is approximately $6 million to $8 million. “Changing the pattern of violence and thinking of it as a public-health issue is a breakthrough idea.”

Photo: Roberta Dupuis-Devlin

Finding the ‘invisible’ factor
When Slutkin worked with the World Health Organization to combat the spread of AIDS and cholera, he and his colleagues searched for the “invisible” that allowed an epidemic to feed off itself. When mothers in Somalia learned to hydrate their children, Slutkin said, mortality rates from cholera dropped by 50 percent to 80 percent.

“The ‘invisible’ with violence is observational learning or modeling,” said Slutkin, sitting in his 10th-floor office at UIC, not far from some of Chicago’s troubled streets. “One question we’ve asked is, ‘Where does the behavior come from?’ To say it comes from poverty is not right. There are plenty of poor places without violence.

“Where violent behavior comes from is the same place that language behavior or eating behavior or bike-riding behavior comes from. They basically come from observational learning or modeling.”

That is, seeing violence around you may impel you to imitate that behavior.

Experts in the field of violence believe that the epidemiologist is on the right track.

“I don’t think there’s another program that has proven as effective,” said Barry Krisberg at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law who has studied CeaseFire’s methods. “Simply throwing law enforcement resources at violence hasn’t curtailed it very much. If I were sitting in the Department of Justice right now or running a major foundation, I’d be looking to replicate CeaseFire in every major city.

“It’s by far the best program out there.”

More than a dozen cities throughout the United States are already in the process of replicating CeaseFire, and representatives from 40 other U.S. cities and 30 countries have visited with Slutkin and his staff over the past five years to learn how to adopt the program in their communities. Early findings in Baltimore and Kansas City, Mo., have shown success; the program is also being used in Iraq and Trinidad.

‘An explorer of the mind’
Slutkin, who earned his medical degree from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, began his work in infectious disease control in the early 1980s in San Francisco, where an influx of refugees from Southeast Asia caused an outbreak of tuberculosis. He helped increase the cure rate from 50 percent to 95 percent and drop the number of cases by more than 50 percent.

In 1985, he moved to Somalia, where he worked on cholera and tuberculosis epidemics among refugees. When Somalia edged toward civil war in 1987, Slutkin left the country and joined the World Health Organization. There he was assigned responsibility for combating the Uganda AIDS epidemic.

Uganda became the only country in Africa where the AIDS epidemic has been reversed, meaning that rates changed course from going up to going down, and with significant reductions.

By 1995, Slutkin was worn out. He experienced “a tremendous amount of highs and lows” over the years and felt it was time to return to Chicago, the hometown he had left behind as a teenager as he set out for the U of I.

(Not surprising for the son of a research chemist, he had been an undergraduate in love with science. “Even from childhood,” he said, “I was trying to figure out how the eye works, how the mind works. What is the brain? What’s in the body? What’s the difference between a duck and squirrel and a person? How do things work? What is reality?”)

After returning to the U.S., Slutkin married Marla Anderson, whom he describes as a yoga practitioner and, like himself, “a thoughtful explorer of the mind.” He regards himself as an introspective man who, when he’s not attending meetings or traveling for CeaseFire – which is rare – likes to find quiet time for himself to sit in the sun, read the latest journal article about brain research or play his guitar.

“I am a private person, and I guess it’s true that I don’t talk about myself,” he said. “I think I learned that in the international environment. People in most other cultures don’t talk about themselves so much.”

Changing the mindset
Slutkin prefers to talk about CeaseFire and how he is trying to change the way we commonly think about violence – that it is committed only by bad people and that violent behavior requires additional punishment and legal sentencing to discourage similar actions.

Crucial to long-term success is CeaseFire’s ability to change not only the thinking on the streets but the mindset of people who have never been the victim of violence, who have never had a gun held to their heads or had a family member or friend shot.

“It’s critical to everybody that solutions be found,” Slutkin said. “I don’t want to sell, ‘It can happen to you,’ but violence does happen to individuals and groups unexpectedly, and it’s the worst thing that can happen to anyone in your family.

“The additional issue is that this is really sucking up money.”

He estimated that violence costs Chicago taxpayers more than $2 billion a year.

“Just look at your tax bill and see how much is going to the court system, the prison system, to Medicaid,” Slutkin said. “There are enormous economic development constraints. Nothing is developing in these neighborhoods because of the violence, so there’s a lack of tax revenues. The school systems are not improving. It isn’t only a matter of teachers or whether the school building is good or not. The kids have chronic-stress disorders from having experienced or witnessed violence.

“It’s a matter of transforming someone’s thinking from, ‘I would do violence that’s expected of me’ to ‘I wouldn’t do it; it’s expected that I don’t do it,’” he said. “That’s social pressure.”

For Slutkin, preventing violence remains his “main thing” for the foreseeable future. He is a realist and knows that reversing an epidemic doesn’t happen overnight. But with behavioral and community norms already changing in CeaseFire neighborhoods, Slutkin believes we can now begin to think of violence in a different way: as solvable, preventable and reversible.

In the future, he said, “There will still be sporadic events and occasional small outbreaks of violence, but they’ll be containable.

“Like other epidemics, violence can be put in the past.”

Wieczorek is a freelance writer and editor in the Chicago area.

Editor’s note: “The Interrupters,” a documentary about the CeaseFire program, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, in January and took the top prize at the Sheffield Doc/Fest in the United Kingdom in June. The film is set to air on PBS’ “Frontline” television program in early 2012.

Eyes On The Prize

Thu 25 Aug 2011 17:42 CST

Chicago Sun-Times photographer is part of Pulitzer-winning team

By Gordon Voit

Photographer and UI alumnus John J. Kim and reporters Mark Konkol, center, and Frank Main celebrate their Pulitzer in the Chicago Sun-Times newsroom on April 18, The trio won the coveted journalistic honor for their series on crime in Chicago neighborhoods.
Photo: Jean Lachat/Chicago Sun-Times Photo

The situation developing on the countertop of John J. Kim ’97 media looked grim – troubling at best, really. Too many times before had the photographer for the Chicago Sun-Times seen colleagues confronted by the very same pink-slip hallmarks that awaited him as he returned from vacation to his Logan Square apartment and his cell phone: a gaggle of missed calls from the office, an estimated 17 voicemail messages and 12 text messages. His time off work officially headed south thanks to the combination.

One can forgive his brusqueness, then, when he didn’t rush to return the calls. As he instead plodded over to check his email account, an unwelcome sight in his inbox added insult to injury.

“I turned on my computer and logged in to my email account, and I got a bunch of messages saying, ‘Congratulations!’ and ‘You’ve won!’ and I thought my email account got hacked,” Kim said.

“Eventually I clicked on a couple, and one said, ‘John, please call the office right away.’”

As the notifications hit a crescendo, Kim conceded, made the call and received his sentence: one Pulitzer Prize for local reporting.

With word of his unexpected honor spreading (the committee no longer announces finalists in advance), a relieved Kim received another wave of calls, this time from other members of the media, asking for interviews.

Area 5
While his elucidating moment elicits a chuckle, what earned the award for the Schaumburg High School graduate and his partners at the Sun-Times – reporters Frank Main and Mark Konkol – is far less of a romp. The three were given the task of presenting a nine-part “State of the Neighborhoods” of sorts, a story that would identify and explain the many moving parts of the debilitating Chicago crime economy.

For a combined total of 11 weeks, over a period from mid-2009 into 2010, Kim was given a rare assignment: Report to 5555 W. Grand Ave., headquarters for the Area 5 Detective Division of the Chicago Police Department. There, he was to serve as the paper’s eyes as he sat in on suspect questionings, lineups and homicide investigations.

The assignment would require a rigorous process of vetting and permission – including getting clearance from top Chicago police officials.

“Every day I would go in, and we would just be [the detectives’] shadow, literally,” the matter-of-fact Kim said. “This is not light hearted stuff … this is them going to work, doing very mundane things or doing very risky things at crime scenes, stuff that the public really doesn’t see, doesn’t have the chance to see or doesn’t want to see, for that matter.”

Area 5 headquarters would provide a unique base of operations for the story, which covered an economically and racially diverse swath of Chicago, ranging from the North Center neighborhood of Mayor Rahm Emanuel to a Logan Square community that is on the upswing despite a nagging crime problem. Over the past 12 months, Logan Square ranked in the top 10 percent of the city’s 77 community areas in what is known as “index crime”: auto theft, aggravated assault, robbery and the like.

Kim harnessed this gritty streak in the final punch of the Sun-Times series. Using images and audio gathered as he sat in the back seat of the squad car assigned to detectives Don Falk ’91 (uic) and Anthony Noradin, Kim provided a poignant change-up to the largely text-based saga with an audio slideshow. Posted on the newspaper’s website, the piece gave the series a depth and emotion of visual expression that the print component could not.

‘that’s what we need to do’
Kim, a collected, humble man who chooses his words thoughtfully, says he subscribes to “somewhat of a puritanical view of journalism.” When asked about the emotional toll of documenting the bloody crime scenes, wakes and hospitalizations he witnessed on a near-daily basis, Kim says he resists the temptation to let his emotions affect his work.

“In theory we are there to objectively chronicle what is happening in front of us. And if you put your own emotions into it, it gets foggy, and it gets opinionated, and I’m not in the business of expressing my opinion.

“I’m in the business of archiving and chronicling whatever happens that is newsworthy,” he said.

But Kim concedes the taxing nature of his passion. As an 11-year vet of big-city photojournalism, the photographer has seen it all.

“Police tape and crying, screaming, hysterical victims’ families, all that stuff,” he said. “I’ve gotten to experience that time and again, and so I’ve built up enough of a wall to not let my emotions get in the way of anything that I need to capture the visuals that are happening in front of me.

“When I get back to my place at night, of course I have to register it in my head and run through the motions in my head and process what happened during the day, and I do, and then that’s that, and I go on. Unfortunately it sounds cold, but that’s what we need to do.”

The Korean connection
When the calls from the media began to pour in after the Pulitzer announcement was made, Kim says one of the first outlets that contacted him was Yonhap News Agency, Korea’s state-owned version of Reuters. Kim, born in South Korea, became the darling of the Korean news outlets. His parents happened to be in Korea at the time, as was his brother, who resides there.

“They were incredibly excited, much more than me. I was on vacation and I was dealing with other things, running errands. All that stuff didn’t register for a while. I imagine lots of journalists have that little daydream when the Pulitzer gets announced that they’ve won it. You’ve seen pictures of newsrooms celebrating and such, and in the back of my head I’m thinking, ‘Oh, that would be nice if I got to experience that someday,’ whether directly or indirectly as a co-worker or as a participant.”

Kim credits his rise to the top of his profession to the life-changing experiences he had while a student at the University of Illinois and a jack-of-all-trades for The Daily Illini. There he worked his way up from a freshman city/state reporter to a biweekly columnist, finding his current passion for photography when he was a junior. After a series of internships and jobs in Wisconsin, Iowa, the Chicago suburbs and Oakland, Calif., Kim finally landed at the Sun-Times, which has seven previous Pulitzers to its credit.

But don’t ask Kim to toot his own horn. Ask him how his life has changed since the award ceremony, and you’d be hard-pressed to get much more than a sentence or two.

“I’ve given my share of phone interviews and such, and the bosses at work are very gracious and nice,” he said.

“I shy away from it because I don’t take compliments very well. Mark and Frank, they love it. They deserve it definitely. They deserve all the praise they’re getting because they’re good journalists.”

A senior English major, Voit was a summer intern at the UIAA.

Editor’s note: For a slide show of Kim’s Area 5 photographs, visit www.suntimes.com/files/area5. An archive of the Pulitzer-winning story series is available at www.suntimes.com/Pulitzer.

Oceans '11

Sal Nudo — Tue 14 Jun 2011 11:25 CST

By David Menconi

Margaret Leinen has moved from the halls of the National Science Foundation to the shores of the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, above, part of Florida Atlantic University, and located in Fort Pierce, Fla. Hailed as a top authority on oceans and climate, she was named executive director this year.
Image courtesy of Florida Atlantic University

When it comes to climate science, there are optimists, and there are pessimists. Despite her misgivings and first-hand knowledge of all the ominous trends and data, Margaret Leinen ’69 las counts herself among the hopeful – and she has a way of gauging whether or not her colleagues are, too.

“I test people’s optimism by asking: ‘If they were alive in 2100, would they be worried about [carbon] emissions?’” she says.

“The optimists say no, we’ll be on to something else by then,” she continues. “I remain optimistic because I think with each year the scientific evidence [for global warming] becomes stronger and stronger.

“I have seen people who were very skeptical coming around to say okay, they see the impacts. … [and] I’m a firm believer in the creativity and genius of people,” Leinen says.

“I think we’re up to it. I just wish we were working on it a little more quickly.”

Given that Leinen has studied everything from the ocean’s biological processes to the chemical composition of deep-water mountain ranges, you could say that she knows this issue from top to bottom. Working in academia, government and private industry, she’s been studying oceans and climate for 40 years. That gives her standing as one of the country’s foremost authorities on the subject and a reliable advocate for science. And that has come in handy, given what a politically charged topic global warming has become.

“There are some legitimate scientists who think the case is still not made,” as to the causes of global warming, Leinen says, “but 99 percent of scientists do. … We are in for a very difficult time because of what we’re doing to the environment.”

In the know
“I have huge respect for her integrity,” says Bob Gagosian, head of the Consortium for Ocean Leadership and a longtime colleague of Leinen’s. “She is very trustworthy. You can count on her to be real when she tells you something, which is hard to do in her position. At the National Science Foundation, she had to be careful about that because of all the politics. But she’s an unrelenting supporter of the scientific community.”

In February, Leinen became executive director of Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, one of just six organizations in the world that operates manned deep-sea research submarines. Before that, she spent a decade in Washington, D.C., working with the National Science Foundation and The Climate Response Fund – and trying to keep contentious debates over global warming focused on science rather than politics.

Leinen moves in some lofty scientific circles. She chaired a recent scientific conference in Washington on “Our Changing Oceans” and also served on the board of the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (which made recommendations on how to spend the $500 million in grants that BP – now headed by fellow alumnus Bob Dudley ’78 las – paid out after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf). If you sit down for a talk in her office, it’s likely she’ll be interrupted by a phone call from someone like Susan Solomon, who headed up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from 2002-08. Email some of Leinen’s colleagues, and you’ll probably hear back from at least one who is doing research someplace like Antarctica.

There doesn’t seem to be anyone in Washington scientific circles whom she doesn’t know.

“She is a great person, very open and fair, and she’s incred-ibly dialed in to the Washington political scene,” says Robert Detrick, director of the Division of Earth Sciences at the NSF.

But Detrick notes other qualities of Leinen as well. “We’re all on a treadmill, looking for the next job that will make us look better,” he says. “That’s not Margaret. She’s more about making a difference. She’s very dedicated to working toward sustainable development and renewable energy.”

‘I was totally won over’
It’s somewhat ironic that Leinen’s professional life has been so tied to the ocean, given her background. She’s amused by graduate school applications in which aspirants recall walking on the beach and dreaming of being an oceanographer. Leinen herself never even saw the ocean in person until she was in her 20s.

She grew up in the landlocked heartland environs of Joliet; during her wonder years, Leinen thought she would grow up to practice law.

“I was very much under the spell of [the television legal drama] ‘Perry Mason,’” she recalls with a laugh. “The thing that attracted me about that was Perry Mason was always right … and always helping somebody who was misunderstood.

“I think that’s wrapped up in a deep sense of trying to find the truth,” she says. “People often say science is not about truth, it’s about verification of a hypothesis. I try to find out the real way things are. That’s the part about investigative law that appealed to me.”

For someone inclined toward investigation and reality, science was a natural pursuit. It was Leinen’s good fortune to have engaging high school science teachers, who further encouraged her in that direction. She came to the University of Illinois in the 1960s, a time when there were few women in the sciences.

Her first chemistry course was a dispiriting experience: Only five of 400 students in the class were female, and the male teacher was less than enlightened about that gender gap. He would move the women around to different seats so that the guys would all have a chance to sit next to the girls.

“I nearly flunked out the end of my freshman year,” Leinen says. “I was in these huge classes [that] I was just not connecting with at all, and I didn’t do well my first semester.” After contracting mononucleosis at the end of second semester, she took her finals upon returning in the fall and wound up on academic probation.

It’s worth noting that people who knew Leinen back then have different memories of her years at Illinois.

“Oh, Margaret was always smarter than everybody else,” says Pamela Etter Zull ’69 las, Leinen’s roommate for two years. “There really is nothing she can’t do, and it’s always been that way. And everything she does, she does very well. Even things like sewing.

“It’s kind of disgusting, actually,” she joked.

Ultimately, Leinen went through five different majors during her undergraduate years, with stints in biochemistry, anthropology, microbiology and geography before she finally landed on geology. What sold her was a class field trip to a strip mine and some outcrops along rivers. The weather was bad, and it could have been a miserable experience. Leinen found it life-changing.

“It was a terrible day, raining and cold,” she says. “I’d been in these 400-person chemistry classes where I never even got to talk to the professor. And not only my own geology professor but three or four others were on this trip, just as cold and wet and muddy as we were, sharing their thermoses of coffee with students and talking about what they were doing. It was such a different experience [from what I was used to], and I was totally won over.”

After that, what closed the deal was a chance to work with the late professor emeritus Harold Wanless. For the first time in her academic career, Leinen felt like she was taken seriously.

“He treated me like a real scholar,” she says of Wanless, “as though I knew what I was doing and talking about. He was making a set of big maps, and he had them spread out on a big table.

“I was terrified I’d make a mistake,” Leinen recalls, “[but] he was teaching me how to read a paper and where to draw a line on a map. … No one had ever treated me like that, which was a wonderful thing to do for an undergraduate.”

There’s a reason Margaret Leinen is smiling – she used this very basket to dredge the first samples of a field of hydrothermal vents that she discovered in 1983 in the waters off of Washington state.
Image courtesy of Margaret Leinen

From land to sea
Leinen continued her graduate work at Oregon State University, where her interest in geology went underwater. She says that whenever conversation turned to rocks from the deep ocean, someone would admit that they didn’t know much about that – which was enough to get Leinen to switch to oceanography.

“I thought I’d go off and study oceanography, learn all about that, come back and be the expert in geology that knew something about the ocean,” she says. “And I never got back to geology.”

Leinen’s master’s thesis traced 50 million years of climate change in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, as revealed by studying sediments. Then it was on to the University of Rhode Island for her doctorate, which refined that inquiry further.

Leinen did most of her research during the 1970s and ’80s, when there weren’t many women out there doing field work. She was a pioneer, but not everyone took that well. A 1978 oceanography trip to sea put her on a ship with a boatswain who was very much a crusty character. He drew a chalk mark in front of the boat’s fantail and declared, “No women past
the line.”

Leinen’s protests fell on deaf ears. “The captain backed him up, … so I had to work through another scientist,” she says. “It was not much fun.”

Leinen achieved a research breakthrough in 1983 when she discovered a field of hydrothermal vents about 250 miles off of the coast of Washington state. (These phenomena occur where the Earth’s plates separate and high-temperature vents spew out hot water and sediments, creating volcanic rock formations that serve as sites for complex deep-sea ecosystems.)

A year later, she returned and explored the area in a submarine. “There were plumes of black water, things crystallizing out of the water as it came out to build up these big spires and peaks of sulfite minerals,” she says. “It was festooned with all these exotic creatures – big crabs and tubeworms and other things. That was amazing. A lot of people spend a lot of years at sea and never see anything like that.”

The climate change challenge
Leinen spent 25 years at the University of Rhode Island, serving as researcher, professor, dean and vice provost (she’s not been to sea on a research trip since 1993). In 2000, Leinen left Rhode Island for Washington to work as assistant director for geosciences and coordinator of environmental research and education for the National Science Foundation.

Most of Leinen’s seven-year tenure there coincided with the George W. Bush administration, which put her in the middle of a pitched battle over climate change. By then, evidence from numerous scientific studies – including her own research – pointed toward global warming as a growing problem. And so
it fell to Leinen to try and convince skeptics in Congress and the White House that this was something real that had to be addressed.

“That was a very interesting time,” Leinen understates. “The Bush Administration was very skeptical, … and their official position coming in was that the case had not been made.

“There was quite an evolution in their thinking,” she continues. “There was a sense that the country would innovate itself out of problems through the private sector finding new ways to use energy.

“I believe it will take a very substantial revolution in the way we use energy.”

Carbon airprint
This is the part of the conversation that will put anyone’s optimism to the test, Leinen’s included, because the cold hard facts of climate change are scary indeed. The situation is already quite dire, and according to many experts, it’s going to get worse – potentially a lot worse – before it gets better.

Currently, the Earth’s atmosphere has 391 parts per million of carbon dioxide. That’s enough to cause the effects we’re seeing now, including significant melting of the polar icecaps. But the truly alarming part might still lie ahead because we are putting far more carbon into the Earth’s atmosphere than can be quickly absorbed. Even if humanity stopped all carbon emissions completely, an obvious impossibility, the acidification of the oceans will continue and the climate will continue to warm.

“If everything on the table [at the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference] had been agreed to and implemented, we would still end this century with twice as much CO2? in the atmosphere,” Leinen says with a weary sigh, “from 387 parts per million to over 700. That’s how big a problem it is.

“We’re already seeing climate impacts from 387 – what happens at 450 or 700?”

The rising acidification of oceans – thanks to carbon emissions – is one of the most profound and troubling issues. In the distant past there were times when the atmosphere had even more carbon dioxide than it does now, without significantly acidifying the oceans. But the concentration of carbon dioxide grew at a slower pace back then, giving the seas more time to reach a new equilibrium.

“The most obvious thing is what happens to everything in the ocean that makes a shell out of calcium carbonate,” Leinen says. “[It gets to] the point where they can’t make their shells.”

Wait. It gets worse.

“The really big thing coming is coral reefs,” she continues. “By the end of this century, there might be a few places where coral still exists. Most will be gone. We’ll reach a critical point where we lose a lot of them by mid-century, 40 years from now.

“Even if we completely stopped emitting carbon today, we’re not at equilibrium, and it would go on over the next century.”

Leinen predicts that eventually a number of reefs will be chosen to save, like underwater game preserves. They’ll be protected by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequestering it, or by treating the surrounding water to make it less acidic – the rough equivalent of dumping Alka Seltzer into the ocean. That will probably have unforeseen consequences because, when it comes to the environment, every action seems to have multiple reactions.

Yet it still might be worth the risks because reefs are such an essential component of the oceans’ ecosystem. Coral reefs create lagoons around islands and protect coastlines from erosion. They also support an enormous amount of biological diversity, which has many direct scientific uses.

“All these weird little plants and animals have evolved various tricks to survive – specialized chemicals that allow them to repel the advances of some other organisms,” Leinen says. “We’ve learned a lot about adhesives from threads that attach mussels to rocks, and a tremendous number of the drugs we use to test for disease come from marine organisms.”

Zoning in on the issue
Trying to de-acidify parts of the ocean would be just one component of a wide-ranging strategy to cope with climate change on land and sea. Another major piece of the puzzle will be decreasing future carbon emissions by using alternative energy sources (especially solar power), as well as developing technology to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Leinen has been working on that, too. Before forming The Climate Response Fund in 2009, she spent two years with a private company called Climos, founded by her son Dan Whaley ’90 las. Climos supports research on projects including ocean fertilization (using iron to stimulate biological productivity, which increases carbon sequestration); The Climate Response Fund funds conferences on technological solutions, such as the use of reflective sulfur and clouds to decrease global warming.

“[Things like that are] such a third rail that people don’t even want to think about it,” Leinen says. “Scientists are horrified at the idea that it’s come to this. We could be looking at environmental impacts so severe, it’s better to take a chance on something.”

Taken as a whole, it looks like an impossible challenge for the planet. Nevertheless, Leinen still believes that humanity can and will solve it. But there’s no time to waste.

“I like to tell skeptics who say that scientists get more money by generating speculative data to look at the USDA’s hardiness-zone maps for the U.S.,” Leinen says.

“When I was a little girl, I’d plant flower boxes, and the seed packets would tell you when to plant with these maps based on the number of freezing spring days, summer temperatures, date of first frost,” she says. “My area of Illinois has moved up a whole hardiness zone – one warmer now than it used to be 40 years ago.”

And plants, Leinen infers, don’t come under political pressure or face funding crises or confront issues of credibility. “They don’t get grants or write papers,” she says.

“They just grow.”

Menconi is the music critic for the Raleigh (North Carolina) News & Observer.

All Wet

Mary Timmins — Tue 14 Jun 2011 10:31 CST

The CEO of The Dow Chemical Co. is famously quoted as having said: “Water is the oil of the 21st century.”

By Mary Timmins

Oh, really?

Despite the post-petroleum doomsday scenarios found on FEARnet and the Syfy Channel, life can go on without oil. Without water, it –

Stops.

When you think about it, we can’t exist without water. There is not going to be a ‘post-water’ era, not for humans. If there is a “post-water era”, we’re not going to be involved.
– Mark Shannon

Shannon is J.W. Bayne Professor in the University of Illinois Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering and has been instrumental in focusing the world’s attention on water issues past, present and future.

Center-pivot irrigation has greened the High Plains with circular fields, but also depleted groundwater even in such vast reserves as the Ogallala Aquifer, which extends from South Dakota to Texas.
Photo by: © Joyce Michaud | Dreamstime.com

Were the Earth a pristine planet in a parallel universe – untroubled by the exploitations of homo sapiens – its water system would function perfectly, albeit on its own terms. Instead, what the world has is a double waterworks. There’s the beautiful, scary, self-sustaining system of rain and rivers, floods and oceans, springs and clouds that water has built for itself. And then there’s the messy and often misguided one that humans have improvised atop it.

For researchers looking at big-picture water problems – and there’s a lot of work of this kind going on at the University of Illinois – solutions lie beyond the shallows of form and content – river, ocean, reservoir, beaker; minerals, pesticides, purifiers – out in a deep place where water asks its own question, that being: What have you done to me?

From current imbroglios (like the “Tri-State Water Wars” among Alabama, Georgia and Florida over rights to water from the Chattahoochee River) to earliest history (the crafty king of the Middle Eastern kingdom of Lagash deprived neighboring Umma of water circa 2400 B.C.), civilization has expended a lot of effort, not always that successfully, to come to terms with water. In Johannesburg, South Africa, and New Delhi, “there are fights in the street every day over water,” noted UI watershed hydrologist Murugesu Sivapalan. “People have to queue up to get drinking water.”

Though scattered across time, place and ethnicity, such conflicts universally derive from the paradox that water is at once a valuable commodity and a commonly held resource. So central indeed is water to the greater good of countries that – in many places and nowhere more than in the U.S. – governments pick up a lot of the cost of irrigation, through projects large and small.

Sivapalan, who teaches a course titled “Water Planet, Water Crisis” for the UI School of Earth, Society and Environment, points out that the true cost of most agricultural products is thus not reflected in their market price. At an interview in his Davenport Hall office he posed the question: How many liters of water does it take to produce a hamburger?

Answer: 2,000.

“We don’t realize it,” he said, “but when we’re selling goods, we’re actually selling water.” And this means industrial as well as agricultural products.

“If you buy a bicycle,” Sivapalan observed, “water is in it.”

We … are big beef producers. For every kilogram of beef, that’s equivalent of 15,000 kilograms of water. We’re a big cotton-producing country. For every pair of jeans that’s something like a thousand liters of water. Each cup of coffee is 140 liters of water. Our habits are very big water glutton habits.
– Mark Shannon

In water, as in so much else, the world is made up of “haves” and “have-nots.” In America, the Mississippi watershed sets the boundary between the two. As Praveen Kumar, Lovell Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Illinois, explained: “The West has water scarcity problems all the way to California. In the East the problem is water quality.”

A stupendous achievement in the taming of the West’s water, the Hoover Dam, above, is now one of more than 20 stoppages along the flow of the Colorado River. Right, NASA satellite imagery shows the mouth of the Mississippi River, where runoff from Midwestern fields enters the Gulf of Mexico.
Photo by: © Glenn Nagel | Dreamstime.com

For the Corn Belt, an abundance of water and black loam has helped shape the greatest farming area on Earth. But this abundance also creates environmental problems elsewhere. Fertilizer washes out of the tiled drainages that make fecund the legendary fields of Illinois, Indiana and Iowa, and with corn and soybeans ganging the furrows just a few months each year, there’s no permanent root system to absorb the nitrogen and phosphorus.

Along the Mississippi River, dams capture a lot of the sediment from farmlands – depriving wetlands downriver of the stuff from which they are naturally formed and renewed. But the nitrogen fertilizers sail on, along with other nutrients, pesticides and herbicides, into the Gulf of Mexico. Both the Midwestern agricultural industry and the scientific community agree that the hypoxia which appears each summer in the Gulf – underwater oxygen shortages that kill sea life – is caused by nitrogen runoff. When it comes to downstream problems, this is a big one.

“The combination of intensive agriculture and tile drainage,” as Mark David has put it, “makes nitrates very readily come out of the soil.” A biogeochemist for the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences, David has been seeking solutions to runoff pollution for 18 years. He’s found them, too. Nitrogen runoff can be cut by fertilizing in the spring instead of fall, as is traditional. Nitrogen runoff can also be cut by building wetlands near fields, and by planting margins of perennials (including miscanthus grass and switch grass, both potential biofuels of the future) and winter cover crops like rye grass, and by installing bioreactors, which turn nitrates into gas. The trouble is, these things all cost money. And nobody’s willing to pay.

“There is no mechanism to make farmers do anything different. There is no mechanism to make fertilizer dealers do anything different,” David said. “The farmer is just trying to maximize his income.

“We as a society are saying that we want more corn. The more you grow, the more money you make. We have created a very simple system – corn and soybeans. There are no other crops, no animals. The corn and soybeans are there some of the time. The fields lose nitrates the rest of the time.”

In some places the water table has gotten so deep that the water is actually getting salty, so it has to be blended or desalinated. In inland Texas they are actually building a desal plant to desalinate the groundwater. Then they have to take the brine, pump it 20 miles and pump it down into a deep oil well to get rid of the brine.
– Mark Shannon

At places all over the country and the globe, the water both above and below ground is being drawn down by the endless thirsts of city and country alike. In arid areas, farmers who move from subsistence to commercial agriculture – a growing global trend, according to Kumar – can and do deplete the water table, meaning deeper wells and scarcer water year by year. In the American West, the Ogallala Aquifer – a basin of ancient glacial melt that underlies a huge area from Texas to South Dakota – is near exhaustion from the center-pivot irrigation that has filled the High Plains with circular crop fields; recharging this enormous underground reserve is a matter of geological, not human, time. Though irrigated agriculture may seem innocuous, like a large-scale version of watering the lawn, it can damage the land beyond imagining – like salt tables rising in agricultural areas in the U.S. and Australia, wicked up from deep levels by the depletion of groundwater and the loss of trees.

“Water is interconnected everywhere, except for deep aquifers and glaciers,” observes Barbara Minsker, a UI professor of environmental and water resources systems engineering. “Ultimately,” she says, “the Earth is a big water ball.”
NASA Earth Observatory Photo

Yet, observed Marcelo García, a UI hydraulician who heads the College of Engineering’s Ven Te Chow Hydro-systems Laboratory, the biggest water challenge ahead is to large metropolitan areas – including Chicago which, on its face, should have no water issues whatsoever. “Chicago has the quintessential water management problem,” he noted. “Fresh water comes from Lake Michigan, and there’s pressure from other states and Canada for Illinois to minimize water diversion.” (To read more about Chicago and water, see p. 37 and pp. 54-55.)

As Barbara Minsker, a UI professor of environmental and water resources systems engineering, pointed out: “Sewage from Chicago used to go into Lake Michigan. Then they reversed the direction of the Chicago River. Now the waste from Chicago goes down the Illinois River. Cities downstream, like Peoria, pull out the water and use it for drinking. We see this everywhere – upstream discharge, wastewater going to cities downstream.

“Water crosses political boundaries,” she said. “It pays no attention to those boundaries.”

In the West, the coupling of agriculture – as in the irrigated jewels of California’s Imperial and San Joachim valleys – and the growth of desert cities – Denver, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles – are testing the waters to and beyond capacity. The Colorado River – interrupted at more than 20 junctures, most famously by the Hoover Dam – bleeds water along its length, expiring into mud flats before it can reach the sea.

There is a 10 to 20 percent chance in the next 10 years that water intakes will drop below the intake levels of Lake Mead, and 30 million Americans will be cut off from water within days – days. You can imagine the freeways lined with cars leaving Southern California, Nevada and Arizona, searching for water. That can actually happen in the next decade. But at the same time we’re not doing anything to try and prevent that.
– Mark Shannon

And America’s water worries are dwarfed by the thirst of Africa and Asia, where water is rare and water purity rarer still. Nick BrozoviÄ‡, an environmental economist in the agricultural and consumer economics department at Illinois, cites the water quality issues of the developing world, such as water-borne illnesses that result from lack of safe water and sanitation. In some cases the problems seem intractable. In Bangladesh, until recently, “People were drinking contaminated river water,” he said. The development of tube wells gave the population access to an alternative source of water, from underground. But, terrible to say, some of the wells have proved to be contaminated by indigenous deposits of poisonous arsenic.

And of course the droughts and floods of the natural water system have been making the water crazy at least since the biblical times of Noah and his ark. Like Noah, the rest of the human race has found ways to deal with water – mostly by containing and controlling. With innovations that have ranged from the drinking cup to the Three Gorges Dam, humans have wrought on the world’s water a huge, complicated and ever-changing system. But not only do many parts of that system need upgrading – like the improved levees that could have protected New Orleans from hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 – it has to be refashioned to meet the coming need of a world population headed for 9 billion by 2050. Mirroring the system itself, solutions await discovery at every level, from local to global, requiring, in Kumar’s view, “a complex balance … between regulating commercial use and meeting basic needs.”

“Water is a basic necessity,” he pointed out. “If water is commercialized, there will be less access to it.”

Over the past 16 years, Kumar has been studying hydrocomplexity. “My primary interest,” he said, “is in understanding the link between the water cycle, the climate system and the biosphere.” Kumar’s office is located on the upper level of the Hydrosystems Laboratory, where a walkway overlooks an array of tanks, sluices and other vessels rigged to study water in motion. His own work, though, happens on the lab’s supercomputer, where he models water phenomena at all levels, mapping “in space and time,” in his words, “the change in how water circulates through the terrestrial and atmospheric systems.”

With climate change, Kumar noted, “a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture and evaporate more water” – accounting for higher incidences of droughts and floods. Transpiration – the process whereby trees return rainfall to the atmosphere by “breathing” – CO2â‚‚ in, oxygen out – has been affected by the loss of forests worldwide. Compound such developments with the declining aquifers in arid regions where more water is being pumped up out of the ground than is trickling back down, and one can see why Kumar and a lot of other people are concerned about where the water of the 21st century will come from – especially when 70 percent of freshwater usage goes to agriculture and thence to food. Moreover, as Kumar observed, water is critical to energy independence because petroleum alternatives such as bioenergy require large amounts of H2O to produce.

“That’s why water,” he said, “is going to be a limiting resource.”

Ximing Cai, who is the Ven Te Chow Faculty Scholar in Water Resources at Illinois (and whose office in the Hydrosystems Laboratory is just a couple of doors away from Kumar’s) has researched where, in the coming years, the water will go, and, like Kumar, he both sees and foresees large-scale changes. Cai recently published a study on the effects of climate change on farmland, predicting that arable land will increase in northern regions – up to 67 percent in Russia, for example – while southern regions will lose farmland – as much as 18 percent in the case of Africa. Such shifts threaten to diminish food supplies in places where there’s not enough to eat even today.

Cai’s aim as a researcher is to address water scarcity and food security for a world population poised to grow by almost 30 percent in less than 40 years. He does so by researching and developing hydrologic and economic models allowing communities and countries to deal with present and coming water shortfalls. He’s already gone to work on the Nile. The storied river of the pharaohs flows through nine sub-Saharan African countries, all of which depend on its waters for farming, drinking, sanitation and industry. In 2010, Cai led workshops in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, gathering officials to discuss management techniques that can help the entire region better steward scarce, shared water resources.

But such issues, for Cai, “cannot be solely solved by hydrologists.” Though these are real-world problems, he noted, “information is rarely used in water management decision issues.”

So it goes when some places have it, some places don’t, but everybody needs it. “In some regions, water is so limited they have to hold it in reserve,” Cai said. “They have to import food. Other areas export food.”

Which means those areas are also exporting water.

There are one-and-a-half-billion people in the next 40 years – with the reduced snowpack storage, which is what’s happening in California, in the Himalayas, the Alps – that will be without water intermittently all year. That’s 1.5 billion people on the Ganges, the Bhambatha, the Yellow, the Yangzte, the Mekong and … the major river systems throughout the West [who] are in that boat. They are intermittent. So how do people survive? This is the question in the world. People are so focused on energy, but this is the problem.
– Mark Shannon

UI environmental economist BrozoviÄ‡ works with Cai and others seeking solutions to water allocation problems. From BrozoviÄ‡’s standpoint, solutions are as much about incentives as they are about technology. Induce countries that are water-poor to obtain their food from water-rich countries, and the demand for water will start ebbing and flowing along new economic lines.

Agriculture in parched Israel shows how this can be done. The country focuses on growing and exporting high-value crops such as cut flowers – which command a good price and require little water, since they’re produced hydroponically – while importing much of its food. This progressive economic model, which has proven very successful, contrasts with the approach of many water-poor developing nations, which devote large amounts of water to subsistence crops like barley and wheat. As BrozoviÄ‡ pointed out, “The current system can be very inefficient. There’s misallocation of where water is and where we need it to be.

“The challenge to economics,” he continued, is finding “ways to reallocate water cost-effectively.”

Tile drainage carries away surface water, making Midwestern fields the most fertile in the world — but also depositing unwanted nutrients, pesticides and herbicides in the Mississippi River.
Mark David Photo

Small local solutions can play a big role. Success has been found with markets allowing farmers to trade water with other farmers in their region. BrozoviÄ‡ said he has become – perhaps unexpectedly – “much more optimistic about the potential for solutions” over the years he has been studying such problems as how to keep the salmon running in West Coast rivers and dealing with how groundwater removal in the Republican River Basin of Nebraska, Kansas and Colorado is affecting the area’s streams.

“We’re starting to regulate water usage more than we have,” he observed, noting that in the past, “regulations have been set up very crudely.

“Make better regulations,” he suggested – regulations that offer appropriate incentives to those who depend on the water for their livelihood – and “you can make more people happy.” Yet he also concurs with other economists in the proposition that in many cases water subsidies should be siphoned away and prices allowed to rise, reducing the demand for too-cheap water and allowing need to be more cost-driven (see p. 64.) This is complicated by the fact that “the institutions we have in place to manage water are,” as BrozoviÄ‡ puts it, “extremely variable.

“In some places they work well,” he said. “In some places they don’t work at all.”

For Sivapalan, the price of water should also include environmental costs – such as pollution and aquifer depletion. Otherwise, he said, there’s a “tendency for the environment to be degraded.” He advocates moving away from capital-intensive projects, like dams, which tend to enrich the companies that build them and the wealthy landowners who get power and irrigation from them, creating scenario after scenario – from Idaho to Egypt to China – in which “ordinary people don’t get the benefit.”

“The so-called water crisis is really a management crisis,” Sivapalan concluded. “There’s plenty of water.

“I’m optimistic. This is a problem that humans can solve. It just takes some will.”

We are a water planet; we are awash with water. There is 99.23 percent of the water on Earth that is not available for humans without some treatment, and of the remaining 0.77 percent, we’ve been polluting it up so much that we have to treat it again.
– Mark Shannon

So – no.

When it comes to large questions poised to heave over the sea wall of the new millennium, oil has got nothing on water.

Across The Water

Tue 8 Mar 2011 19:11 CST

Across The Water

Making it to the NBA is the ultimate goal for lots of talented college players. But as numerous past Fighting Illini hard-court greats can tell you, playing professional basketball overseas is also a supreme experience – though not without its challenges.

By Sal Nudo

Jerry Hester

Small hands hoist up shots on the local playground. Teenagers compete in frenzied high school gyms across the country. College basketball players can practically taste it. What drives such athletes on a worldwide scale?

Playing in the National Basketball Association.

But what chance does a hopeful hoopster actually have of making a living in basketball’s revered dream world?

The fast answer is that there are more than 6 billion people on Earth and only 60 fortunate players get selected to join the NBA each year. Of those 60, only the first 30 drafted in the first round are guaranteed a contract. Yes, there is an NBA Development League and invitees, but the chances of making it to basketball’s apex are less than a 1 in 100 million shot. What players perceive as the Promised Land – where competition is tops, travel first class, hotels luxurious and adulation abundant – is immensely hard to reach.

“It’s what everyone aspires to, but it’s certainly not easy,” said Derrick Burson ’99 media, associate sports information director at the University of Illinois Division of Intercollegiate Athletics. “Every year there [are] college All-Americans that don’t even get drafted.

“That’s just a reality.”

So what’s an energetic young man in the prime of his athletic life to do when his collegiate playing days are over? Back in the days of Bruce Douglas ’01 las and earlier – before the game of hoops went ballistic the world over – opportunities to play professional basketball overseas were not as plentiful, said Burson. Some cusp-of-the-NBA players may have had to settle for a job in the “real world” and dominate their basketball compatriots in the confines of a suburban gym.

Not anymore.

During his heyday at Illinois in the late ’80s, Stephen Bardo,, now an ESPN college basketball analyst, racked up 909 points, 495 assists and a 1989 trip to the Final Four; he later plied those skills in the NBA and five foreign nations.

These days opportunities flourish in countries the average person might not link to Michael Jordan’s sport. Stephen Bardo ’90 las – he of the late-1980s Flying Illini Final Four fame and now a college basketball analyst on ESPN – offered up his blood, sweat and tears on courts all over Spain, Italy, Japan, France and Venezuela. Kiwane Garris ’97, Illinois’ second all-time leading scorer and a two-year player in the NBA, gutted it out at high levels for more than a decade in Germany and Italy – and his playing days may not be over. Illinois State University transfer Marcus Arnold ’07 las now utilizes his physicality to put up big numbers for a team in the Czech Republic, a place he never imagined living in while growing up.

Long rides from gym to gym, grueling practices over an extensive season, occasional outdoor courts and constant language barriers (all for money that is really good but usually not NBA good) may not sound ideal. Yet playing professional basketball outside of the U.S., as several former Fighting Illini players can attest, is not without its hefty rewards and charms.

“I know a lot of guys scared [to go] overseas to play,” said Garris, “but I encourage people to take advantage of it. You can make a good living.

“I never thought basketball would take me so far.”

‘Soak it in’
During the 1990s, the 6-foot-6-inch Bardo played several seasons in the NBA with the San Antonio Spurs, Dallas Mavericks and Detroit Pistons. Years later, though, his reflections regarding the on-site cultural education he experienced while playing international ball offer serious competition to memories of the NBA’s potentially million-dollar contracts and a shot at U.S. stardom.

“I grew up overseas, pretty much, and I really matured and became a man going over there,” said Bardo. His forays into his overseas surroundings didn’t go unnoticed by his non-American teammates, who appreciated the former Illini’s willingness to visit storied sites in distant lands. Surprisingly, Bardo said, many American players eschewed the chance to explore their foreign environments. While others hit McDonald’s, Bardo, a serious history buff, was out and about visiting homes, cultivating friendships, viewing monuments and observing all he could.

“If you’re going to be across the water, you might as well soak it in,” he said.

Over the span of a decade, Bardo’s overseas pro career allowed him to explore 13 countries, win championships and put up fine statistics during his long sports career. His international experiences also did wonders for his mind, body and spirit.

“It was uncomfortable during the time,” he said, “but I look back on it and think it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me.”

It didn’t hurt, of course, that even as far away as Japan and Spain, folks who barely knew English were familiar with the 1988-89 Flying Illini squad, and they made sure to let Bardo know.

“We were known worldwide, so that warmed my heart,” he said.

Newlyweds Trent and Theresa Meacham, above, are making the most of their time in Europe, where Trent has played in Austria and Germany. Below, former Illini Damir Krupalija can vouch that basketball players aren’t the tallest objects in the world, as he measures up beside the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The road-hardened Krupalija hasn’t forgotten his collegiate years. “I miss that plane we used to travel [on] when we were at U of I,” he reminisced. “Here we fly commercially.”

Nothin’ but ’Net?
“We lost Internet access!!” proclaimed Trent Meacham ’08 ahs, edm ’10, on his April 13, 2010, blog posting. “So for anyone playing overseas, you know that the Internet is pretty much your lifeline back home. Some of the guys here will joke and question how Americans used to make it over here in Europe before there was Internet.”

Meacham’s insight about staying with it via the World Wide Web resonates with international players of his generation, who regularly rely on Facebook, Twitter, Skype and good old-fashioned e-mail to communicate back home.

“It’s just changed everything,” said DIA’s Burson of today’s multiple ways of reaching out. Because of technological advances, he said, current international pro players don’t feel so detached from home as guys did 20 years ago, when phone calls cost $3 or $4 a minute, and you could end up feeling like it was just you and your teammates. Case in point: Dee Brown ’05 ahs, one of the most beloved Illini basketball players of all time who’s now playing in China. At last count, he had more than 5,600 people following him on Twitter, where Brown keeps them posted (via the compact language of Twitter) with entries like: “In beijing WOW its so nice its an unbelievable city! Just got done shoppin … BIG GAME tom I will be ready!”

Meacham utilizes the Web to stay in touch with family and friends and to keep up with hoops scores in the U.S. (particularly when NCAA March Madness is in full swing). “Anybody can beat anybody on a given night,” he said on his blog about the 2010 tournament. “It’s just one of the things which make basketball the greatest game in the world!”

A self-described “homebody,” Meacham told Illinois Alumni that residing in Europe with his wife, Theresa, has forced both of them to escape their comfort zones and plunge forward. Once they got their bearings, Meacham said the experience of living in unfamiliar places has been healthy for their marriage, perhaps because he and Theresa are in the same boat together.

“Just a few weeks after we got married, we headed overseas without really knowing what we were getting into,” he said.

What Meacham has gotten into during the last two years are spots on teams in Austria and Germany, where he’s played against former NBA all-star Allen Iverson, been named to an all-star team himself and faced top-notch competition all over Europe.

While Meacham maintains his blog, uses Skype to watch his stateside niece grow up and connects as much as he can through Facebook, he also makes sure to meet lots of people in person, too, just like the older-school Illini players that trekked before him to faraway places.

“I really enjoy getting to know people,” said Meacham, “and I’ve already made some great friends in the short time I’ve been playing overseas.”

Jerry Hester

‘The world is a big place’
But players who choose the “nothin’ but ’Net” social interaction option may sometimes miss the here and now. For Jerry Hester II ’97 las, who played basketball overseas when serious online social networking wasn’t even on the radar, camaraderie with teammates – swapping stories, visiting people’s homes – ruled the day.

Currently an expert basketball analyst on the Illini Sports Network, a financial analyst for The Downey Group Inc. and a UI Alumni Association board member, Hester formed close relationships during the six years he spent abroad (1998-2004). “I can’t speak for the players now,” he said, “but that’s why pretty much every place I played I still have relationships with a lot of the players that were from that country.

“We did spend a lot of time together because we couldn’t get on the Internet.”

Hester’s stints with teams in Poland, Israel, Yugoslavia and England allowed him to travel to 24 countries – a figure larger than the number of U.S states he’s visited. His time in Poland seems especially poignant, when he became great friends with his translator, Bartek Halemba, who showed him the ropes early on. Something must have clicked with Halemba’s tutorials, because in 2008 Hester was voted the decade’s most popular player on Stal Ostrow’s team (1998-2008).

Poland was nearly a decade removed from Communism at the time, a fact that resonated deeply with Hester, who loved to absorb people’s life tales.

“Just to hear stories about what they went through made me appreciate what we have here in the United States,” he said, adding that the history books can only teach you so much.

Hester – who estimates he’s proficient at understanding Polish and halfway fluent in speaking it – said he wouldn’t trade his international experiences for anything.

“The world is a big place,” he said, “but at the same time, it’s not as big as we think.”

When off the court, Marcus Arnold, below, takes in the sights in Prague, Czech Republic, with his wife, Latoya Hamilton Arnold ’05 BUS.

Getting physical
While the international landscape may be less familiar, professional basketball games abroad don’t differ that much from those in the NBA or college. Coaches scream away in Turkey just like they do at UCLA (and yes, they do the screaming mostly in English these days); fans cheer for the teams they support; referees continue to make good and bad calls; and players compete with gusto (partly because of the plethora of NBA scouts lurking around in Europe).

“Once you get on the court … the game is pretty much the same around the world,” said Bardo.

That includes the occasional scuffle. The physical style of play that’s so evident in a typical NBA game occurs in international games, too – perhaps on an even more rough-and-tumble basis. Once, after a few overly enthusiastic elbow exchanges, Bardo found himself involved in an on-court altercation shown on national Italian television. As he had it out with the opposing player at the sidelines, beneath the basket and on the ground, a policeman came over to break things up – or so Bardo thought. In actuality, the officer attempted to “stomp” on Bardo, whose teammates ended up escorting him safely out of the gym. Fuming fans later pelted Bardo’s team bus with ice as it drove off the premises.

Basketball may play second or third fiddle in soccer-crazed Europe and elsewhere, but fans overseas can get passionate – even downright rowdy – when it comes to their hoops teams. It’s not uncommon, said veteran European player Damir Krupalija ’02 bus, to see a couple of buses carry dedicated French fans 300 to 400 miles to follow their team for a big away game. And when it comes to the referees in other parts of the world, Krupalija said they sometimes have it rough.

“At U of I, no matter how bad the refereeing crew was, they never had to worry about their safety,” he said. “In some places I played that is not the case. Fans take it seriously.”

Ex-Illini star Deon Thomas, above, turns to coaching after more than a decade as a player on the international circuit. His Lewis & Clark Community College team edged Parkland College 63-60 in a Champaign matchup in December. He employs European-style training techniques in developing the skills of his players. Despite the passage of nearly two decades, Thomas remains a popular draw in C-U, as evidenced by the post-game gathering of autograph-seekers, below.

Learning from others
Basketball may have been invented in Springfield, Mass., in 1891, but Deon Thomas ’94 las, Illinois’ all-time leading scorer, thinks Americans could learn a thing or two from their fellow coaches in Europe.

Thomas – who experienced an impressive 14-year pro career in Spain, Israel, Greece and Bulgaria – believes true basketball is all about all-around skill (think guards posting up down low and big men running the point on a fast break).

That sort of player completeness is how the game is taught and played overseas, and Thomas would like to see more of it in U.S. basketball. “[Here] we rely so much on our athleticism that if a kid’s a great athlete … we give him the ball and say, ‘Hey, go do what you can do,’ instead of teaching this kid the basics,” he said.

“If he’s tall, [Americans] think he needs to play the post. I think that’s probably the biggest misconception … that has to do with basketball.”

In order to instill a wide assortment of skills into each player’s psyche and game, coaches will have to step it up in America, said Thomas. To that end, in his role as a coach and director of athletics at Lewis & Clark Community College in Godfrey, he has his guards go through the same drills in practice as his big men and vice versa.

“[All-around] basketball players should be made – not a guard, not a two-guard, not a center,” he said. “I think that’s one of the areas where we’re falling behind the rest of the world.”

Globetrotting Illini
A true basketball ambassador, Thomas would likely agree that the sport’s way of providing such massive togetherness on a worldwide scale is perhaps its greatest asset.

Illinois is well-represented on basketball courts worldwide, from the aforementioned Illinois stars to Cleotis Brown ’99 (Argentina, Ireland), Robert Archibald ’02 las (Spain, Italy, Ukraine), Cory Bradford ’02 las (Qatar, Mexico, Europe), Frank Williams ’03 (Italy, Argentina), Jack Ingram ’05 eng (Slovenia, Poland), Roger Powell ’05 las (Germany, Italy, Israel, Spain), James Augustine ’06 ahs (Spain), Warren Carter ’07 ahs (Israel, Turkey, Spain, Greece), Brian Randle ’07 aces (Israel), Calvin Brock ’08 ahs (Germany), Shaun Pruitt ’08 las (Puerto Rico, Greece, China, Croatia, Czech Republic) and Chester Frazier ’09 ahs (one year in Germany).

And who wouldn’t love those opportunities? Getting paid to play the game you love against outstanding competition in a different land offers a whole new outlook on the sport. You may be hard-pressed to find a former Illini hoops player who hasn’t extracted positive things from his time on the hard courts of numerous countries and continents.

Basketball has undoubtedly opened life’s doors to many past Fighting Illini greats. Playing their favorite game in far-flung lands has no doubt swung that door wider still.

A Gift for the Ages

Tue 8 Mar 2011 10:08 CST

The renovation of majestic Lincoln Hall, constructed a century ago on the University of Illinois Quad, will modernize the facility but still retain much of its character.

By Holly Korab

It’s possible that on a chilly spring evening 73 years ago, a young Pauline Hurd Matteson ’31 ed, beautiful at 17, hurried up the steps of Lincoln Hall, a ticket for a fashion revue stuffed securely in her pink satin purse.

Or that young college students relaxed thoughtfully during a study break while sitting in the building’s elegant lounge, complete with curved ceiling and terrazzo floors.

Or that luck never ran out for the hundreds of thousands of test-takers who passed by the bust of Abraham Lincoln, giving his nose an anxious rub.

There are a whole lot of memories, collected over a hundred years, within the walls of Lincoln Hall, that iconic building on the west side of the University of Illinois Quad, home to professors, students, theatergoers, actors – and in later years, skunks, squirrels and opossums. In recent count, nearly 16,000 students passed through its hallways each semester, representing nearly every major and field of study the University has to offer. Yet while the world has fought wars, survived financial depressions and negotiated civil unrest, Lincoln Hall has stood largely unchanged, sitting like a weighty time capsule on the campus Quad.

Now with a $57.3 million state-funded renovation well under way, the University is uncovering the beauty of this old friend and rediscovering a legacy that may prove more powerful than time.

Lincoln Hall facade

A progressive start
Today, a century after Lincoln Hall opened for classes, it is hard to imagine the excitement that greeted its dedication. Before it closed for renovation in 2009, the building had seen just one major expansion – in 1929, which added the west wing and theater – but had undergone no major renovations despite being one of the most heavily used buildings on campus. Ceilings were peeling, and 100-year-old windows rattled in the wind. Graduate students shivered in their fourth-floor attic offices, while dirt obscured the elegance of the structure’s original design.

But back on Feb. 12, 1913, such dilapidation may have seemed impossible to the hundreds gathered to mark its dedication. A parade of 400 faculty and dignitaries from around the nation marched along the unpaved road that defined the western edge of the Quad. In attendance were the presidents of the major American universities of the day (approximately 50 at the time), local and state politicians and nearly every member of the UI faculty, which was possible because the University’s president, Edmund Janes James, had canceled all classes.

The U of I was expanding rapidly at the time – four major new buildings in the preceding decade and a student population that would nearly double to 9, 249 by the time James retired in 1920. It was the Progressive Era, and the University was benefiting from an industrializing nation’s belief that higher education offered a means for social mobility. Less than 5 percent of the nation’s 18-to-22-year-olds attended college at that time; still, according to historians like John Thelin and Eugene Tobin, the public was captivated by the concept of college as a place where social standing was earned through ability and achievement rather than bestowed by wealth and ancestry.

Public universities, in particular, were being embraced as vehicles of opportunity. The building that James was dedicating that February day – the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth – was a tribute to that promise.

Education as ennobling
The architectural design of Lincoln Hall fit well as a memorial because President Lincoln, like those planning the new building, believed that education was ennobling. The planners wanted their design to capture that sense of purpose. Students and professors stepping from the wind-swept prairie into the glowing marble foyer were meant by the architect to feel as if they had left the ordinary world behind and had joined in an important endeavor. Indeed, the insistence by James that the building include museums and departmental libraries reflected that belief.

In its day, Lincoln Hall was innovative in the simplicity of its design. At that time, all buildings financed by the state were designed by its politically appointed architect. In 1909 that was W. Carbys Zimmerman, a member of an influential circle of avant-garde architects in Chicago, which included Frank Lloyd Wright. “The Eighteen,” as they were known, all shared space in the same Chicago office building and assisted each other with projects.

Today, when Melvyn Skvarla, an architect and campus historic preservation officer, looks at Lincoln Hall, he sees the influence of Wright’s Prairie style – the long, horizontal lines and wide, overhanging eaves. In the copper medallions and the monumental, vaulted ceiling in the main entry, Skvarla also sees Italian Renaissance, which may be interpreted as a sign of the University’s youth. Many newborn colleges strove for instant authenticity by imitating European colleges and populating their campuses with classical architecture. The Italian Renaissance style was widely accepted as appropriate for academia in that day.

Zimmerman never defined the style of Lincoln Hall, preferring to simply describe it as straightforward. But when Evarts B. Greene, hon ’31, a historian and the dean of the UI College of Literature and Arts, suggested that the building be named in honor of Lincoln, Zimmerman thought its dignified design was an appropriate fit.

It’s impossible to know if either man anticipated the zeal with which Greene’s suggestion would be greeted. The connection between the centennial of Lincoln’s birth and his role in signing the land-grant legislation that created public universities struck a chord. The U of I swiftly embraced the idea of transforming their newest building into a memorial to the president who had made their University possible.

Lincoln bust by Hermon MacNeil

A nod to Lincoln
With the significance of the project now elevated several notches – James liked to brag that Illinois’ memorial to Lincoln was the nation’s largest until eclipsed in 1922 by the one in Washington, D.C. – the planners turned to artisans for ways of incorporating inspirational tributes to the nation’s 16th president into the design.

The most extensive tributes were planned for the exterior of the building for maximum impact. Into the space between the second and third floors, Zimmerman incorporated 20 scenic and quote panels which were designed by artist Kristian Schneider to convey the spirit of Lincoln’s life. Each quote panel was framed by medallions of key figures from Lincoln’s day. (Ten more quote panels with blank medallions were added in 1929 when the building was expanded.) The planners wrote in the dedication program that they could not foresee a time when “young men and women are not to be seen studying these inscriptions and panels.”

The panels never quite caught on to the extent the planners imagined. They also miscalculated public reaction to a plaque embossed with the Gettysburg Address and placed in the floor of the foyer. Instead of visitors walking around the plaque and being inspired by Lincoln’s famous eulogy, they trampled across it instead. In 1955, out of respect, the University moved it to the south wall.

The most beloved of the Lincoln tributes – the bronze bust whose nose has been rubbed for luck by students on their way to take a test – did not arrive until years later. In 1928 the sculptor Herman Atkins MacNeil delivered the bust of a soulful-looking Lincoln to a gold-painted niche in the center of the foyer’s grand staircase, where he has remained ever since. Only twice has the bust been moved: for 24 hours in 1976 when pranksters stole in and left it on a tree stump on a local golf course, and recently, to the Spurlock Museum for safekeeping during the renovation.

Before the bust went into storage, the campus made the controversial decision to restore it.

The three-monthlong process successfully removed the nicks, scrapes and gouges that had accumulated over the bust’s 80 years (the most disfiguring of which likely happened when Mr. Lincoln was kidnapped). It also eliminated the shine on his nose.

“If we hadn’t restored it, in a few years it would have looked seriously defaced,” said Wayne Pitard, director of the Spurlock, in explaining the decision to tamper with a campus tradition. He’s hoping alumni will restart the nose-rubbing tradition, which is why the museum placed the bust on display this past February and invited the public, in this case, to “please touch.”

Out with the old, in with the new – sort of
Tampering with any public treasure, even one as weary as Lincoln Hall, must be approached respectfully, says Ron Harrison ’81 faa, march ’84, the project’s lead architect from the Chicago firm of OWP/P|Cannon Design. That’s why those working on the renovation have tried to balance preservation with modernization. When the building reopens for classes in fall of 2012, it will retain its sense of history while providing a more sustainable, effective facility for research and teaching.

An example of this balancing act is in Lincoln Hall Theater. While the seats are being replaced with new, wider ones that more easily accommodate today’s larger body sizes, the distinctive cast-iron endcaps at the ends of each row are being restored. In July, contractors tore down the stage’s flyspace and three-story cyclorama – two theater relics – so that they could add 8 feet of depth to the stage and more offices on the third floor.

All of the building’s 100-year-old windows will be replaced; however, new double-glazed windows of aluminum-clad wood will replicate the look and feel of the original ones, minus the drafts. Not going anywhere will be the nearly 60 owls sculpted into the maroon-colored, exterior window frames on the first floor (and perched around the main foyer). The wisdom they are rumored to impart will come in handy once students and faculty re-enter Lincoln Hall’s doors.

The upper floors have been gutted and are being completely remade. The entire building is receiving sophisticated new heating and cooling systems as well as the equivalent of 1.5 acres of restored masonry, 3.2 miles of “micro piles” for structural support and enough new electric service to power 67 homes with 100-amp panels.

Respecting the past
Most of the preservation efforts are being concentrated on the first floor, where the original architects lavished most of the adornments, and on the exterior, which is qualified for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. For example, contractors are repairing any damage to the historic panels and medallions on the outside and are replacing the slate roof and the copper flashing and downspouts with similar materials.

Even the mortar between the bricks is being refurbished in historically accurate ways. Because of the greater variance among bricks used in the early 1900s, the masons who are tuckpointing Lincoln Hall are recreating “the historic, horizontal joint in the mortar to make a little shadow line that implied more horizontality and consistency than there actually was,” said Susan Turner, an historic preservationist with Bailey Edward, one of the firms working on Lincoln Hall. This groove will make the bricks appear more uniform.

On the first floor, hallways will shrink by a foot to make the classroom space more flexible – a request from the faculty, though the change in dimensions will hardly be noticeable. The contractors will be reinstalling the slate chalk boards – another faculty request – as well as the stripped and refinished oak picture and chair rails, window trim and 5,000 lineal feet of baseboard. The old-growth white oak doors will also return, although they will now be recessed into the classrooms so that when opened, they do not extend into busy corridors.

Character issues
In some instances, to retain the character of the building, the architects are leaving areas untouched, such as the dips in the marble steps where decades of traffic have worn them away.

“The first rule of historic renovation is to do no harm,” said Harrison. “There will be a lot of rough edges and worn patina that will maintain the continuity of the history of the building.”

Such will not be the case in other historic areas, particularly the theater, where the original character begs to be resuscitated. For instance, most people probably remember the theater’s color as predominantly a mucky green; a paint chronologist, though, uncovered a much different history. He found evidence of more than 37 original historic colors as well as gold stencils. The colors in the original theater were more vibrant and nuanced than anyone imagined. Some other historic areas are being rediscovered and will be revived in the new building.

Underneath the building, Harrison found a beautiful former smoking lounge which had been obscured by plywood walls and doors that had converted the space into dismal graduate student offices in the late 1960s or ’70s. The lounge will be reborn in the renovated Lincoln Hall as a café, which will open onto a newly landscaped courtyard surrounding the theater – two lost treasures now found.

Relics and myths
Demolition, however, couldn’t erase all remnants of the building’s former occupants. Contractors have found numerous reminders of the facility’s former occupants – from between walls and under rubble they’ve retrieved letters, old maps and instruments, pop bottles from companies long forgotten and even a pink satin purse containing a ticket for a 1928 fashion revue. A tuition stub in the purse carried the likely owner’s name – Pauline Martha Hurd.

In another nod to the past, when researching the rare “composite” ornamentation in the theater, the project’s historic preservationist discovered that it had been produced by the same family-run company that worked on Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition. Remarkably, the company, Decorator’s Supply, still exists and will be involved in the decorative work’s rehabilitation.

Digging into the past has come at the expense of some popular myths, however, including the delightfully gory one about the hexagonal structures that hang from the ceiling of the theater. Members of the Chi Omega sorority will be disappointed to learn that these boxes are not the coffins of their four founding members. Instead, they were added in 1938 as part of a new air-cooling system. They will not be included in the restoration.

Higher education today
These relics and myths are reminders that this beloved building is much more than bricks and mortar. Many alumni and faculty have memories of love that began, and ended, in Lincoln Hall. They have recalled classes that awakened a dream or may still be laughing over the memorable graffiti on bathroom walls. Others recall archaeological collections stored in the basement, patiently awaiting rediscovery.

When the governor’s office announced in July 2009 that the Legislature had approved funds for renovating the building, the news was met with relief. During the long years in which this once-proud building continued to slip into disrepair (especially during the decade when it bobbed up and down on the state’s list of capital development projects), its uncertain fate had, for many, come to symbolize the fragile financial relationship between the University and the state.

At one time, support for public higher education was a sure thing, and the main obstacle standing between bright high school students and their attendance at Illinois was their ability. In the past, the state’s significant subsidy had helped keep a college education within reach for the majority of Illinois families; today, however, that funding has decreased significantly. So while the release of monies secured Lincoln Hall’s future, access to opportunity – the core of the land-grant mission – remains endangered.

But for all of these insecurities, it seemed at times to those involved in the renovation project as if mysterious forces were at work … almost as if Mr. Lincoln himself is watching over his legacy.

How else to explain the repeated coincidences as the project began to unfold: The original appropriation, for example, was in 1909, while the new one arrived in 2009. The original construction began in 1910, the renovation in 2010. The original dedication and the next will be separated by exactly 100 years to the day.

When the campus rededicates the renovated Lincoln Hall on Feb. 12, 2013, it will again be one of the most heavily used buildings on campus and a center of learning.

The University also hopes it will be a symbol of a re-energized commitment to the land-grant mission. If so, then Lincoln Hall will truly be, to paraphrase Edwin Stanton’s famous pronouncement of Lincoln’s legacy, a new gift for the ages.

Korab ’80 media, ms ’92 media, is the senior director of communications and marketing at the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, which will return to its Lincoln Hall home in 2012.

To follow Lincoln Hall renovations, visit www.lincolnhall.illinois.edu.

How to Grow a Human Network

Thu 16 Dec 2010 16:35 CST

By Dave Wieczorek

Sue Bostrom sits high atop the corporate ladder at Cisco, but she also touts the merits of down-to-earth Midwestern values.
Photos courtesy of Cisco Systems Inc.

When Sue Guenther Bostrom ’82 bus takes time from her extraordinarily busy life to retrace the roads she took from Palatine to the University of Illinois to San José, Calif., she laughs, she cries, she talks tough. She even does a little unabashed cheerleading, which leads us to make a disclaimer right up front: This is an upbeat story about a down-home, all-American girl. There’s simply no other way to portray Bostrom, a former pompom girl who grew up to become executive vice president and chief marketing officer of Cisco Systems Inc. – and one of the most influential women of her generation.

It takes only a few minutes with her to understand how Bostrom became a top executive with one of the largest high-tech corporations on the planet: by staying true to her essential nature. She is, in many ways, still the cheery, optimistic, unpretentious, bright teenager who left the suburbs of Chicago for the U of I and eventually became a powerful player in Silicon Valley.

“I love to tell people I’m from the Midwest because there are so many great attributes both in that part of the country and that my family instilled in me: hard work, a high degree of integrity, straight talk, being down-to-earth, not taking yourself too seriously and placing a value on people and their performance,” Bostrom says. “My family taught me that you have to work hard for the things that are important, but that you always have to put your family and friends first, and remember what life’s all about.”

Family ties
Bostrom wears her brown hair stylishly short and tucked neatly behind her ears. Her most prominent feature is her smile, which rarely is absent from her face. Even her voice seems to smile. Welcome, it says, come on in. Just the greeting one would expect from a farmer’s daughter.

“My dad was one of 10 kids, and it was the older boys’ job to farm, especially when their father passed away at a relatively young age,” Bostrom says with admiration for a work ethic she inherited.

Her father’s family farm, located near the northwest suburban home where she was raised, was eventually sold, but Walter Guenther continued the long hours of labor that would make an indelible impression on his daughter.

“That was back when you worked two or three jobs,” Bostrom says. “He was farming [other people’s land], working at a factory and was also a school custodian for 20 years to make sure we had enough food on the table.”

Her mother, Genevieve, worked too, as an executive assistant with area companies, while raising two girls. As many work hours as the Bostroms piled up, family was always their primary focus.

“Between my mom’s and dad’s families, I had 32 first cousins, and they all lived within a stone’s throw of Palatine,” Bostrom says. “That whole sense of family, of community, sticking up for each other, taking care of each other, that was a really important part of the way I grew up.”

So was the idea of Bostrom and her older sister, Karin, attending college and making something of themselves.

“My mom really pushed my sister and me to dream,” Bostrom says. “There were a lot of things I think she wanted to do. She was very bright. She had wanted to go to college. She wanted to explore the world. Those things just weren’t possible, given the financial situation her family was in. … So she really pushed us as young girls, as young women, to believe that there’s nothing you can’t do.”

There is a reason for front-loading a profile of Bostrom with so much of her back story: She has built her success – personal and professional – on the foundation of family.

“I always have it in the back of my mind that I want to do the family proud,” she says. “My mom and dad sacrificed a lot for my sister and me, … and I want to live up to [those] expectations.”

Her résumé is proof that Bostrom is doing just that.

Restoring the human touch
Bostrom’s climb up the corporate ladder has been swift – particularly so in a male-dominated industry – since earning her MBA from the Stanford School of Business in 1986. After stints at National Semiconductor, FTP Software and McKinsey & Co., the management consultant giant, she joined Cisco Systems in 1997 as vice president of applications and services marketing.

Cisco, a global corporation with more than 70,000 employees, posted more than $40 billion in revenue in fiscal 2010. The company designs, manufactures, sells and services Internet protocol-based networking and products related to the communications and information-technology industry.

Bostrom was promoted to senior vice president in 2000, appointed to chief marketing officer in 2006 and executive vice president in 2007. She is responsible for developing and communicating Cisco’s overall vision and strategy and heads up Cisco’s Worldwide Government Affairs organization, which develops and executes the company’s public-policy agenda. She also spearheaded Cisco’s in-house Women’s Initiative for accelerating diversity in the workplace.

Bostrom and her team came up with ‘Welcome to the Human Network,’ a marketing theme that now drives every aspect of Cisco’s global business.

By the time she was 40, Bostrom was already being touted as one of America’s formidable young executives. In 2000, Fortune magazine named her one of the “50 most powerful women in business.” In 2004, BusinessWeek placed her among the “top 50 women in technology.”

While Cisco had been well-known in the IT world since its founding in 1984, only in the past five years has the company reached out aggressively to the everyday consumer market – in both the corporate and personal sectors. Two of its marquee products are Cisco TelePresence (designed for the business world and launched in October 2006), and Cisco umi (pronounced “you-me”), another high-definition tele-presence system – this one for in-home use – which was unveiled this fall. (Telepresence systems are designed to improve visual communications across geographic and cultural boundaries through delay-free HD video images and audio.)

Cisco TelePresence connects central office sites, remote offices and teleworkers face-to-face around a virtual table. One of its primary purposes is to reduce travel expenses, sometimes in the millions of dollars, depending on a company’s size. Cisco umi connects consumers home-to-home via video.

One recent morning, Bostrom “met” with Cisco’s European marketing team across 10 countries via TelePresence. “I did a Q&A with everyone in 60 minutes,” she says. “They feel just like they would if they had met me physically.”

How consumers “feel” about Cisco and its products has been the major focus of Bostrom’s attention since she was appointed CMO in 2006 and charged with recasting Cisco’s image in the global marketplace.

“We were in many other parts of the IT business, … but we had been known primarily as a networking company, a manufacturer of routers and switches and the equipment that connects the Internet,” she explains “The market wasn’t recognizing that … we were now in many segments of it, such as home networking, voice-communications space, web-conferencing and more.”

Cisco made a strategic decision to shift to a more consultative sales model. Instead of just selling technology to its business customers, it would emphasize helping those customers use technology better in order to boost their productivity. And for home consumers, Cisco would introduce products such as umi that would enhance their personal lives.

To remake Cisco’s image, Bostrom and her creative marketing team went back to the most basic principle of successful communication – making it personal – and came up with “Welcome to the Human Network,” a campaign theme that now drives every aspect of Cisco’s global business.

Web 2.0 and social networking made it possible for everyone to connect with one another person to person, and “what we were recognizing was this emergence of the human network and how that was going to be the next transformation of both business and personal lives,” Bostrom says.

She continues: “We’ve got people who are moving physically in order to pursue work opportunities or to travel or to explore new cultures. The great thing about video is it allows you to reconnect no matter where you are.”

Bostrom’s approach to repositioning Cisco and the results of her efforts – including Cisco’s brand value increasing by 32.5 percent over the last five years and monthly visits to the company’s website topping 13 million – come as no surprise to those who see her business instincts and intellect in action.

“Sue thinks strategically,” says John Shoven, who directs the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and was so impressed with Bostrom that he recruited her for SIEPR’s advisory board in 2003. “She figures out what you’re trying to accomplish and comes up with a strategy to accomplish it in a very organized manner: What are we trying to accomplish? By what means can we accomplish it? What are its costs? Given the time, is it feasible? She’s very good at that.

“I don’t know if it dates back to business school training at Stanford or her University of Illinois training, but she takes a very clear path.”

A senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Shoven adds, “I find Sue’s advice very compelling because of her clarity and progressive way of tackling problems. I would guess that’s why she has advanced to this high executive position at Cisco.”

Confirming Shoven’s assessment is David Hsieh ’83, a colleague of Bostrom’s at Cisco, where he serves as vice president of marketing, emerging technologies.

“Sue’s got a sharp, quick, analytical side,” says Hsieh. “Where her creativity shows is when she cuts through the fuzzy, foggy stuff and homes in on the critical issues.”

She’s been doing that since her days on the UI campus.

Finding her destiny
When Sue Guenther was an 18-year-old freshman at Illinois, she had no idea what the future held. A career in the high-tech world wasn’t remotely in her thoughts, she recalls, “but I said to myself, ‘I want to do something different, something special.’”

Imagine, for a moment, an executive who is a step away from a corporate corner office wearing a sequined dance outfit and waving pompoms in a Memorial Stadium filled with thousands of screaming football fans. That was Bostrom 30 years ago as a member of the Illinettes, the female dance team component of the Marching Illini; it was a period she counts as pivotal in her life.

“It’s hard to believe, I know,” she says, laughing. “When I was in high school, I loved to dance, and I was also really competitive. I still am competitive. The idea that I could go to Illinois and compete for a spot on a dance team was really exciting.”

She survived a series of tryouts and made the squad.

“It really built my self-confidence in terms of just putting myself out there with a possibility that I could be rejected,” Bostrom says. “I learned … that if you don’t take a risk, you never have a chance.”

Performing with the Illinettes also gave her a sense of structure.

“We practiced two to three hours a day and then got up Saturday mornings to practice before the football game. My life was completely structured between classes, the Illinettes, homework and activities with my sorority, Sigma Kappa. [That structure] helped me academically because I had to focus to get my work done.” (Bostrom graduated in the top 1 percent of her college class and also was named a Bronze Tablet Scholar.)

One of the players she cheered for was her future husband, though she didn’t know it at the time. Kirk Bostrom ’83 aces was a placekicker and punter for the Fighting Illini.

“Fortunately, I met Kirk in the spring of our senior year, so it didn’t negatively affect my academic performance,” she jokes. They were engaged three months after meeting and married within a year.

“I don’t recommend that to my children,” she says, “but it did work out great for us.”

Meeting her husband at the U of I “seemed like destiny” after Bostrom “experienced this horrific loss my junior year.”

That was the death of her mother. Genevieve Guenther began to deteriorate rapidly from pancreatic cancer during the spring of Bostrom’s junior year, passing away three months after her diagnosis.

“It still shocks me to this day to have gone through that,” says Bostrom, holding back tears. “Thankfully, my dad had called me to come home the weekend she died.”

Even back then, Bostrom knew how to home in on a problem and find a solution.

“One of the first things I wanted to do after the funeral was get back to Illinois,” she says. “My friends were there. … I could feel normal. I could throw myself into my schoolwork or into my sorority … and not quite handle the reality of my mom’s death yet. It was really a safe place for me to go.”

The experience also seems to have set her course as an independent woman whose example would influence her children and her future colleagues.

A voice for working women
Bostrom realizes that her professional success has granted her a platform for giving “visibility to some things that are important in the world beyond business.

“I love being able to speak on behalf of women,” she says, “and about the challenges and issues they may have in the work force.”

Bostrom was encouraged to play a leadership role when a grass-roots effort by employees led Cisco to establish its Women’s Initiative, one of a dozen or so diversity programs the company supports. She served as the program’s executive sponsor from 2001-04.

“There are things you need to start to change now to make [the business world] better for the next generation,” she says.

Sometimes it’s about how to “become adaptable,” as Bostrom learned soon after graduating from Stanford and taking a job with McKinsey & Co. in Dallas.

“That was a different cultural environment, and I was a woman,” she says. “Growing up in the Midwest, I was raised to be upbeat, positive and supportive. Then I go to Illinois, [where] I was an Illinette and was in a sorority. I was positive and upbeat. I had that whole persona thing going on, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

But the business world demanded unequivocal toughness, too.

“I’ll never forget,” Bostrom says, “when one of my managers at McKinsey … gave me my first review, which was all very positive, and then he said, ‘You can’t be a cheerleader all the time.’

“Now, for someone who was an Illinette, you can imagine what I thought: Wait a minute! How did you know that? Of course he was just using a really interesting analogy for any woman, especially for me. But he was [saying], ‘You know, Sue, it’s a rough-and-tumble world out there. People have certain expectations, … so you have to adapt to that and at times you have to deliver tough messages. … Sometimes that’s better than beating around the bush and trying to be too nice about it.’

“If you talk to people I work with now, they’ll say I’m pretty direct, pretty tough, but hopefully in a positive and productive way.”

Bostrom believes she has found a balance between business toughness and the Midwest values so ingrained in her. That’s why she still likes telling people she was an Illinette.

“At the end of the day, what I really value in people is diversity and different experiences, the idea of having a sort of multi-experiential or multicultural environment with people bringing new ideas and different experiences to the table,” she says. “I also think that you can’t judge people too quickly.”

Unquestionably, Bostrom has changed since those early days in Dallas and so too has the attitude of young women following in her footsteps.

“The plus for me 25 years ago was that I really didn’t know how tough it was going to be,” she says. “I didn’t know any better. I didn’t know the statistics.” (As of November, 2.4 percent of the CEOs in the Fortune 500 are female, totaling 12 women.)

“There was some benefit to that,” Bostrom says. “I figured, ‘Hey, if I work really hard, if I learn, if I take people’s input, if I’m trustworthy, I’m going to do OK.’”

What about her own limits? Bostrom seems a prime candidate to be someone’s CEO. She interacts with government leaders from China to the United Arab Emirates. She sits on numerous prestigious boards from Stanford Hospital to Georgetown University and volunteers at her children’s schools. Might there be, say, a future in politics?

One more time Bostrom laughs at a presumptuous notion that some may say conflicts with her Midwestern values, and then she replies: “I would never say never to anything, though it’s hard to imagine [politics]. Am I interested in public service? Absolutely. I love the idea of giving back at this stage of my life. I do think that that is one of the blessings that has come with success.”

Once again, Bostrom is upbeat and positive and putting those Midwestern values right out front.

Wieczorek is a freelance writer and editor in the Chicago area.

Body and Soul

Thu 16 Dec 2010 15:23 CST

Students continue to thrive at one of the nation's most accessible college campuses

By Dave Evensen

A portrait of the able-bodied Timothy Nugent shows him casting the shadow of a wheelchair, reflecting his decades-long passion to offer access to higher education to students with disabilities.
Photo courtesy of College of AHS

For the most part, the world is run by people whose bodies are whole. If you ask them to slow down or otherwise sacrifice on behalf of those whose bodies are not, people will raise their voices, call you unreasonable or simply ignore you.

But if you keep asking for — no, demanding — fair consideration, day after day, year after year, slowly they'll give ground. And after 63 years you'll get what you have at the University of Illinois. Curb cut by curb cut, ramp by ramp, the University has evolved into a one-of-a-kind, life-changing force for students with disabilities.

The Division of Disability Resources and Educational Services (DRES) is a mouthful of a title for a simple but radical concept, which is to make college more accessible for students with disabilities. That's just an umbrella phrase, however. Serving hundreds of students each year, DRES has long been a leader in its field. Illinois was the first campus with curb cuts, wheelchair-accessible bus routes and adaptive sports (Illinois' programs are considered the New York Yankees of collegiate wheelchair athletics). Many of the nation's accessibility laws trace their roots to Urbana-Champaign.

"The purpose of this unit is to ensure that the brightest young people with severe disabilities — and with broad ranges of disabilities — are afforded egalitarian access to resources of this campus and benefit to the greatest degree possible, similar to the benefit that's granted all other students," says DRES Director Brad Hedrick, phd '84 ahs. "That's a pretty exciting mission."

The program is housed in the Rehabilitation Education Center, which sits among a cluster of nondescript buildings on the south side of campus. It's a good distance from most campus academic buildings, but in a way it's a fitting spot, surrounded on all sides by power plants, labs, chiller plants, workshops and other brass tacks of the University. Talk to anyone touched by a disability, and you'll know that rehabilitation is part brain, part guts, part sweat and part mechanical.

Look around the lobby of that building, however, and it's clear that DRES' mission is also an inspirational one. On one wall, near a trophy case of honors collected by Illinois wheelchair athletes, is a portrait of Tim Nugent by the late artist Billy Morrow Jackson, mfa '54. It says something of Nugent's impact that DRES keeps his portrait hanging some 25 years after his retirement. But what really makes you pause to consider the man is a peculiar feature added by the artist: Nugent, who does not have a disability, is casting the shadow of a wheelchair.

'The Visioner'
Any story about DRES needs to start with Nugent. He was the program's first director when it was created in the late 1940s and called the Rehabilitation Program, geared primarily toward wounded war veterans. Nugent arrived at age 24, fresh from graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, and he'd stay at Illinois until his retirement in 1986.

Highlights of his career are too many to list, but they include citations from presidents Eisenhower and Clinton; the founding of Delta Sigma Omicron, a national fraternity dedicated to serving those with disabilities; the establishment of the first National Wheelchair Basketball Tournament; and the research and advancement of architectural standards that would be built into laws adopted across the country.

A 2002 history by the Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Independent Living Management says that Nugent created a program that "became a prototype for disabled student programs and independent living centers."

Around DRES these days, Nugent is affectionately referred to with such titles as "the Visioner," but during his career, he didn't necessarily achieve those visions by being Mr. Nice Guy. Former students recall facing reprimands — even expulsion — for failing to meet Nugent's high standards, including pushing your own wheelchair and otherwise striving for independence.

In "The History of Discrimination in U.S. Education: Marginality, Agency, and Power," former student Jan Little '61 media, ms '65 media, recalls a love/hate relationship with Nugent that was 99.9 percent love and 0.1 percent hate. "The 0.1 percent hate turned out to be the factor that made many of us succeed when all odds were against success," she recalls.

***

Evelyn Moore '69 las arrived at the University Illinois in the 1960s with partial use of her hands and arms. Before she left, she had learned to drive.

Nugent was talking to a visiting doctor one day when Moore drove up in a convertible. "The doctor said, 'Gee, she looks familiar,'" Nugent recalls. "I said, 'She should. She was your patient.' He said, 'Oh my God, I discharged her with an attendant 24 hours a day.' I said, 'Would you like to go for a drive with her in her new car?'"

A ramp offers easier access to living quarters.
Photo courtesy of College of AHS

Making inroads one at a time
Nugent, now in his late 80s, still lives in Champaign with his wife in a leafy subdivision just a few doors away from his grandkids. He still advises DRES, attends all of the wheelchair basketball tournaments and recalls keenly his working days at the U of I. At times his voice hardens. In the early days, the University and DRES didn't always see eye-to-eye.

When Nugent arrived in 1948, the Rehabilitation Program was located at the University's former Galesburg campus. Almost immediately, news came down that the University planned to close that campus and the Rehabilitation Program along with it. Nugent and his students protested at the state capital and at Urbana to keep the program alive.

The program was eventually spared and relocated to Urbana-Champaign, where the roughly dozen or so students were housed in tar-paper U.S. Army surplus barracks. Nugent was informed that the program would receive no financial backing from the University.

Undeterred, he cobbled together a hodgepodge of funding sources, including wheelchair sports ticket sales as well as contracts with the U.S. Veterans Administration and state vocation and rehabilitation programs. Nugent was so proficient at fundraising that when the program finally did receive University monies in 1956, he already had a paid staff of five and two wheelchair-accessible buses.

As his students eventually moved into better quarters and the program's positive results poured in, Nugent's devotion grew. "I just got interested in the whole theme of why these people weren't doing more than what they were doing," he says. "Only about 3 percent of the students who came to the University of Illinois and were disabled earlier in life ever went to grade schools or high schools. They were all home-instructed, hospital-instructed or orthopedic school-instructed."

Protests and low funding were only the beginning of the struggle to make the University accessible, however. People on campus often weren't happy about making accommodations for Nugent's students.

"There's nothing harder than changing the mind of a Ph. D.," he says, with a wink. "I've had some interesting experiences with faculty."

Some of the most heated exchanges arose as Nugent rearranged classroom locations to accommodate students with disabilities. Today's campus is mostly accessible by ramps, elevators, automatic doors and other features, but early in his career, Nugent sometimes had to relocate as many as 600 class sections a semester.

During the influx of students following World War II, Army barracks — equipped with a space heater and devoid of insulation — become home to students both with and without disabilities.
Photo courtesy of College of AHS

He once notified a professor that a class was to be moved from the third floor of a building to the first. The teacher erupted angrily and called Nugent "every name in the book," Nugent recalls, because the professor had already carefully coordinated class times and location to be near his office. Ultimately, Nugent took the matter to the assistant provost, who ensured that the class was relocated to the ground floor.

"We had a lot of situations like that. That was the attitude of a lot of the faculty," Nugent recalls. "It's hard to explain the phenomena that went into changing people's concepts and attitudes. It doesn't happen just by talking to a person. Sometimes you have to hit them with something harder than that."

He also had a lot of help. Nugent has many glowing examples of people who always seemed in tune with his mission. A former Champaign city engineer, for example, whose wife taught students with visual disabilities, would create curb cuts at Nugent's request within 24 hours. One of Nugent's early bus drivers told him, "As long as you work here, I'm going to work here," and he drove for $1 an hour for 18
years before Nugent could convince the University to raise his wage.

And for every angry professor, there were others who would patiently work with Nugent through an entire departmental class schedule, moving sections as necessary so that all students could attend.

"There were so many ways that people contributed," he adds. "It would take me months to describe them all."

And it should be mentioned that in 1949, when the program was under threat of closure, Nugent had inquired of several other universities whether they'd be willing to house the program. None would except the Urbana campus, making it the first college campus to serve those with severe physical disabilities.

Jean Driscoll
Photo courtesy of College of AHS

Sports as the great equalizer
Of all the factors that earned DRES acceptance around campus, sports was one of the strongest. Illinois was the first university to develop a collegiate wheelchair sports program, and the reason was partly public relations.

"Sports contributed a lot to what we were able to achieve," Nugent recalls. "It motivated people and also gave people an understanding what we were really like. One father wrote to The Daily Illini and said, 'It may be a wonderful thing what the University is doing for these ... people with disabilities, but what's more important is what they've done for the general public.'"

The strong wheelchair sports tradition continues today, with DRES boasting 15 men's and 14 women's national basketball championships and some of the world's best wheelchair athletes. Perhaps DRES' most famous alumna is Jean Driscoll '91 las, ms '93 ahs, a graduate of Illinois who was born with spina bifida. She arrived just after Nugent's retirement and went on to win eight Boston Marathons in the wheelchair division.

Now an associate director of development for the UI College of Applied Health Sciences (under which DRES operates), Driscoll recalls how in the late 1980s Hedrick recruited her out of her hometown of Milwaukee to play wheelchair basketball at Illinois. At first she was reluctant to leave Wisconsin for what she considered a rival state, but once she arrived in Urbana-Champaign, her "life just changed," she says.

"Marty Morse '84 ahs, ms '87 ahs, who was the track and road racing coach, and Brad, who was coach of basketball, they helped you see the big picture. ... I wasn't dreaming that big before I came to Illinois," Driscoll recalls. "I love the structure that was provided; I love the type of coaching that was provided. Not only were we coached there, but they were consummate teachers."

***

In fall 1993 Ian Rice '98 las was a freshman gymnast at Illinois when he fell from the high bar during practice. He dislocated a vertebra in his neck, paralyzing his legs and ending life as he knew it.

But a funny thing happened at rehab in St. Louis. Rice met some wheelchair athletes who asked him where he went to school. They were "super impressed" that he attended the U of I, Rice recalls. "I had no idea [that] if there was a place to be injured, this would be it, this would be the best place in the universe."

When he returned to the Urbana campus, he began wheelchair racing. It gave him hope.

"After getting involved in wheelchair athletics and seeing the athletes and how able they were, how good they were and how happy they were, it really kind of opened my eyes to the possibility that this might work," Rice says. "It rehabilitated me body and soul."

Rice would graduate and go on to earn a doctoral degree at the University of Pittsburgh, where he studied wheelchair propulsion biomechanics. This fall, almost exactly 17 years after his injury, he was hired as an assistant professor of kinesiology and community health at the U of I.

Mayor Jerry schweighart, honoring former director Tim Nugent with an "honorary Tim Nugent Way" in 2007
Photo courtesy of College of AHS

Reaching the children early
By the time that Hedrick, DRES' current director, arrived at Illinois in 1977, the University had become a trendsetter in campus accessibility (indeed, he remembers it as "an oasis in the desert"). Still, much work remained to be done on behalf of those with disabilities.

One of Hedrick's earlier roles was directing sports and recreation at DRES, but during the mid-1980s, he was also pursuing a doctoral degree. In light of that, he conducted an experiment in Kansas City, Mo., at what was then the only youth wheelchair sports program in the nation.

Hedrick generally speaks in long, running sentences when he broaches a topic he's passionate about, but his voice falters as he recalls how people in Kansas City responded to his efforts to improve sports instruction for youth with disabilities.

"I had parents tearfully thanking me because their son or daughter with a disability said that for the first time they actually were coached," Hedrick recalls. "They felt they had been given the same kind of opportunity and respect and training — and held to the same expectations — as their brothers and sisters and peers.

"I get overwhelmed now when I think back about those comments. And they were probably very critical to my career in helping me frame what I wanted to see us do at Illinois in outreach."

Soon after Hedrick's experience in Kansas City, DRES conducted its first summer sports camp on the Urbana campus for youth with disabilities, enrolling 16 children. This past year the program's summer camps served more than 200.

In recent years DRES has worked with the Illinois High School Association to promote sports for children with disabilities and has arranged for DRES' coaches and athletes to conduct clinics across the nation and around the world. The program is developing online resources for teaching sports to youth with disabilities.

"[Children with disabilities] get a taste of the wheelchair sports program, and they go, 'This is great, I'd really like to do this, I like to play college sports!'" Hedrick adds. "And then you say, 'You know what? The admissions bar at Illinois is pretty high. You'd better recalibrate your study habits and focus yourself a little more and make better grades.' It's just been marvelous in terms of reorienting the young people to set higher standards and maybe higher standards than their teachers or parents had for them.

"The carrot is to get here and be a part of this program, to experience this for four or five years instead of once a week. To get it daily."

Ongoing efforts
Outreach is just part of a program that continued to bloom after Nugent retired and Hedrick became director in 1995.

Nugent and his staff had created a legacy of architectural standards that became the components of future accessibility codes, including the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, the Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988 and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Research at DRES has been the seed for myriad architectural features that shape buildings today, including seats with showers; hallway, doorway and toilet dimensions; wheelchair ramp characteristics; stairway features and more.

Today, DRES is one of the top producers of accessible college course content in the nation, with staff converting thousands of textbook pages and other materials to Braille, auditory readings and Web-accessible electronic content.

Accessibility initiatives have also branched to the Internet, with complex efforts to make websites friendlier to users with disabilities. For people with sight, hearing or motor challenges, the Internet may not be easy to navigate. Catherine Kudlick, professor of history at University of California, Davis, and president of the Disability History Association, calls Illinois a leader in electronic accessibility.

"Our electronic environment today is much like the physical environment of the last century, where there were all kinds of barriers as people devoted most of their energies to laying out streets, putting in pipes, directing traffic, etc., but only later tackling the problem that it was built for people in great physical condition," she says.

"Today's [disability activists] are looking for ways that we can build in 'electronic curb cuts' before it gets too expensive and complicated to add them on later. A site such as the one at University of Illinois is a terrific contribution to these efforts," Kudlick adds. The site she refers to — itaccessibility.illinois.edu — includes straightforward information on laws and standards, HTML best practices, types of disabilities and other issues.

In recent years DRES has expanded its services to students with cognitive disabilities such as learning disorders, brain injuries, psychological disabilities and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

With help from other campus units, DRES provides free screenings of students who are in danger of dropping out to see if they have undiagnosed cognitive disorders; since 2000, 600 such students have been helped. While some 45 percent of them had been on academic probation or faced expulsion upon entering the program, that number fell to 2 percent after diagnosis and treatment or counseling. Grade-point averages rose significantly.

These days, DRES has some 30 full-time staff, serves hundreds of students every year and enjoys strong support from University administration and the College of Applied Health Sciences. Indeed, Nugent, who is still active on DRES committees, says current AHS Dean Tanya Montaleone Gallagher '67 las, ma '70 las, phd '71 las, has contributed mightily to the efforts.

And architectural accessibility efforts have not been forgotten. This fall, in a crowning achievement for the program, the University opened the first wing of Timothy J. Nugent Hall, the campus's first new residence hall in 44 years and the most accessible in the country for students with severe disabilities (the building also houses students without disabilities). At the building dedication during Homecoming Weekend, Nugent called the new dorm "the culmination of 63 years."

***

"The students who live [at Nugent Hall] will be able to open every exterior door, every security passage and their individual room doors without touching anything," Hedrick said before the residence hall became operational this semester. "Each of the rooms will have a motorized ceiling lift that [students] can use to independently... get in and out of bed or go to the bathroom or get in and out of their chairs or require fewer [personal assistants] to help them do that.

"We're the first non-hospital, large-scale facility in which those ceilings are going to be deployed."

But Hedrick had an even greater reason to be excited about the state-of-the-art facility. While attending a tour of the residence hall shortly before it opened, he recognized a moment when the missions of DRES and the University of Illinois seemed to merge into one. As he followed the young, able-bodied tour guide from an entirely different University unit than his, Hedrick realized she knew more about building accessibility than he did — and he had never seen her before in his life.

Evensen is a freelance writer living in Champaign.

Illinois Homecoming

Sal Nudo — Mon 13 Sep 2010 10:48 CST

By John Franch

In its 100-year history, Homecoming at the University of Illinois has held many special moments – such as the four touchdowns within 12 minutes made by Red Grange, left and on opposite page, during the 1924 game.

There would never be another Homecoming game like it. On the 80-degree afternoon of Oct. 18, 1924, some 67,000 raucous fans, jammed into a newly dedicated Memorial Stadium, waited in suspense for the start of the contest against a powerhouse Michigan team. A whistle sounded, a cheer arose, and the Michigan captain kicked the football. It was a low kick, and the ball, spiraling northward through the sun-washed sky, plopped into the outstretched arms of Harold “Red” Grange ’26, who stood on the five-yard line of the emerald-green field. “Cautiously, almost shyly,” the bare-legged Grange embarked upon the famous 95-yard run that would win him sports immortality. Starting on his left, he quickly dodged to the right to avoid a tackler and then again swerved left. He had outflanked his befuddled Michigan opponents, extricating himself from “seemingly hopeless tangles of tacklers,” and an open field lay ahead. Grange sprinted into the end zone, and the bleachers “went crazy,” the fans standing up and trying to “split their throats cheering.” He wasn’t done that day – far from it. Grange scored three more times that quarter – four touchdowns in 12 minutes – and the Illini would go on to crush Michigan 39-14.

Like the fabled runs of Red Grange on that distant autumn afternoon, Homecoming at the University of Illinois has enjoyed many memorable twists and turns in the course of its 100-year history.

The idea of Homecoming was born, so the story goes, on the steps of the old University YMCA, now Illini Hall. In the spring of 1910, 28-year-old Walter Elmer “Ek” Ekblaw, Class of 1910, and 23-year-old Clarence Foss “Dab” Williams, both seniors, were sitting there and talking about “graduation and being ‘old grads’ and Alma Mater.”

“I’d like to do something really big for the old school before I leave,” one supposedly said to the other.

“We talked about this, that and the other thing,” Williams recalled in 1930, “and gradually came to a conclusion when one of us suggested a university reunion like the old home weeks of some of the towns of New England. We figured that alumni would like to come back while school was in session, and we felt that a good football game would act as a magnet.”

The story is a good one, but it contains at least one inaccurate detail: Williams claimed that the conversation on the YMCA steps occurred in April or May of 1910, but by that point, the movement for a University Homecoming was already well under way.

The first Homecoming
However the idea originated, on March 13, 1910, members of the two senior honorary societies – Shield and Trident as well as the Phoenix – assembled in the basement of the YMCA and resolved to urge the Council of Administration, the University’s central body for student affairs, to sanction an annual Homecoming.

The first Illinois Homecoming in 1910 – the pushball contest in which swarms of opposing freshmen and sophomores battled to force an enormous ball over the goal line. The competition left in its wake “sweat, blood and the ragged remnants of clothes,” in the memory of one observer. “Fond mothers do not like to look at Illio pictures current in those years.”

One month later, a committee of the senior societies formally presented its Homecoming petition to the council. The petition maintained that “the setting aside of such a day as a holiday would afford alumni and students the opportunity to come into closer touch with each other.” This Homecoming, it was hoped, would give the alumni a “true conception of the real greatness of the University” and thereby “create a more active and sincere loyalty to the University.”

Taking nearly six weeks to decide, the Council of Administration finally – on May 24, 1910 – approved the Homecoming but “with the understanding that it will be determined later whether this shall be made an annual event.” A jubilant Daily Illini predicted that the Homecoming would become “a particularly and distinctively Illinois institution which if successful will without doubt be followed by other Universities.”

Homecoming at the University of Illinois debuted on Friday, Oct. 14, 1910, and many alumni returned. “The Illini can come back,” the Alumni Quarterly declared in apparent amazement. “They can come from all directions at once, and in astonishing numbers, back to Alma Mater and a jollification that sets new standards of fellowship between the graduate and the graduate to be, between Illinois and all her great family.” The Quarterly estimated that some 1,500 alumni attended the Homecoming, more alumni “than ever returned at Commencement time.”

The Friday events of the “jollification” – a match between the Illini baseball team and alumni all-stars, a pushball contest between freshmen and sophomores (in photo above), the Hobo Band (comprising colorfully and often outrageously dressed students) and a mass meeting – were all but a prelude to the Saturday pigskin duel between the Illini and the University of Chicago Maroons. Thousands were packed into the rickety grandstands and temporary bleachers of Illinois Field, including an organized “rooters’ section” of undergraduates selected for “their peculiar rooting ability and attired in Orange and Blue dress in a manner that formed a block ‘I.’” To the surprise of many witnesses, the Illini “outplayed and outgeneraled” the Maroons on that warm and dusty day.

The Daily Illini declared the first Homecoming to be an unqualified success and also touted the University as the originator of the affair:

The echoes of the events of this great Home-coming will be heard as long as the University endures, for it is now almost a certainty that it will be adopted as a permanent annual institution the like of which no other University can boast. Illinois may well pride itself on being the originator of the plan for drawing home the alumni, a plan which will undoubtedly be adopted generally.

Unfortunately for The Daily Illini’s assertion, on Nov. 24-25 of the previous year – 1909 – Baylor University had sponsored an alumni event called a “Home-coming” featuring a concert, pep rally, parade, bonfire and football game. However, Baylor’s next Homecoming apparently wasn’t held until 1915. So, at the very least, the University of Illinois can legitimately claim to have had the longest college tradition called “Homecoming.”

Making it permanent
In 1911 the Council of Administration endorsed the idea that Homecoming should be an annual affair. This decision did not please all alumni, a fact that became evident at the second Homecoming, when the New York alumni made known then their belief that the annual class and alumni reunions should continue to be held during Commencement Week. Strongly agreeing with the New Yorkers was J.N. Chester, Class of 1891, of Pittsburgh, who suspected that Homecoming “had been planned and promoted by the Athletic Association in order to increase its gate receipts at the football game.” Of course, Chester’s statement is exaggerated, but one cannot deny the importance of football to Homecoming. So the hiring in 1913 of Robert Zuppke ’38 as football coach may have been one of the best things that happened to the UI Homecoming in its early years.

A tug of war takes place at the 1919 Homecoming. In the 1917 Homecoming program, above, UI president Edmund J. James writes as he welcomes alumni, “You find us sadly diminished in numbers both in faculty and student body by the call of the Great War”; indeed, the pressures of World War I caused the single lapse in Illinois Homecoming history, with 1918 being the only year that the event has not been held on campus.

Later described as “a truly magnetic, dynamic personality – the personification of pep and fight,” the 33-year-old Zuppke quickly revived the flagging football fortunes of the Illini. In his first 17 years as coach, Zuppke would lead his teams to win seven Western Conference championships and compile a remarkable 90-29-8 record. Not coincidentally, attendance at the Homecoming games soared in the wake of football success.

Judging by The Daily Illini headlines, each early Homecoming had been “the greatest,” far outdoing its predecessor, but then 1918 arrived. That was the year without a Homecoming, the only such lapse in the tradition’s 100-year-old history. Due to the exigencies of World War I, no preparations for the annual tradition had been made by early autumn, the Big Ten football game was canceled, and Homecoming never took place. (A popularly held belief credits the Spanish influenza epidemic with felling Homecoming; however, the oft-mentioned football game on Illinois Field – as recounted by Fred H. Turner ’22 las, am ’26 las, phd ’31 ed – was indeed played behind locked gates because of the epidemic, but the contest was between the Illini and a group of Navy men on what would have been Homecoming Saturday.)

As the war came to an end, the Alumni Quarterly issued a call for a great postwar Homecoming, “a homecoming that will shake the old campus and all of us to the very foundations.”

Held on Oct. 31-Nov. 1, 1919, the so-called “Victory Homecoming” fully lived up to the expectations of the Alumni Quarterly. An estimated 12,000 alumni returned to the old Alma Mater; some parked their cars in the Armory, which had been pressed into service as a garage. The alumni enjoyed an elaborate Homecoming program that featured old favorites like dances, the pep rally, reunions, the Hobo Band and innovations like a Coed Carnival, whose vaudeville-type program would later become known as The Stunt Show. On Homecoming Saturday, the Illini thwarted Chicago in a 10-0 upset before a crowd of 18,000.

That evening a crackling bonfire on Illinois Field and a booming fireworks display ended “the Greatest Homecoming” in a blaze of glory.

The Roaring ’20s

The Victory Homecoming ushered in the decade of the 1920s – perhaps the heyday of Homecoming at the University of Illinois. One great Homecoming followed another: In 1920 the Library (now Altgeld Hall) chimes were dedicated; in 1922 a dedication ceremony occurred on the site of what would eventually become Memorial Stadium; and in 1923, a year before Grange’s legendary run, the first game was played there.

In 1925, Illinois’ Red Grange, at left above, confers with head football coach Bob Zuppke.

Costing nearly $2 million (the money having been raised from alumni and students), Memorial Stadium forever changed the scale of Homecoming. That fact became evident on Homecoming Saturday, Nov. 3, 1923, when the partially completed Memorial Stadium first opened its gates and received “a baptism of rain” as the Illini faced off against Chicago.

Logan Fletcher Peirce ’24 bus, a senior, witnessed the historic contest that raw and drizzly day, sitting in the stands of the vast stadium, the exposed steel framework of which he likened to a “spider webb” (sic). “Dear, the spectacle here Saturday was beyond my powers of description,” Peirce raved in a letter to his girlfriend. “It was wonderful! 62,000 people jammed into the stadium. Chicago, with their maroon colors, formed an enormous C in the east bleachers. The players looked like midgets – but you could see wonderfully well. Railroad trains were backed right up to the Stadium gates and 19 special trains unloaded their mass of seething humanity between 8 A.M. and noon Saturday.”

Peirce thought that the massive stadium formed an appropriately dramatic stage for the grand performances of the University Band, a longtime highlight of Homecoming games. “The Illinois band was out in full force and it was a wonderful sight to look down from such a gigantic structure and see the band playing ‘Loyalty’ and spelling out a perfect ‘Illini’ below us,” Peirce wrote.

And then there was a sophomore halfback by the name of Harold “Red” Grange. “When Red Grange broke loose with his long end runs – you undoubtedly heard the deafening roar in St. Louis,” Peirce kidded his girlfriend.

Grange “broke loose” into the end zone only once on that rain-drenched day, but the one touchdown was enough to defeat a scoreless Chicago. That night “the campus was nothing but a howling mob of half crazy homecomers,” Peirce reported.

Red Grange ran wild the next year with his four famous touchdowns, but after the 1925 season, he signed a pro contract with the Chicago Bears. Only 42,555 attended the 1926 Homecoming game against Iowa, but big crowds returned in 1927 to watch Illinois triumph over Michigan by a score of 14-0. This game would mark the first Homecoming appearance of the Chief Illiniwek symbol, which had been introduced late in the previous season.

The Depression
The Illini football fortunes faded after 1929. This “football depression,” coupled with the economic depression gripping the country, cast a shadow over the Homecomings of the 1930s. As early as 1930, The Daily Illini detected what it thought was a decline in Homecoming spirit.

“After almost two decades of continuous growth, each year on a larger scale,” the student newspaper asserted, “Homecoming appears to be back-sliding this year, not because of faulty management or any cause of the like, but seemingly because many students seem to think that all the frivolity and collegiate spirit connected with the weekend is more or less passé.”

The Hobo Parade, pictured above, was a casualty of the Depression era, canceled in 1934 because of a lack of interest. The parade had been a feature of Homecoming since the beginning.

While one Homecoming tradition died during the Depression, another was born. In 1936 Dolores Thomas Sims ’39 las was crowned the first UI Homecoming queen. Unfortunately, the Northwestern University band marred the pregame crowning ceremony, blaring forth just before the introductions were to be made. The bewildered Thomas and her maids of honor soon left the field without being heard, causing one observer to ask, “What happened to the Homecoming queen?”

The Depression decade concluded on a cheerful note for UI Homecomers. On Nov. 4, 1939, the Illini toppled a mighty Michigan team, stunning the football world. This victory would be the last major upset engineered by Bob Zuppke, who coached his last Homecoming game on Nov. 1, 1941 – a Homecoming marked by the dedication of the Illini Union – and retired later that month after 29 years at the helm of the Fighting Illini.

Women and wartime
Shortly after the close of Zuppke’s last season, the Pearl Harbor attack occurred and the United States entered World War II. Transforming University life almost overnight, the war gave a more subdued tone to Homecoming. Ever since the teens and ’20s, members of the Greek fraternity and sorority system had festively decorated their houses for Homecoming, but, beginning in 1942, this tradition was put on hold because of wartime rationing. The red, white and blue of the American flag, the orange and blue of the University flag, and “the star-studded service flag indicating the number of members in that house in the armed services” replaced the usual garish decorations.

As the men went off to war, women took charge of campus affairs. “Sans gas, sans the usual decorations, but not sans the traditional Illini spirit,” the 34th Homecoming in 1943 was a largely women-run affair. That year’s pep rally kicked things off in the usual fashion except for one notable wartime innovation: Princess Illiniwek, portrayed by Idelle Stith Brooks ’44 media made her debut. The influence of the war could even be seen in the Homecoming Stunt Show of 1943, in which Allan Sherman ’45 (the campus comedian who later hit it big with the 1964 Grammy-winning song “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh”) poked fun at the 4F-ers like himself; periodically during the performance “plaid-shirted ‘hunters’” popped up on stage searching for a “draft-dodger.”

In 1944, 20 years after being dedicated to the Illini who perished in World War I, Memorial Stadium was rededicated on Homecoming Saturday to World War II’s Gold Star Illini (those who perished in war).

After the war, University enrollment boomed, thanks in large part to the GI Bill, and Homecoming roared back on a scale surpassing even that of the 1920s. During the 1946 Homecoming – “THE Homecoming the soldiers, sailors and marines had been dreaming of during those years in the foxholes, on board ship or in a bomber over Germany” – a crowd of 62,597 watched the fifth-ranked Illini come from behind in the fourth quarter to defeat Wisconsin by a score of 27-21.

A ’50s ‘first’
The decade of the 1950s opened with the crowning of two noteworthy Homecoming queens. In 1950 Mildred Fogel ’52 wore the “Miss Illinois” crown; in later years, “Millie” starred in the “Mission Impossible” TV series and would be better known by her stage name – Barbara Bain. The following year students selected Clarice Davis Presnell ’52 las, an African-American senior in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, to be “Miss Illinois” in “the biggest vote for Homecoming queen in the history of the University.” According to the Chicago Defender, Davis was the first African-American to hold the Homecoming queen title at a major American university.

From left: A house decoration predicts a crash and burn for the Michigan team at Illinois Homecoming 1945. Clarice Davis, believed to be the first African-American Homecoming queen at a major U.S. university, rounds Memorial Stadium in 1951. The Stunt Show, shown here in 1961, was a longtime Homecoming tradition; the last one occurred in 1968.

Homecomings in the 1950s were characterized by large attendances and memorable football games. In 1951, on a field fringed in snow, the undefeated Illini slaughtered Iowa 40-13. Two years later, halfback J.C. Caroline ’56 shattered Red Grange’s Big Ten rushing record in a 19-3 rout over Michigan. In 1957 an Illini team “hobbled and hampered by injuries and inconsistency” throttled a powerful Minnesota squad, subjecting the proud Gopher defense to “a beating the likes of which they never dreamed possible.”

‘For the times they are a-changin’’
The University marked the golden anniversary of Homecoming on Oct. 7-8, 1960, with several new features. A gallery of color portraits of the recipients of the University of Illinois Alumni Achievement Award, located in the east wing of the Illini Union, was dedicated on Homecoming Saturday. The Homecoming queen and her Big Ten Court were moved from the north wall of the stadium and introduced from the football field – “where they could be seen better.” And, during halftime, the Marching Illini maneuvered to spell out “Ek” and “Dab” in honor of the co-founders of the UI Homecoming and re-created a pushball contest. For the finale, Block I joined the act, depicting “a white-bearded Old Grad, then a brash young Illini” while the band formed “1910.”

Homecoming traditions faded somewhat in the 1960s and ’70s. In 1970, some students proclaimed an “anti-Homecoming,” playing their own football game on the Quad. In subsequent decades, the tradition bounced back, with strong football teams in the ’80s, and vigorous pep rallies, such as the one that occurred outside Foellinger Auditorium in 2008.

As late as 1965, Homecoming remained an important student ritual. The Daily Illini called that year’s Homecoming “one of the all time best,” but the times were “a-changin’,” to quote singer Bob Dylan, and growing numbers of students began to question the relevance of Homecoming as the tumultuous 1960s drew to a close.

The 1968 Homecoming Stunt Show captured the spirit of the times. Many of the skits were politically charged, portraying Vietnam, war and peace, and student power. The Stunt Show, a “barometer of student sentiment” for nearly 50 years, would never be staged again.

The following year’s Homecoming took place on Halloween weekend and proved a disaster. Its theme, “Hexascopic Hell’s a Topic,” brought to mind a spell from an imaginary witch, and indeed, the events seemed cursed. The 1969 Homecoming featured lousy weather; a canceled parade, pep rally, and magic show; credible complaints from “Miss Illinois”; and, last but not least, a rout of the Illini by Purdue. The Illini Union Board’s Homecoming Committee registered a $2,000 net loss. “In my estimation, there will be no Homecoming next year,” the IUB Homecoming Committee’s chairman declared after the 1969 debacle.

’70s and ’80s
There was a Homecoming in 1970, however. That year organizers and participants attempted to make the tradition “relevant”: They instituted Homecoming Saturday symposiums, put up anti-war house decorations and sold a stop-sign-shaped Homecoming badge boasting a slogan with a double meaning, WHEN THE BOYS COME HOME.

As the 1970s progressed, the Homecoming queen contest increasingly became a source of controversy. In 1973 the Illini Union Board dropped its sponsorship in response to charges that the yearly event was “irrelevant and sexist.” Sigma Alpha Epsilon kept the tradition alive for one year, and then the Panhellenic and the Interfraternity councils took charge of it from 1974 until 1978. In 1977 the event was renamed – for that year only – the Homecoming Regency Contest and opened for the first time to male candidates.

During this period, the Greeks on campus organized more and more of the Homecoming festivities. In 1979 the Student Alumni Association, in cooperation with the UI Alumni Association, assumed control of Homecoming. A “new breed of students is hitting the campus,” Josh Grafton ’83 las, the new Homecoming chairman, maintained, students who were “ready to return to the spirit of enthusiasm.” With the theme “Those Were the Days,” that year’s Homecoming revived the parade – which hadn’t been held since 1968 – and the all-campus dance and introduced an entirely new tradition: the Homecoming king.

During the subsequent decade or so, one innovation after another was unveiled as Homecoming expanded into a weeklong affair: a 5K run, Lunch on the Quad, orange-and-blue-day, a fireworks display, the African-American Homecoming, a UI Alumni Association tent party and the Illini Comeback Guests, a program begun by the UIAA in 1980 to honor “distinguished alumni from varied backgrounds” and which would later be described by one student as “the centerpiece of Homecoming.”

Homecoming flourished in the 1980s, buoyed by strong Illini football teams led by stand-out quarterbacks like Dave Wilson ’83, Tony Eason ’83 ahs, Jack Trudeau ’86 las and Jeff George ’91 las. Perhaps the most memorable Homecoming game of the decade occurred on Oct. 15, 1983, when 73,414 fans watched the Illini offense, spearheaded by Trudeau, drive 83 yards down the field in the last minute and 46 seconds of the game to defeat Ohio State for the first time in 16 years.

The recent past
In the 1990s, Homecoming attendance began to decline, prompting concern from some. “I guess I’m enough of a traditionalist that it bothers me, if it really is true, that Homecoming is slipping at the school where it started,” one observer wrote in 1994.

Three years later, the UI Alumni Association set out to rejuvenate Homecoming. Backed by the Office of the Chancellor, the UIAA sought “to give Homecoming a face” and to move it away from being “the mere celebration of a football game,” in the words of The Daily Illini. The 1997 edition of the event restored old traditions like elaborate campus decorations, the bonfire and the wearing of Homecoming buttons.

One old tradition, however, made its final bow that year. During halftime of the football game against Purdue, the Homecoming king and queen opened their jackets to reveal shirts bearing the slogan “racial stereotypes dehumanize.” In subsequent years, the concept of a king and queen was replaced by the more egalitarian Homecoming Court.

During the 2000s, Homecoming endured. Like in the previous nine decades of its existence, the resilient annual ritual featured devastating losses (the 2005 drubbing by Penn State), magnificent victories (the 2001 rollercoaster run against Wisconsin) and community-minded events (such as the iHelp volunteer day; a family-friendly, community kickoff celebration; and SoccerFest, which paired children’s activities with a UI Varsity soccer game).

After quite a ride, Homecoming at the University of Illinois has reached its centennial anniversary, and now is the time to look back to the beginning.

“The echoes of the events of this great Home-coming will be heard as long as the University endures,” The Daily Illini declared in 1910.

Indeed, 100 years later, the echoes of that first Homecoming reverberate still.

Franch ’89 media is a freelance writer based in Champaign

Editor’s note: The material quoted in the story references newspapers, correspondence and other historical documents housed in the University of Illinois Archives, as well as information gleaned from the UI History, Philosophy and Newspaper Library.

In The Time Of PLATO

Mary Timmins — Fri 10 Sep 2010 16:26 CST

How students at Illinois created today’s computer technology 50 years ago

By Mary Timmins

University of Illinois graduate student Lippold Haken wires a computer processor built in 1986 to run PLATO, a networked computer learning system years ahead of its time.

They came as inquisitive children. They left as virtuosos, versed in a computer environment decades ahead of its time. Such were the days of PLATO, a networked teaching system launched at the University of Illinois in the ’60s and celebrated at a recent conference in California.

Under the guidance of professors Dan Alpert ’63 and Don Bitzer ’55 eng, ms ’56 eng, phd ’60 eng, gifted students – many still in high school – pioneered a new way to interact by computer, in an era when data was stored on paper tape and memory cost $2 per bit. Inspired by enormous technical challenges to wild feats of ingenuity, PLATO’s mutable crew of young investigators devised innovations that made possible interactive lessons in which UI students not only learned material but engaged with it and were graded, all on computer. In this endeavor, they prefigured the shape of things to come with touch screens, plasma displays, online chat rooms, multiplayer gaming, cable modems, smart phone lines, instant messaging, blogging and e-newsletters.

“Technology was just on the edge of being able to do some of these things if we used it creatively,” Bitzer recalled of that time. “And we had a laboratory of people that knew how to do creative things.

“We had a lot of young people who didn’t know that there was an answer like ‘you can’t do it.’”

Begun in 1960, more or less at the moment Bitzer hooked a television tube to the Illiac I mainframe on the Urbana campus to see if he could create a computer setup for individualized learning, PLATO stood for “Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations,” an acronym deliberately cultivated to evoke the Greek philosopher and his dialogues. Roger Johnson ’65 eng, ms ’66 eng, phd ’70 eng, a computer entrepreneur (and a current member of the board of directors of the UI Alumni Association) was a graduate student in the days when PLATO was first evolving. He described its educational paradigm as one “far beyond even what we do today.”

Johnson was on hand for PLATO@50, a conference celebrating the system’s golden anniversary, held in early June at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. So was Ray Ozzie ’79 eng. Now chief software architect for Microsoft, Ozzie reminisced to conference-goers about the “friendly orange glow” that drew him as a UI undergraduate into the incredible 24/7 computing world of the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (CERL), where PLATO was housed. “So many people flunked out of school because of passion about what we were doing,” Ozzie told the capacity crowd of PLATO alumni and executives and researchers from the surrounding computer industry of Silicon Valley. Ozzie’s own work with PLATO would evolve into Lotus Notes, software that won him status as a major player in the industry.

Microsoft was among the sponsors of the two-day showcase of hardware and memories, to which “there was an outpouring of response,” according to C.K. Gunsalus ’78 las, jd ’84 law, a UI administrator who helped organize the event. Gunsalus herself was one of PLATO’s happy children of the future, going to work for Bitzer while a student at University Laboratory High School (“Uni”) and staying on for more than a decade. Working at PLATO, she said, “changed almost everybody in really profound and important ways. … There was a feeling of believing in what you do and knowing it will make a difference that’s addictive.”

Lippold Haken ’82 eng, ms ’84 eng, phd ’90 eng, now an electrical engineering faculty member at Illinois, was another fearless young mid-’70s innovator, enticed from teenage responsibilities at Uni to the cutting-edge gaming and music at CERL, which was located on the UI engineering campus in a former coal-burning power plant that dated back to 1912.

“On the weekends, I got in the habit of finding open windows and climbing in,” confessed Haken (who went on to invent the Continuum Fingerboard, a computerized synthesizer instrument now in use by such Hollywood studios as Lucasfilms).

As project mentor, Bitzer handled such obsessions shrewdly. With computer time highly sought-after and monitored around the clock, the students “thought I would squash games,” he said. “But I didn’t. I thought it was probably not a bad thing to have going as long as it didn’t interfere with the education. So we blanked the games during the peak hours of education and locked ’em out. And then we’d bring ’em back in again at night and on weekends.

“People work very hard when they work on things that they believe in.”

For Haken – at least in retrospect – PLATO’s true virtue was in being “so great, so patient” a teacher – one literally incapable of giving up. “If you got it wrong for the whole week, it would keep working at it,” Haken said of the networked tutorials. And for gifted students, PLATO made it a pleasure to “work at one’s own pace.” Moreover, by individualizing instruction on the computer, PLATO freed up classroom time for professors to cover more advanced material and encourage discussions.

PLATO innovations ranged from online tutorials and multiplayer games to blogs and emoticons. From left: A plasma touch screen enables interactive learning; a screen close-up shows a biology lesson about gene inheritance in fruit flies; alumni Don Bitzer, right, and Ray Ozzie recall the allure of PLATO’s “friendly orange glow” for a capacity crowd at a recent conference in Silicon Valley.

The software that supported such coursework was developed by Paul Tenczar ’63 las, ms ’69 las. Then a graduate student in life sciences, he created a simple language for writing questions and an answer-judging scheme that enabled the computer to grade student work. Within three years, Tenczar said, 3,000 lessons had been developed by UI professors across the disciplines, from physics, biology and chemistry to modern languages and even Latin and the classics (taught by UI legend Dick Scanlon). Custom graphics, emoticons and animations were among the innovations available.

“The courseware,” Tenczar recalled, “was utterly stupendous for its time.”

Having attracted major funding from the National Science Foundation, PLATO grew via phone lines and television microwaves into a network that, by the mid-’70s, reached out of the UI campus into the surrounding community and around the country and the world. Terminals, which communicated with the mainframe at Illinois, featured touch-screen plasma displays and accommodated audio discs and microfiche for use in instruction. Commercialized by Control Data Corp., PLATO eventually produced 10,000 hours of coursework in areas from language and science to training for airplane pilots, nuclear power plant operators and securities dealers. When striking air traffic controllers were fired by President Reagan in 1981, the Federal Aviation Administration turned to PLATO to train the insurgent replacements.

What PLATO, in all the collective foresight of its youth and barrier-shattering paradigms, could not surmount, in the end, was the advent of the microcomputer. Developed to run on mainframes, the online learning system peaked in the ’80s, then slowly faded, not adapting in time to catch the big PC wave that transformed computing – and human life – forever. The system still endures in NovaNET courseware for high school and adult learners and PLATO Learning, a company that provides teaching resources for K-12 and higher education.

“We were riding this crest of technology, and at the same time we had demonstrated the ability to build new things that didn’t exist.” Bitzer recalled. “Those worked together.”

And in its heyday, the system anticipated the “cloud” of today’s computing environment, by pioneering networked education, while giving clever young people a whole new way to share their lives – online.

Editor’s note: PLATO@50 proceedings are archived online,"The Friendly Orange Glow,” a history of PLATO by Brian Dear, is scheduled to be published later this year; for more on this exhaustive work, visit www.friendlyorangeglow.com.

Illini Spirit

Sal Nudo — Fri 10 Sep 2010 10:51 CST

Button Up For Homecoming

By Dan Petrella

They’re as old as Homecoming itself, and their ever-changing designs mirror the history of the annual event.

Since a pin was created for the first Homecoming at the University of Illinois in 1910, Illini have donned lapel decorations when celebrating the return to Alma Mater each fall. These Homecoming badges have honored athletic greats, such as Harold “Red” Grange ’26 and football coach Bob Zuppke ’38, and marked important University events, including the dedications of Memorial Stadium, the Illini Union and Assembly Hall.

They have also reflected events beyond campus. During World War II, the traditional metal badges (commonly called “buttons” today) were abandoned in favor of cardboard orbs to conserve money. In 1970, the badge featured the words “WHEN THE BOYS COME HOME” on a stop sign shape, alluding to the Vietnam War. Some buttons also represented cultural trends of their era, such as 1945’s parody of the ubiquitous Kilroy figure and the cartoon dog Snoopy in 1964.

“[The buttons] reflect both the larger popular culture and attitudes on campus as well,” says Ellen Swain, ms ’95 lis, archivist at the University’s Student Life and Culture Archival Program.

Collecting the buttons has become quite a pastime for several alumni, including Jayne Turpin DeLuce ’87 ahs, ms ’88 ahs; David Dorris jd ’73 law, of LeRoy; Don Long ’59 bus of Lake Wylie, S.C.; Phil Matteson ’57 bus of Champaign; Kevin McCandless ’01 ahs, ms ’02 ahs, of Urbana; and Paul L. Stone ’67 bus, jd ’70 law, of Sullivan.

Long’s inventory of UI memorabilia includes approximately 600 buttons and pins, 80 of which are Homecoming badges.

Despite the variety of designs over the years, the wording on Homecoming badges is usually more standardized, he says.

“The Homecoming pins tend to be very straightforward,” Long says. “They tend to have the name or slogan that’s been chosen, and that’s about it.”

Nonetheless, the buttons’ changing shapes, colors, details and themes continue to commemorate the mood of Homecoming days gone by.

And, Swain notes, they’ve become “very orange since 2005.”

The Unsilent World

Bea Pavia — Wed 12 May 2010 10:10 CST

For more than two decades, Susan Schiefelbein enjoyed a remarkable working relationship with the underwater adventurer Jacques Cousteau in helping to bring his beliefs to the written page. June marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Cousteau, who counted Schiefelbein among the five closest friends of his life.

By Beatrice Pavia
Photo by L. Brian Stauffer

When a young Susan Schiefelbein ’72 MEDIA first met the famed undersea explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau, perhaps it was appropriate she was soaking wet.

“What are you doing here?” Schiefelbein recalls a forgetful New York City editor asking her at the end of a workday back in 1975. “You were supposed to be at the Pierre Hotel meeting [him] at 5:30.”

“It was pouring down rain … and I couldn’t get a cab,” the veteran writer recounted, resulting in a very soggy self at their very first encounter.

And so began a 20-plus-year relationship between a young writer and a visionary, an American ingénue and a French legend, a pair who, despite their 40-year age difference, could enjoy both nailing down the details or grandly expounding on the universe. “He was my ‘éminence grise,’” Schiefelbein said, using the French term for “gray eminence” or powerful adviser. “He was the most imaginative and creative man I’ve ever met,” she said. “I will never have a friend like that again.”

If underwater cameras were Cousteau’s eyes and the Aqua-Lung his breath, then Susan Schiefelbein has been his voice. True, “The Silent World” and other Cousteau documentaries have garnered attention, acclaim and wide-eyed wonder, but it is Cousteau’s words – his “unsilence,” if you will – that have underpinned the dazzle of imagery with the thoughtfulness of reflection. Throughout much of her career, Schiefelbein has helped bring those messages to the public – via Cousteau’s Saturday Review columns, magazine articles, the narrations for several of his films and their decades-long collaboration on his manifesto on social issues, “The Human, the Orchid and the Octopus” (Bloomsbury, 2007).

But don’t mistake her for having reached the spotlight by hanging onto a famous man’s coattails (or diving flippers). Schiefelbein was in New York City, the mecca of magazines, in the first place by virtue of having won a nationwide contest for journalism students. Just seven years out of college Schiefelbein landed the
National Magazine Award, “the most distinguished the magazine world has to offer,” according to The New York Times. And as a very young writer, she was working at Saturday Review, one of a quartet of “big-think” magazines that also included The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Magazine.

But first, Schiefelbein was an undergraduate journalism student at the University of Illinois, so shy, she says, that she trembled in a phone booth as she dialed her sources for her first assignment.

Reading, writing and the rawness of nature
Hailing from the Chicago suburb of Western Springs, Schiefelbein said she had never seen anywhere else as flat as her new campus environs – nor as brutal. “I remember the wind blowing so hard that you’d put your feet together,” she recalled, “and it would blow you along the ice. … It was so cold that I took in a breath, and my lungs froze.” Weathering those woes proved worth it, though, if for nothing else than the solitary hours it gave her with her father on the long drives back and forth from home. “It was the best time I ever spent with him,” she said, “because … he would speak to me as though I were a peer because I was [at] the University.”

Flat, brutal, precious – the wholeness with which Schiefelbein views the world has served her well in the course of her career. She would go on to cultivate her skills, producing works known for a richly visual quality hushed with awe. And the well-roundedness of her observations mirrors Schiefelbein as well. A diminutive figure with a prodigious brain, her friendly neighborliness contrasts oddly with her throaty, cabaret-type voice; she is equally at home in a senator’s office or a Gregory Hall classroom; she agrees to an interview and thanks you for asking. She holds fast to friends – including the high and heroic – and still counts her mother as a pivotal force.

“Susie was apart from other people,” said Donna Vasilion Urschel ’73 MEDIA, Schiefelbein’s Chi Omega sorority sister and roommate. “She was just so golden.” The girl who swam in the English Building pool, steadfastly exercised and headed the UI Panhellenic Council “had this wonderful ability to converse with people,” Urschel said of Schiefelbein. “She can charm anybody.”

It was at Illinois that Schiefelbein would begin to build a lifelong habit – gathering people together to discuss just about anything. She brought in a steady stream of professors to lunch at the sorority and even cajoled then-Chicago news reporter Bill Kurtis to share a meal with her and the late photojournalism professor Dick Hildwein. “I thought it was just like brainstorming,” she said, “an interesting conversation with interesting people.”

If underwater cameras were Cousteau’s eyes and the Aqua-Lung his breath, then Susan Schiefelbein has been his voice.

It was also at Illinois that Schiefelbein gained a thorough grounding in journalism-related issues and the value of digging deep, believing that she “had a preparation better than any other young [writer] in New York.” She also presents a daunting scenario of the monumental work ethic which would become her calling card: “I always thought … that the way to get ahead was to do so much work in the time limit [your editors] gave you that they’d be stunned,” Schiefelbein said. “So you’d stay at home, you don’t get dressed, you don’t take a shower, you don’t stop to eat, and then when you do get dressed, you go to the library, you stay from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., and then you come home and read the articles and look at the bibliographies and see who the experts are quoting, and then you go back to the library the next day and get those experts.”

Exactly the tools Schiefelbein would use in the course of her career to snag nearly 20 cover stories, the National Magazine Award (for the Saturday Review cover story “Children and Cancer”), the Front Page Award for science reporting, the award of the American Association of University Women for best writing on women’s issues, and the ability to debate learnedly and gracefully with some of the most forward-thinking minds of the 20th century.

Jumping off the high dive
“I had all the time in the world to write whatever I wanted,” muses Schiefelbein of her more than three decades as a writer. “That means you can just take a [leap] off the high dive and stay in the water as long as you wanted.”

And she has swum wide, deep and far in bringing to the public her searing but scrupulously researched stories on issues facing the environment, science, society and health – from limb regeneration to how doctors treat female patients to the plunder of fisheries to the storage of nuclear waste. She can report on a brutish medical school professor, then turn you around for a glimpse into the birth of the universe. She describes her impulse to walk away from a children’s cancer ward as honestly as she lets you in on the confusion of Parisians shopping in an American products store. She can load you up with projections on the problems of oceans, then weaken your knees in describing the beauty down under.

Schiefelbein’s stories on science have been read into the Congressional Record; her documentary film narratives have won Peabody, ACE and Sept d’Or awards. And she has not only written on her own but in conjunction with 20th century icons: the pioneering Cousteau, the impassioned Norman Cousins and the endlessly fascinating National Geographic Society.

At Saturday Review, Schiefelbein eventually made her way up the ladder to senior editor, but she started as a first-rung editorial assistant, where she worked with Cousteau on his magazine columns (it didn’t hurt that she spoke French). After their initial encounter at the hotel, the pair’s first serious business meeting plunged her into a marathon weekend. “I glanced at the hundreds of books lining the shelves along the walls and knew they contained accounts of all the legendary storytellers, from Scheherazade to Coleridge’s ancient mariner,” Schiefelbein writes in “The Human, the Orchid and the Octopus.”

“Before me sat their real-life incarnation. For 14 hours in an empty office building, this mariner had held me spellbound with the tales he’d told. It was a day the likes of which I wondered if I’d ever live again.”

“I just adored, adored talking with him,” said Schiefelbein, a permanent resident of Paris since 1993, of these conversations that flowed throughout their friendship. “When we were together like that, it was the most wonderful afternoons and evenings and sometimes midnights that I ever spent in my life.”

While “other people would go from A to B to C to D, logically, to get to Z,” she said in describing the way many people express their thinking, “Cousteau would go from A to Q to Z … and I would understand all of what was in the middle.

“We just clicked that way.”

“Susie’s education and her knowledge interested JYC most of all,” said Jan Cousteau, referring to the acronym (pronounced “zheek”) formed by the initials of her father-in-law’s name. “JYC admired Susan a lot, admired her intellect, her understanding of a lot of the issues that were important to him. … Susan and JYC could sit and talk ideas.”

The Saturday Review folded several years after Cousteau and Schiefelbein met, prompting him to want to keep her writing talent all to himself. “Don’t take another job right away,” he told her, “because we could spend six months together writing an environmental manifesto.” Between his years-long exploratory jaunts and his inability to sit still (“Let’s go to a chocolate shop; let’s go get tea”), “The Human, the Orchid and the Octopus” took nearly two decades to complete.

Weaving together Cousteau adventures with shocking examples of the destruction of nature, the book, which was published to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Cousteau’s death, shines with his unflagging curiosity and courage. Calling the intricacy of nature “an orchestration of accidents,” the book observes: “In its relatively short existence, life has evolved into the forms biologists consider the most complex vertebrate, the human being, and the most complex plant, the orchid. I [Cousteau] would designate the octopus, given its intelligence and devotion to the continuation of its species, as the top invertebrate. The resounding chord in evolution’s symphony: the human, the orchid, and the octopus.”

With the book project stalling and starting, Schiefelbein proved invaluable during that time to Cousins as he wrote his ground-breaking book, “Anatomy of an Illness,” (1979) on the effect of attitude on health, and to National Geographic, co-authoring “The Incredible Machine” (National Geographic Society, 1986) about the human body. She also traveled with Cousteau to the Amazon, Canada and California and sometimes took up translation work when Cousteau’s checks were late.

Due to complications with the family estate, the Cousteau-Schiefelbein book, completed in 1996, lingered for years after Cousteau’s death in 1997. It finally came to print a decade later, “never intended as his final statement,” she said, although it may have looked that way due to the timing of its publication. “He just wanted to do a book on our beliefs.”

Deciding for the future
And expressing those beliefs is paramount to Schiefelbein, whose conviction in the importance of such writing verges on the spiritual.

“The urgent problems of today and the urgent problems for the future are science problems, science decisions,” she said. Pooh-poohing from public officials and experts on serious matters like pollution and nuclear waste angers her “because they’re taking a great privilege from the [populace] to determine its own future.

“I’m a firm believer that these are public issues,” Schiefelbein said, “and they shouldn’t be kept just for the scientists or just a politician – they should be decided in the public forum, and that’s the great privilege of a science reporter.” While journalists are paid to ask the questions that everybody in the community has the right to ask, she said, the writers then “have an obligation to the community to say, ‘Here is what I learned.’”

Has Schiefelbein followed her own credo? In “The Incredible Machine,” she offers an insight into a human baby’s development; her words may well reflect not just the science of the moment but Schiefelbein’s own work at large.

“The making of a human being is more than just assembling differentiated cells,” she writes. “Our genes issue orders for our bodies and our brains, but our humanity is the embodiment of concern provided or begrudged, education offered or withheld, love denied or bestowed.”

Just so are Schiefelbein’s writings: reaching far beyond a mere assemblage of data, infused with concern, education and love, prompting and guiding us to the full potential of our humanity.

Physician, Educate Thyself

Sal Nudo — Wed 12 May 2010 10:04 CST

At Illinois, students inject the study of medicine with other disciplines

By Deb Aronson

The bioengineer wants to develop a cure for blistering skin disease, and the neuroscience student believes her understanding of how zebra finches learn songs could help combat degenerative neurological ailments. The biochemist dreams of applying her knowledge of the molecular foundation of the immune system to help fight infectious disease. The philosopher hopes to play an important role in teaching medical ethics and even guiding policy.

Each of these students is a University of Illinois Medical Scholar, earning both a medical degree and a doctorate in a field of basic research. Achieving even one of these degrees is hard enough, but to study for both simultaneously? These are students who dream of being physician/scientists, driven by a rare combination of intellectual curiosity and a desire to make a difference in other people’s lives. They can fulfill that dream in the University of Illinois Medical Scholars Program.

Take John Selby ’99 ENG, MS ’01 ENG, PHD ’07 ENG, for example. Selby, whose three Illinois degrees are all in mechanical engineering, is now enrolled in the UI College of Medicine. He says that, except for a joint program between Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at the time of his enrollment Illinois was the only institution that offered such a combination of studies.

Selby sees his M.D./Ph.D. program as the interface between classic engineering, which takes a reductionist view, where data is broken down to less complex equivalents, and medicine, which is part science and part art.

“I want to do work in an area that is not traditional medicine and not traditional engineering,” he says.

Selby has become intrigued at how cells handle various forces exerted upon them. When he learned of blistering skin disease, in which skin cells cannot stand any kind of friction and babies are born completely blistered as a result of labor, he knew he could use microfabrication techniques to ask and answer basic science questions about how cells handle tension from a mechanical perspective rather than a biological one.

“I fell in love with the idea of doing research, the idea that there is something there is no answer for yet,” says the Quincy native. “New insight is always a good thing.”

Selby also appreciates that this inquisitive process will ultimately help people in medical need.

Medicine + 35 other choices
Formal programs that offer both doctoral and medical degrees (known generally as M.D./Ph.D. programs) are not new, but the program at Illinois, which was established more than 30 years ago, is among the oldest and largest in the country. In addition, it is the only school to offer doctoral degrees in one of 35 disciplines, from history or philosophy to engineering or neuroscience. Illinois medical students may also combine their degrees with a juris doctorate or MBA. The breadth of available offerings is one reason Medical Scholars may elect to study medicine and their additional field of interest at the Urbana campus, although all Illinois medical students apply to and are accepted by the University of Illinois at Chicago’s College of Medicine.

As of last fall, more than half of MSP students were enrolled in disciplines traditionally offered in M.D./Ph.D. programs (such as immunology or pharmacology), but 27 percent are in sciences not traditionally offered in other programs, and 16 percent are enrolled in disciplines within the humanities and social sciences, such as community health, communications, history, kinesiology, philosophy or agricultural and consumer economics.

This diversity benefits everyone, says Jim Slauch, a UI microbiology professor who directs the MSP program. “The students learn from each other as much as they do from the faculty,” he says. “You may have a biochemistry Ph.D., but that person next to you has one in neuroscience, and next to them is an engineering or history Ph.D.”

Unlike many Medical Scholars at Illinois, Claudia Winograd had not originally intended to pursue medicine.

“I had always planned on a Ph.D.,” says Winograd, who majored in biology and Spanish and minored in dance. “I wanted to do research, not medicine.”

But as she grew interested in degenerative disorders of the nervous system, Winograd realized she needed to understand how the entire human system worked, both in sickness and in health. Her courses involve medicine and neuroscience, with her research focusing on the molecular basis for how zebra finches learn specific tunes (which can be related to the effect of human diseases on learning and neural connections). On top of that, Winograd became involved in the HeRMES clinic, a free community health center run by MSP students (see sidebar). Like Selby, she gets a different kind of satisfaction in this clinic than she does in the lab.

'I wanted a deeper understanding'
These physician/scientists can and do bring fresh perspectives from a wide range of fields to address issues of access and cost containment as well as new, more effective, efficient and affordable health care options. For this reason and many more, says Slauch, “People who run residency programs like M.D./Ph.D.s. They want M.D./Ph.D.s on their staff and work hard to attract them and keep them as faculty members.”

Katherine Omueti Ayoade ’00 LAS, PHD ’07 LAS, whose Illinois doctorate is in biochemistry, also finds satisfaction both in the lab and in the clinic. After earning a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Illinois and spending two years at Proctor & Gamble, she yearned to return to the lab. There, she wanted to pursue her longtime interest in pathogenesis and treatment of infectious diseases, like malaria, which is endemic in Nigeria, where she grew up. Ayoade’s thinking was that, while medical doctors can and do conduct research, having a doctorate in an area of the biological sciences would give her the grounding she hopes to apply in medicine. “I wanted a deeper understanding,” she says. “I need to know on a molecular level what is going on.”

As Ayoade describes her work, which elucidates some of the molecular mechanisms involved in human immune responses, the animation in her face makes it clear where her passion lies.

“I fell in love with immunology,” she says of her experience in the lab. “A physician/scientist sees something unique or addresses a given problem from a different direction [than does a traditional medical doctor],” she says. She envisions using the knowledge and tools she learned in the laboratory to investigate and possibly develop new treatments for inflammatory and infectious diseases in dermatology, her chosen medical specialty.

A rich environment
One of the most unusual aspects of the Illinois program, says Brad Schwartz ’74 LAS, dean of the College of Medicine, is that MSP students are the majority of medical students at Urbana-Champaign. Most M.D./Ph.D. programs, on the other hand, comprise only between 5 percent to 10 percent of a given medical school class.

“The MSP is defined by the students,” agrees Ramji R. Rajendran, PHD ’03 LAS, MD ’05 (uic), one of the program’s graduates. “They really make the program. They are interested in learning new things, and it provides for a very rich environment. It made me a better physician, scientist, person. It’s a huge intangible.

“Many universities segregate their professional schools from the broader intellectual community, whereas we are located right smack dab in the heart of this great University,” he says.

“By having so many people who have earned dual degrees, you change the intellectual environment, and it really is a remarkable thing,” Schwartz says. “Simply put, when you are surrounded by a bunch of Ph.D.s, people tend to hold each other to higher standards.

Loren Zech, AM ’00 LAS, has embraced that intellectual community by working on a doctorate in philosophy at Illinois, as well as a medical degree. Zech is adept at asking the hard questions – and the deceptively simple ones – and then teasing apart the nuances to get at the heart of the issue. As a graduate student, he became curious about the line between medically therapeutic and non-medical treatments. Fundamentally, Zech realized, he had to ask, “What is disease? Can we define it? And if we can, does that help us determine when a treatment is medically appropriate and when it is extra-therapeutic?”

“Science is not supposed to merely reflect the cultural opinions and norms of our times, but all too often newly proposed models do contain bias and are influenced by prevailing cultural belief,” Zech says. “It can take time to separate that bias from accurate models.”

In order to define disease, Zech decided to first look at what is “normal.” He determined three conceptions, the first being the theoretical norm. The key here, Zech says, is that the more controversial or poorly worked out the model, the less reliable this sense of normal becomes. Then there is the statistical sense of normal, which is derived from measuring hard data. Finally, there is the conventional, culturally relative definition of normal, i.e., it is “normal” for women to have long hair and men to have short hair. Needless to say, cultural norms shift over time.

And so it is when contradictions arise between the first and last definitions of “normal” that the line between disease and health becomes blurry and, sometimes, battle lines are drawn. Is attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder a disease, or are parents and teachers simply wanting kids to calm down? As neuroscientists learn more about how the brain works, the answer with regard to ADHD has become clearer (studies show the brains of children with ADHD differ from those of their peers), but questions regarding other conditions remain.

“Science moves slowly as it builds explanatory models,” says Zech. “Working out the kinks can take decades. Science can’t answer these questions on a policy time scale.”

He finds wrestling with this kind of ambiguity deeply satisfying and can easily envision himself as a full-time clinician at an academic hospital where he might teach and consult on medical ethics, especially as they relate to policy.

Habits of graduate education
The program at Illinois is also structured to take maximum advantage of the graduate school experience, says Schwartz. In most programs, students take the first two years of medical school (which encompasses basic sciences) before doing their graduate research and earning a doctorate; then, they return for the last two years of medical school. At Illinois, students begin with the graduate program, which alone can take six to seven years to complete.

“We want our students to acquire the habits you get in graduate education – in which you need to stop, consider what you’re looking at, question it, and be able to drill down where necessary – as their core approach to acquiring and using new knowledge,” says Schwartz. “The other thing is, in graduate education you take established information and use it as a foundation to now project forward and discover new things. We think that is something
students should learn early.”

Peter Rohloff, PHD ’03 VMS, MD ’07 (uic), who has a doctorate in parasitology, embodies this credo. Rohloff founded Wuqu’ Kawoq, a non-governmental organization that delivers health care in native languages to Mayans living in Guatemala. Although almost 75 percent of Guatemala’s population is made up of Mayans who speak one of 20 indigenous languages, health care is provided to them only in Spanish.

It wasn’t until Rohloff had completed his doctorate and was “muddling through” medical school that he first visited Guatemala and became interested in social justice and indigenous rights. The enormous flexibility of the Illinois program allowed Rohloff to take as much time as he needed to pursue his passion.

“My status as an MSP student helped me do things a traditional medical student would not necessarily be allowed to do and played a big role in getting me to where I am now,” he says.

Rohloff regards Illinois’ science resources as outstanding and its access to technology and equipment unparalleled. “Getting an M.D./Ph.D. at Illinois was much more collaborative than one might find at other institutions,” he says.

And the strong research base that characterizes the Illinois Medical Scholars Program will support myriad physician/scientists’ efforts, in both tangible and intangible ways. Whatever the direction selected, those efforts, ultimately, are in service of individual patients. Physician/scientists never lose sight of that.

“In the end, medicine puts a very human face on what you are doing,” says Selby, who has blended engineering with medicine. “Encouraging patients and making them feel better is a totally different kind of reward you never get in the lab.”

O Brave New Web

Mary Timmins — Thu 25 Mar 2010 14:08 CST

As the Internet colonizes more and more space in our world,
what will be the conveniences and challenges of life in the cyber-dimension?

By Mary Timmins
Getty Images/Chad Baker Photo

As the millennium clicks over from the aughts to the tens, one of the truisms that’s been circulating is about all the virtual things that weren’t just a decade back. Ten years ago there was no Facebook. No YouTube. No Twitter, tweeting. No iPods trilling with downloads. No Kindle, delivering books out of air. Soooo – if all these amazing toys have constituted themselves since A.D. 2000, what will roam the Internet dimension by A.D. 2020? According to observers and shapers of the cyber-world – a future-focused coterie that includes influential alumni and faculty of the University of Illinois – the Web is going to be bigger, better, faster, more connected, more convenient. It’s going to be everywhere.

It’s going to be wild.

“The Internet is a next-generation information transportation system – like a television/radio/fax system on steroids,” observed computer scientist and entrepreneur Roger Johnson ’65 eng, ms ’66 eng, phd ’70 eng. “It is the repository of information on what humankind knows about itself. But instead of being restricted – like the information in a library – it will be quite available.”

While in the Web’s first iteration users would navigate to static pages and read them, perhaps responding with e-mails and posting their own pages in turn, the far more interactive Web of today – nicknamed Web 2.0 – is a place where people link and blog and tweet and share and play and just hang out. Social networking has exploded into the stupendous popularity of Facebook (350 million active users). Online gaming has mutated into endlessly buildable, addictively immersive environments like “Second Life” (where an estimated 770,000 players populate a virtual world, having careers, building homes, traveling, performing, socializing and even earning actual money).

Now, in part through an evolving online architecture known as the Semantic Web, the next iteration is already shifting the focus back to the Internet itself. “Until now the Web has been people-operated,” observed science fiction writer Edward M. Lerner ’71 las, ms ’73 eng. “The richer languages and data models of the Semantic Web will enable machine-centric access” – meaning computers will talk with other computers. Lerner, whose master’s from Illinois is in computer science, uses high-tech savvy to underpin his writing and has a fondness for futuristic worlds where rogue cyber-entities sometimes create mischief and chaos. In his 2008 novel “Fools’ Experiments,” a computer program develops awareness of other programs and decides to stalk and destroy them.

Anytime, anywhere – this evolution of the Internet is making disks and even flash drives the paraphernalia of the past.

“I think of Web 3.0 as a step toward an AI [artificial intelligence]-friendly Internet,” said Lerner, whose work extends through such multi-volume “space operas” as “Fleet of Worlds” and “Known Space” and includes novels written collaboratively with Nebula Award winner Larry Niven. “The technology envisions agents roaming the Web carrying out information-intensive tasks.”

In the good old days of Web 1.0, search engines (more quaintly known as spiders) went after search terms much as dogs fetch sticks – sticks that can come in bundles of hundreds of millions. Now – trained by semantic tools and stored data – the spiders are more like valets than pets. While a random search on the single word “Avatar,” made on Google in January, brought back 628 million Web results, the No. 1 hit showed the nearest theater screening the James Cameron movie of that name. Pretty good hunting.

A much more powerful generation of extremely bright search engines awaits in the online future. One such tool is already around – Wolfram Alpha, which can answer queries across subjects ranging from date, time and weather to socioeconomic indicators, regression analyses and DNA sequencing. By searching its own database – which grows daily more robust on input from a staff of researchers – the program can compute a Doppler shift, chart a genealogy and tell you what the weather was like on the day you were born. It can find and calculate nutritional information for recipes, translate words into Morse Code and solve math problems from simple algebra up to symbolic integration of formulas. With hundreds of capabilities, it appears to be the most powerful reference tool ever devised. It’s also online and free to the public.

“Alpha has a huge amount of information,” explained Theo Gray ’86 las, who, with UI faculty member Stephen Wolfram, founded Wolfram Research more than 20 years ago to market Mathematica, software for high-level computation. The company has now debuted Alpha as a way for prospective users to test out the complex, sophisticated capabilities of Mathematica. “Alpha knows what the data means, as opposed to a conventional search engine which doesn’t,” Gray observed. Searching with an engine like Google, he said, is akin to getting book recommendations from a reference librarian, while with Alpha, “we’ve actually taken the books out off the shelf and read them all and understood the formulas and digested the information that’s in there.

“The system is then able to use that information and synthesize it … and give you back the actual answer rather than just pointing you toward a book that contains the answer.” Though Alpha doesn’t search the Web firsthand, it’s clearly the precursor of future tools that will (perhaps to be named Beta and Gamma, among others?).

The programming techniques – semantic tagging, annotation, algorithms and categorization – that render Alpha’s database so searchable are also those used in building the Semantic Web. An ambitious venture to classify information and enable search engines to target and cross-reference that information, the Semantic Web has the potential to offer answers to very specific questions by penetrating the enormous proliferation of data that layers the Internet. At present its enactment entails a long, painstaking process – a human process, being carried out by people who have Web sites around the world – of line-by-line reading and standardized categorization of texts and images, supplemented by the programming work known as metadata, which links descriptions of the texts and images to other texts and images. (Though it is sometimes called Web 3.0, the Semantic Web is just one component of the future in cyberspace.)

Dan Roth, a researcher who leads the Cognitive Computation Group at Illinois, wants to speed up the search process by teaching computers not simply to read terms and tags and recognize connections but to comprehend language itself. The task is both monumentally difficult and stupendously interesting because so much of language is about context and ambiguity.

“If I write a program that can process news – for example, The New York Times – does that mean it can read blogs?” explained Roth, who also leads the Multimodal Information Access and Synthesis Center at Illinois, which researches artificial intelligence for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “Even for people this can be difficult. There are different language conventions, such as a lack of capitals [letters]. … There are the same problems involved as in moving from language to language.”

Roth’s program, at present, can understand text at a sentence level – recognizing, for example, that in the phrase “peace of cake” the word “peace” is misspelled. His work is proceeding on the theory that when a computer has ingested enough text and images (including Semantic Web-style annotated material), that computer will be able to make inferences from other text and images. And already “it’s doing things that I did not program it to do,” Roth observed, noting that “when you feed a computer an infinite amount of data, you cannot predict its behavior ahead of time.” Ultimately, he hopes to enable computers to read anything, anywhere on the Internet.

With 25 billion indexed Web pages, that’s a lot of territory to cover.

Anytime, anywhere – this evolution of the Internet is making disks and even flash drives the paraphernalia of the past, replaced by online data repositories that range from word-processing and document storage to photo-sharing sites and social networking groups. Housed in mega-computing resources, such as the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at Illinois, high-end databases allow researchers to share information about everything from children’s literature, plant names and the Mississippi River to astronomy, earthquake engineering and honeybees – to name just a few of the resources at the U of I. The University Library offers access to huge online archives of fine art and literature, which open new research possibilities. For example, through semantic tags, “you could find out the words that Jane Austen avoids, by comparing her work with work by other authors of the time,” noted John Unsworth, dean of the UI Graduate School of Library and Information Science.

Not only are data and software wicking up into cyberspace, the management of computer resources themselves is headed for the virtual stratosphere in a phenomenon called cloud computing. A “cloud” is a network of resources, housed on servers and enabled by the Internet, that provides storage and services on demand – like a utility, where customers draw off a grid not of watts but bytes, paying based on how much they consume. At Illinois, the computer science department hosts a Cloud Computing Testbed supported by industry partners including Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard and Intel.

Also Web-fueled are ventures such as GeoVector, a company with which Johnson is working to create what he describes as “a mouse on the surface of the Earth.” Using satellite and Web technology, GeoVector applications will enable cell-phone users to retrieve on-the-spot information about their whereabouts, getting the names of streets and structures by simply pointing and clicking. Johnson even envisions Web-connected binoculars that will allow visitors to national parks to read the names and histories associated with the scenery viewed through its lenses, playing simulations of, for example, what happened to Custer and his men at Little Big Horn, overlaid on the actual view of the historic battle site. The potential is “very, very wide,” said Johnson, for applications of such overlays upon the world. These he defines as “augmented reality” – a real-world view merged with virtual imagery.

Not only are data and software wicking up into cyberspace, the management of computer resources themselves is headed for the virtual stratosphere.

A founding member of SAI Technology – a Silicon Valley company specializing in mobile electronics for defense and intelligence – Johnson spent time at Illinois both as a student and faculty member. (He currently sits on the UI Alumni Association Board of Directors.) Johnson came of age in the labs of the UI College of Engineering, where he worked in the late ’60s and early ’70s on the early online learning system PLATO. Those were heady days at Illinois, days that sci fi writer Arthur C. Clarke saluted by making Urbana the birthplace of Hal, the rogue computer that inhabits “2001: A Space Odyssey.” This was the beginning of the Illini techie begats, a genealogy that numbers such stars of Internet innovation as Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie ’79 eng (instant-messaging and e-mail), Marc Andreessen ’94 eng (Web browsing) and the PayPal triumvirate of Steve Chen ’99 and Jawed Karim ’04 eng (who together went on to create YouTube) and Max Levchin ’97 eng (who has since devised that security box with the squiggly figures you need to retype to gain access to certain Web sites). That more geniuses will spring from the electrical and computer engineering and computer science departments at Illinois, as Athena from the head of Zeus, seems certain. What’s less clear are the new innovations to unfold. Back in mid-20th century, who would have foreseen the computer as a place to buy new shoes and run into old friends?

In those dawn years, Johnson said, “a lot of the motivation for the World Wide Web initially was to assist researchers in major universities and major government science centers in sharing information quickly and conveniently.” What started as point-to-point communications among “a thousand or so large computers” has grown, Johnson observed, into “a single network that shrouds the world.” Like a river system or a bloodstream, that network is penetrating with ever-greater depth and detail into human life, pulsing from desktops and laptops into cell phones and netbooks and even onto chips embedded in pets, to keep them from getting lost, and in people, to monitor their health.

For Johnson, a challenge that looms in the coming cyber-world will be the sheer proliferation of devices with unique Web addresses. “Where we’re headed is not just humans holding gadgets,” he said. “There are more and more pieces of equipment – cameras, sensors, robots that are part of this network – pieces of memory buried in the network. As large as or larger than the number of humans on the Net will be non-humans – pieces of equipment, from chips embedded in your body to things that observe individual processes. These are all unique addresses. The question will be how to accommodate them.”

Among the more auspicious Web-driven innovations sci-fi writer Lerner foresees are prosthetics for the brain, including neural interfaces to the Web (the blink of an eye or the slight movement of a finger allowing a user to navigate), implanted computer chips, contact-lens computer displays and human/nanotech hybrids. “And,” he pointed out, “I’ve written about all of them.”

Ever wary of Web-based entities, though, Lerner raises trustworthiness concerns to do with, for example, radio frequency identification devices (RFIDs). “There may be data gathered about me – and searchable through the Semantic Web – that I have no interest in sharing,” he noted. “Consider the RFIDs in my E-ZPass transponder, MetroCard ID, passport, clothes and maybe someday the currency in my wallet. And think of Semantic Web agents mining that history of everywhere I’ve been.

“To trust agents to do many things on our behalf – like make medical decisions – we’ll need, I believe, a much more secure Web,” he observed. “Without much more robust authentication, many-layered authorization systems and hacker-proof databases, lots can go wrong. Identity theft might go beyond impersonating you and me to impersonating our autonomous Web agents.”

“One thing that we have to attend to – a huge regulatory issue that we’re just starting to look at,” professor Roth likewise cautioned, “is trust. Trustworthiness.

“My kids get most of their information from the Web. They study from the Web. … So how do we develop and improve trustworthiness?” he asked.

What measures, for example, will help users assess the quality of the information they encounter on any given Web page, when sites vary from the meticulously edited stories of The Christian Science Monitor to the groupthink of Wikipedia? How do users protect themselves from the hostile viruses and spyware lurking in the Web environment?

And beyond is the Web itself, a network that connects the minds of billions of people around the globe, creating a super-entity that itself could be likened to a giant brain.

“System scientists and sf writers often point to the theory of emergence, in which complex behaviors emerge from a large number of simple items. Ants in an anthill. Workers in a bureaucracy. Neurons in a brain,” Lerner explained. “Will intelligent behavior emerge out of an aggregation of computers tied together by logic?”

It’s a question that may never be fully answered. With unique URLs surpassing 1 trillion, the Web now has 10 times as many places in it as the human brain has neurons. What human brain is going to figure THAT out?

Endlessly evolving, self-organizing, expanding and more and more intelligent, the Internet has become a new dimension, a dimension of virtuality, operating alongside time and space to contain and spit out information and (with some help from the UPS guy) stuff. The Web is connecting the world ever more closely to itself while broadening life’s scope at the same time. As the network clicks over and expands, its emergence will be understood and shaped in many ways and many places – including, undoubtedly, by alumni and faculty of the University of Illinois.

Labors Of Love

Mon 22 Mar 2010 21:05 CST

Lorado Taft – the sculptor behind the ‘Alma Mater’ – embraced both his art and his University

By Muriel Scheinman
Photos courtesy of the University of Illinois Archives

Lorado Taft, stands with pieces of his artwork at his Midway Studios in Chicago

For legions of alumni, memories of the University of Illinois embrace not only the people they met but the scenes that surrounded them – the Quad, the Illini Union, the Beckman Institute, the South Farms.

It may please alumni to know that many of the sights familiar to them – the “Alma Mater” statue, the limestone figures outside of the Main Library and various busts and plaques – are not just beautiful and noteworthy art, but art created by a fellow alumnus who remained emotionally attached to the University and to the Midwest throughout his life.

This spring on April 29, we mark the 150th birthday of Lorado Taft, an 1879 and 1880 UI graduate whose artistic vision and rich talent are responsible for many of the mental snapshots that alumni hold dear from their time on campus. It is also a time to celebrate his work, not only here at Illinois but throughout the country.

While some artists might like to identify themselves with the impressive “Alma Mater” group, not so the generous and easygoing Taft. “My name will be on the bronze, and I do not want it repeated anywhere else,” he wrote. “I am not doing this thing for personal glory and refuse to be mentioned in the inscription. If it is done, I shall not come to the dedication.”

Although a plaque on the statue says Taft conceived the idea for it in 1922, his own letters reveal an interest as early as 1883. He sought support for the project in 1916, telling of his dream “to show ‘Our Mother’ as a benign and majestic woman in scholastic robes, who rises from her throne and advances a step with outstretched arms, a gesture of generously greeting her children,” while the figures of Learning and Labor, signifying the University’s motto, stand back with hands clasped.

In a letter to a friend, Taft said he once told the sculptor Daniel Chester French “that his noble Alma Mater, on the steps of Columbia’s Library, was happily expressive of the reserve and reticence of the East; that a Midwest mother must be more cordial. So I made my lady with widespread arms and a smiling face. … I understand that [the young people in Urbana] have dubbed our group the Ideal Chaperone. I hope they may keep the bronze throne polished by their visits!”

Unveiled in 1929, the statue stood “temporarily” (for 33 years) just behind Foellinger Auditorium. When the group was moved to its present site near Altgeld Hall in 1962, students protested its “shocking” new location. The Daily Illini found the placement to be in the “worst possible taste; it makes the Alma Mater a debased, commercial ‘advertisement’ for the University.”

No matter. Set among Canadian hemlocks and flowering crabapple trees,
the iconic statue has proved wonderfully effective in beckoning people to campus for nearly a century.

FROM CHICAGO TO CHAMPAIGN
While Taft designed the “Alma Mater” with the U of I in mind, other of his works came to campus in a roundabout way.

Taft long dreamed of beautifying the old Columbian Exposition Midway Plaisance in Chicago by creating a mile-long expanse of trees, lawns, fountains and statues. Only the 100-foot-long Fountain of Time, which many consider his masterpiece, came fully into being in Chicago’s Washington Park.

But four splendid limestone nudes from the uncompleted Fountain of Creation, planned as part of the Fountain of Time, grace the entrance to the Main Library and the south side of Foellinger Auditorium. In imagery derived from a Noah-like Greek myth, Taft’s “Sons and Daughters of Deucalion and Pyrrha” depicts the moment when the “bones” of Mother Earth are changing into men and women who materialize in the aftermath of a flood. Massive, dynamic, seemingly incomplete, the four figures metamorphose out of rough-hewn boulders – in the fashion of Michelangelo or Rodin – into human form.

EXEMPLIFYING THE ‘YOUNG PROFESSIONAL WOMAN’
Taft’s artistry also captures historic moments or significant people in busts, plaques and statues across the campus. One such example is a low-relief, half-size portrait of Katharine Lucinda Sharp, hon 1907.

The Alma Mater

Sharp came to the University of Illinois in 1893 when she was not yet 30 years old, tasked with establishing a professional library program and building a major library. Her work has resulted in the University now holding one of the largest public university collections in the world and a graduate program of library and information science that ranks No. 1 in the nation.

Taft’s rendering, located in the Main Library, represents Sharp as a dignified young woman in academic robes. At the 1922 dedication, the journal Public Library wrote, “Mr. Taft, as was to be expected, has caught and expressed the ideals of the young professional woman at the beginning of the 20th century, which Miss Sharp truly exemplified in her attitude toward library service.”

‘ART MISSIONARY’
An Illinois native, “Rado” Taft often said that his creative impulses came with his first exposure to art in 1874. That was when John Milton Gregory, first regent of the U of I, established a Fine Arts Gallery on campus, where a collection of authentic plaster casts of classical Greek and Roman sculptures and other reproductions would, he hoped, “give Champaign and Urbana a character abroad for art, genius and refinement.” The Daily Illini put it more bluntly: “The age no doubt is rapidly approaching when foreigners will no longer cry out against the supremely disgusting taste of Americans.” The 14-year-old Taft; his father, a UI geology professor; and others worked as “surgeons of the modeling room” to repair the damaged casts that had come over from Europe.

“Do you remember Dr. Gregory’s little art gallery?” the sculptor would later ask alumni of his own generation in 1917. “Those were the days of small things, but the memory of that collection of casts and photographs looms big in my life. To it and Dr. Gregory I owe my profession and all the pleasure it has brought me.”

After graduating from Illinois, Taft would go on to study at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris before settling permanently in Chicago in 1886. He taught at the Art Institute, lectured and wrote extensively on the history of art and for some 40 years created distinguished works of sculpture, aided by a loyal coterie of pupils and assistants in his Midway Studios. A self-described “art missionary,” Taft became widely known for his interest in helping young artists and for providing a great number of opportunities for women students.

A crowd pours in to attend the dedication of the “Alma Mater” statue in 1929 at its original, “temporary” location behind Foellinger Auditorium

He retained close ties with the University of Illinois. Named nonresident professor of art in 1919, Taft came to campus each spring to give illustrated talks on art to overflow audiences. At the unveiling of the “Alma Mater” in 1929, the University granted him an honorary doctoral degree and a year later, with the help of alumni, established the ongoing Lorado Taft Lectureship in Art. Taft died in 1936.

Today, approximately a dozen statues, busts or plaques by Taft are displayed throughout campus; nods also go to him via the naming of Lorado Taft Drive and Taft Residence Hall. Beyond campus, other notable pieces include a towering statue of Chief Black Hawk in Oregon, Ill.; “The Solitude of the Soul” at The Art Institute of Chicago; the gargantuan representation of George Washington in Seattle; and the Columbus Memorial Fountain in Washington, D.C.

But of the works dearest to him, one wonders if many of them might be those at the University of Illinois, as Taft said that throughout his life, he had “retained a romantic love for my Alma Mater.

“I believe I am needed here,” he wrote in 1899 in declining an offer to teach at Vassar College on the East Coast. “I want my work to come out of the west, and if there is any glory in it, I want to share it with my own home people.”

“Mickey” Scheinman, am ’69 faa, phd ’81 faa, is an art historian and author of “A Guide to Art at the University of Illinois: Urbana-Champaign, Robert Allerton Park and Chicago” (University of Illinois Press, 1995).

Special Game Plan

Sal Nudo — Fri 22 Jan 2010 16:44 CST

By Dave Evensen

Nothing that you will read here disputes the fact that the late Eunice Kennedy Shriver founded Special Olympics, a worldwide organization that provides sports training and competition for people who have cognitive disabilities. But this story is a reminder that success has many origins.

In this case, you’d be on firm ground tracing the roots of Special Olympics to the University of Illinois in 1960 and a spirited doctoral student named Frank Hayden, MS ’58 AHS, PHD ’62 AHS.

You usually remember meeting people like Hayden. They possess those vivid traits that make any idea seem possible: resourcefulness, energy, optimism, charisma.

“You know,” a woman once told him in Paris, with her husband by her side, “we don’t have a man like you in all of France.”

But that’s at the other end of this story. It starts with Hayden as a young graduate student under the tutelage of renowned professor T.K. Cureton, founder of the U of I’s kinesiology program. Cureton taught Hayden fitness demonstration techniques that Hayden would later employ everywhere from China to the Middle East as he worked to spread Special Olympics.

In 1960, Hayden was near the end of his studies at Illinois and had accepted a research position back home in Canada (he was interested in the relationship between exercise and mood). One day the man for whom Hayden was set to work phoned him – a group of Rotary clubs in Toronto was offering a research grant to study fitness in children with cognitive disabilities, and the caller wondered if Hayden was interested.

“I said, ‘I’ll call you back in two days,’” Hayden recalls. “I went to the library there at Illinois, and I looked to see what had been done on it. At that point there really wasn’t much at all. So I said [to myself], ‘Well, Frank, you’ll be an instant expert. You’ve got a blank page.’”

‘THERE WAS A NEED OUT THERE’

Hayden’s early research took place in Toronto at what is now called Beverley Junior Public School, a setting for children who had cognitive disabilities (that is, people who have greater difficulty with various types of mental tasks compared to people without disabilities). Hayden oversaw sit-ups, running, jumping and other activities to test the kids’ fitness levels. He determined that these children were about half as physically fit as those without such disabilities. Then came the surprise: It didn’t have to be that way.

“Everyone just assumed,” Hayden says, that because of the children’s cognitive condition, “of course they’re weak, and they’re slow, and they’re unskilled, and they stumble when they walk. But then our research showed … it wasn’t an automatic thing that came with mental handicap.”

Hayden determined that the fitness gap between kids with cognitive disabilities and the rest could be closed quickly. As one account put it, Hayden’s exercise programs – which focused on areas such as strength and cardiovascular conditioning – turned even lethargic kids into “balls of energy.”

In 1964 Hayden wrote “Physical Fitness for the Mentally Retarded” (the word “retarded” is now considered by many to be offensive but not so back then). He asked the Rotary clubs that had originally funded his research for $1,000 to print 1,000 copies of the book. He planned to give away 500 and distribute the rest for $2 apiece so the clubs could get their money back. In the end, more than 50,000 copies were sold.

“[The sales] just showed me that there was a market not just for the book but a market for teachers and parents and physical educators that were looking for help in order to provide this kind of activity,” Hayden says. “As I said from the beginning, from the original idea of why I got involved, there was a need out there and a blank page.”

THE KENNEDY CONNECTION

To many, this was the beginning of “Dr. Frank” – as they affectionately call him in Canada – who was instrumental in the formation of Special Olympics, for soon after the book was released, a copy made its way south of the border (indeed most of the sales were in the United States) and landed in the hands of the late Eunice Kennedy Shriver and the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation. One thing was about to lead to another.

Here’s where Special Olympics history kind of depends on where you are. American descriptions of Shriver portray her as the movement’s original, ferocious ball carrier. Canadians revere her as such, too, but north of the border you’ll also hear Hayden’s name in the same breath – if not before it.

“We always look at Frank as being the creator and Mrs. Shriver as being the founder,” says Glenn MacDonell, president and CEO of Special Olympics Ontario, Canada’s largest chapter, “because it was a great physical education idea that Frank had, and then it was transported to Washington.”

Shriver and the Kennedy Foundation threw weight behind his ideas and attracted big names to the cause. And while Hayden’s research brought him to the attention of Shriver and her husband, Sargent, they were particularly interested in another idea he had – namely, a proposal for a “National Mental Retardation Games.” The idea had failed to take hold in Canada, but when Hayden first met the Shrivers in 1965, the first question out of Sargent’s mouth was whether Hayden could organize something similar in the United States.

“Here I’d been pushing and working hard to get it off the ground in Canada,” Hayden recalls, laughing at the irony, “[and with him] it was kind of like, ‘Hi, Dr. Hayden, how are ya. Can you do this in the United States?’”

Hayden was at first reluctant, however. He was happy in Canada. “Someone can do it but not me,” he told them.

But the Shrivers liked him. They didn’t take no for an answer, and finally, a few months after that first meeting, Hayden gathered his wife, Marion, and their four children and moved to Washington, D.C., where he was hired as the Kennedy Foundation’s fitness director.

WELCOME TO THE WINDY CITY

By the time Hayden started the new job, however, the Shrivers’ interest in a national games had temporarily waned. Although Hayden’s energies were directed elsewhere, he continued to make presentations on the topic, hoping to revive the idea.

Finally the break came. The Chicago Park District was seeking funding for a citywide track meet for people with cognitive disabilities, and someone recalled Hayden’s proposal. Eunice Shriver soon announced a $20,000 grant for a “Chicago Special Olympics,” and Hayden was appointed director. The July 1968 Games at Soldier Field expanded beyond Chicago, however, and included some 900 athletes from 26 states, plus a floor hockey team from the school at which Hayden had worked in Toronto.

Hayden recalls “sweating blood” at that first effort as he ran himself ragged making sure the inaugural Special Olympics Games went smoothly.

“Everybody there except myself thought they were there for just a happy day,” Hayden says. “But in my mind I’m thinking, ‘This has to really go well because if it doesn’t, we’ll never do what we’re talking about, about developing ... a national organization, getting people to run games like this all over the country, and then maybe way off on the horizon other countries besides the United States and Canada.’”

Besides a few hitches, the event was a success. It was also a statement, as it displayed a belief held closely by Hayden and the Kennedy Foundation that Special Olympics should be about sport, not just recreation. His research had indicated that fitness was a lifestyle, and to change lifestyles, you need motivation.

“Sport has all the motivation to do that,” says Hayden. “All the rewards system, the support system, the progression, social

atmosphere … feeling better about yourself, making friends – [all that] improved their learning ability.

“It’s something for families,” he adds. “One of the most important things Special Olympics does is [it] relates to mothers and fathers and gives them a new view of their sons or daughters.”

After the first Games, Hayden spent 1969 conducting training sessions and organizing regional games across the U.S. and Canada. In 1970, a second U.S.-Canada Special Olympics Games was held in Chicago. The strategy called for the larger events to inspire similar activities on the local level, so that everyone could take part. Involvement was growing rapidly.

“It trickled down,” Hayden says, as the cachet of Special Olympics helped bring more and more people into the program at all levels, not just the final competitions. “The only justification even today for the World Games is for what it does at national levels, and the national level is only good for eventually what it does at the local level.”

GOING INTERNATIONAL

Hayden left the Kennedy Foundation after a few years, but by the 1980s other countries were interested in starting Special Olympics. Upon Eunice Shriver’s request, Hayden became the organization’s director of international development, traveling the world to organize Special Olympics offices and perform demonstrations on how to teach fitness to those with cognitive disabilities.

Special Olympics now provides year-round sports training and athletic competition and related programming for more than 2.5 million children and adults with cognitive disabilities in more than 180 countries.

Today, at 79, Hayden has mostly retired from his work, though he’s still involved with Special Olympics Canada and travels regularly to events. Neil Glasberg, chairman of Special Olympics Canada, says Hayden is always smiling and serves as an “incredibly positive” influence on the organization.

“I watch the interpersonal dynamics between … Special Olympics athletes and Dr. Frank,” Glasberg says, “and they all know who he is. He’s not this behind-the-scenes guy. He absolutely was instrumental in terms of the movement.”

If Hayden’s been overlooked by Americans at large, he has a bevy of recognition from his homeland. A partial list of awards for his work on Special Olympics includes the Canadian Royal Bank Award for his contributions to human welfare and the common good (he gave half of the $250,000 prize to Special Olympics) and being named an officer of the Order of Canada, the nation’s highest civilian award.

Hayden’s also full of stories, which he’d like to write into a book. One of his more memorable moments occurred while Special Olympics was being introduced in France in the late ’60s.

Hayden was conducting a fitness demonstration for children with cognitive disabilities and their parents in Paris (it was after this demonstration that the aforementioned French wife swooned over him). Because Sargent Shriver was the American ambassador to France at the time, the event took place at the U.S. ambassador’s residence. In the packed ballroom, everyone – including the children – was dressed to the nines, except for Hayden, clad in a sweat suit. Not that he didn’t recognize the importance of the occasion – in fact he worried that America would get a black eye if it didn’t go well – but he had work to do.

When the demonstration started, he approached the first girl in line. “Would you like to play with me?” Hayden asked.

“No,” she replied.

“So I go to the next one, and I say, ‘Would you like to play with me?’ He says, ‘Nope,’” Hayden recalls with a laugh. “I go all the way down the line, and they all say, ‘No.’ So I said, ‘I guess that’s the end of the demonstration.’”

Then Hayden spotted a child with whom he thought he could connect. Hayden grabbed the boy’s hand and said, “Come with me.” He started running with him around the room.

“And then I say [to another one], ‘Hey, would you like to come with me, too?’” Hayden recalls. One by one the children said, “Yes.”

You can imagine the smiles when finally he had them all on their feet, sweating and running and playing, turning the ballroom into a glimpse of what could be.

News Worthy

Sal Nudo — Fri 22 Jan 2010 00:00 CST

At the Freedom Forum and the Newseum, alumni Ken Paulson and Joe Urschel help document news – right up to the very moment you’re reading this.

By Amy F. Reiter

In suburban Chicago of the 1960s, two boys grew up dreaming of becoming newsmen.

Ken Paulson, JD ’78 LAW, and Joe Urschel ’74 MEDIA didn’t know each other then, nor could they have dreamed that their futures would intersect professionally time and again. But that’s what life had in store for them.

Both went to the University of Illinois, then hopscotched each other at news organizations around the country. Over the years, both developed a deep love for and belief in the value of news. At the height of their careers, both would land at the same building – the Newseum, which opened in April 2008 – one of Washington, D.C.’s newest monuments and the public arm of the Freedom Forum, a nonpartisan foundation devoted to free press and free speech. It’s a place befitting lifelong newsmen.

Amid a chaotic year in the news industry, the two men talked to Illinois Alumni about the path from Urbana to Washington, the prospect for journalism in changing times and the role of the First Amendment – with its protections for press, speech, petition, assembly and religion – in preserving America as we know it.

CHASING A PAPER REVOLUTION

One could never fault Ken Paulson for waiting too long to make a decision. At age 6, he dreamed of black ink and gray newsprint. And instead of those childhood dreams falling away, they solidified as Paulson saw the pervasive influence of journalism.

“I was able to watch the civil rights movement unfold, the women’s movement unfold,” he said. “All of these positive forces, including the free press, came from the five freedoms of the First Amendment.”

By high school, Paulson was already dating his future wife, Peggy, and had answered an ad in a Chicago magazine looking for a writer with a youthful perspective. At age 16, he got hired as a rock critic.

Paulson would go on to attend the University of Missouri for a journalism degree, then come to the University of Illinois to study law. “Two of the greatest forces for positive change were lawyers and journalists,” he said. “What appealed to me about both of these fields was to call attention to injustices and remedy that.

“The law school was extraordinary,” Paulson said. “But the big surprise was how good the student media was at Illinois.”

“He spent way more time in The Daily Illini than in the law library,” wife Peggy remembered. In addition to occasional disk jockey duties at WPGU, one of the DI’s sister media outlets, Paulson began Revue, a music magazine published by the DI.

It was on the Urbana campus that he developed a management style of regular, hands-on meetings that sustained itself throughout his tenure at USA Today. “What I learned to do as a 23-year-old at The Daily Illini, I applied for my entire career,” said Paulson, who today keeps an orange-and-blue cap above his desk at work.

“On the day I was named editor of USA Today, I talked to the staff about what we had to accomplish,” he said. He remembers a former DI staffer standing up to tell the staff that she’d worked for Paulson back at The Daily Illini and that he was worthy of their trust.

FROM COPY EDITING TO CAMPUS

Just like Paulson, Urschel found his profession early.

In high school, he worked for the Chicago Heights Star, part of the local Star Tribune publications. “I started out reading proofs from the linotype operators,” he said, and eventually worked his way to a position as copy editor, which became his summer job when he was off from the University of Illinois.

While at the U of I, Urschel also found a second home at the Illini Media offices. While he tried his hand at The Daily Illini and WPGU, he found his niche as editor of the Illio yearbook, which he helped transform into a magazine-style publication.

“It’s the 1974 Illio, and it won huge awards,” said Urschel’s wife, Donna Vasilion Urschel ’73 MEDIA, who now works in public affairs at the Library of Congress. “It was a real turning point in the Illio, and it just sold so many copies.”

Urschel, who sometimes wears an orange-and-blue tie at work, also took lessons from his days at Urbana. He said he left Urbana-Champaign “particularly well-suited to do what I wanted to do.”

BLACK AND WHITE AND READ ALL OVER

After graduation, while Paulson worked at papers from Wisconsin to New Jersey to Florida, Urschel went back to the Star Tribune papers, during which time he started dating and then married Donna. Eventually, both went to work at the Detroit Free Press. In a city with competing papers, Urschel thrived.

Less than a decade later, however, he joined a bigtime, brand-new experiment in journalism – a paper that would cover the entire country. “Most of my friends thought I was crazy, that it would never succeed,” Urschel recalled, but the experiment – USA Today – has become a mainstay of the news world.

Paulson was there, too, helping configure a newsroom that could break news from around the globe. “It was the toughest working environment I’d ever been in,” he said. Despite the competitive atmosphere, Paulson said both he and Urschel brought a friendly tone to the paper.

“That Midwestern sensibility is something Joe and I both share,” Paulson said in a joint interview with Urschel. “It also involves a respect for readers. … We both buy into the concept that the news is whatever is current.”

Jack Hurley, who worked with Urschel both at “USA Today on TV” and at the Newseum, says his friend’s laid-back energy can be deceptive.

“Initially people might think he’s a little low-key, but it’s because he’s assessing them and not making snap judgments,” Hurley said. “He treats people with respect and dignity – even when they’re wrong.”

At USA Today, Urschel developed a knack for stories that gave the readers – and himself – glimpses into unique worlds, ranging from the American archaeologist who found what was then the largest tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings to the entomologist who doubled as a roach exterminator. Urschel’s work won him notice, including an Emmy Award for a documentary on campus crime.

In early 1997, Paulson took a hiatus from daily newspapers and spent seven years as executive director of the First Amendment Center, part of the Freedom Forum that is housed at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. He returned to the newspaper, however, to serve as its editor from 2004-09. During a time of upheaval, both in the news industry and at the paper, Paulson brought a sense of engaged leadership and committed ethics – and those meetings that hearkened back to his DI days.

“People can see how honest he is and how principled he is and approachable. He made the staff understand they were going to do what was right,” said Charles Overby, who has worked with Paulson on and off since Paulson’s days at USA Today. “He immediately infuses the newsroom with excitement. He cares deeply about what he’s doing, and he shows an interest in everybody’s work. I think that’s the quality of a real leader.”

At USA Today, Paulson changed the paper’s policy so unnamed sources were excluded from nearly all scenarios. “Online journalism is driven by speed, and it takes time to check something out,” he said. “There’s too little recognition that getting it first is not as important as getting it right.”

The phrase “the media” was – and is – another peeve of his and a phrase he worked to strike from the paper’s lexicon, especially when “the media” is thrown out “like it’s one big club,” Paulson said. “It just reinforces the stereotype that editors, publishers, news directors are not independent thinkers.

“I entered the news business because I believe it can be a tremendous force for good,” Paulson said. True journalists, he said, “are not out to ‘get’ anyone. They’re out to get the truth.”

TELLING THE STORY OF FREE SPEECH

Paulson’s first connection with the Freedom Forum took place from 1997 to 2004 as head of its First Amendment Center, where he embraced the opportunity to bring national attention to First Amendment issues. The second time that Paulson connected was in 2009, following his return stint at USA Today, when he became the Forum’s president and chief operating officer.

In its mission to promulgate the importance of free press and free speech, the Freedom Forum includes several entities. While the Newseum serves as the most public arm of the nonprofit organization, the forum also includes the aforementioned First Amendment Center and the Diversity Institute, which aims to increase minority participation in newsrooms.

Overby, who serves as chairman and CEO of the foundation, called Paulson the human equivalent of the 74-foot inscription of the First Amendment on the exterior wall of the Newseum. “He looms large in the fight for First Amendment rights,” Overby said.

But how could Paulson get people passionate about words written back in 1791? “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment …” doesn’t sound exactly catchy. And so, about a decade ago, he launched Freedom Sings.

“I was looking for a way to tell the story of free speech in America,” said Paulson, who attends approximately 50 concerts a year, usually with his wife, to keep up with the music scene. “I never felt like I could engage college students as much as I’d hoped to.” To that end, he developed a concert of sorts, with diverse songs illustrating how music can be an instrument of free speech and catalyst for social change. The program offers songs originating in the 1700s to present day, from “You’re A Grand Old Flag” to “Where Is The Love?”

Even the musicians are drawn into the mission of the chorus. Grammy winner Don Henry, who has been part of the Freedom Sings touring band, wrote in an e-mail, “I think that young people who never gave the [First] Amendment a second thought walk away as reborn Americans. I see it actually happening during every show.

“I’m not belittling our part as musicians in the show, but in the end it’s the writing, pacing and timing in Ken’s performance that leaves you with a full heart.”

“We’ve played campuses all over America, including the University of Illinois,” said Paulson. “It’s quite an experience to look out at an audience of 18- to 22-year-olds and see many tear up.”

STARTING AT SQUARE ONE

And so, Paulson’s and Urschel’s professional paths were to cross again. At about the same time that Paulson was getting started at the Freedom Forum for the first time, Urschel also received an offer to join. His task, however, was different: Create a museum from the ground up that focused on news. In planning it – first at a smaller venue in Arlington, Va., then the 250,000-square-foot version in D.C. – Urschel could apply his storytelling skills to show how journalism reports, reflects and sometimes shapes history.

“He transcended kind of the usual Washington reporter and editor,” Overby said of Urschel, who serves as the museum’s executive director and senior vice president. “He knew issues big and small, serious and lighthearted. It was that scope that helped him be a real leader in the building of the Newseum.”

Overby credits Urschel with helping to get at least two of the museum’s biggest draws: the words to the First Amendment writ large on the building’s face and a communications tower from the ruins of New York’s World Trade Center. “Joe really used his personal skills and his news instincts to get that,” he said.

‘THE KILLER APP OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT’

Both Paulson and Urschel, of course, eagerly engage in any discussions about news. Paulson’s face, like his stance, is always on, the kind of guy who walks across the hall to talk, rather than call. Urschel has light brown hair and a face-crinkling smile. He leans back when he listens and tells stories like a reporter: broad theme, tiny illustrative details.

At their posts within the Freedom Forum, Paulson and Urschel try to show the world that news matters, that the ability to express opinions – no matter what they are – is legal, that Congress can’t make a law against it. They try to show that those opinions are essential for the country’s democracy.

Paulson looks at the Internet as a place of possibility for journalists and a place where First Amendment rights flourish, though inaccuracy and meanness can also take up virtual space.

“The Internet is the killer app of the First Amendment. It amplifies free speech,” he said. “[If he were alive today], James Madison would blog. Thomas Jefferson would Tweet – so the interesting dynamic is that free speech has never been more free, but the potential consequences have never been greater.

“The marketplace [of ideas] has never been more vibrant, more uninhibited or unrestricted. That’s a good thing for democracy,” Paulson said. “It doesn’t free you of the consequences of what you may say.”

Urschel points out that the credibility issue in the digital age is much larger. “If you make a mistake in a newspaper that a million people are reading, one of those people [is] likely to catch you,” he said.

Paulson worries that online reading means people won’t learn much beyond where their interests already lie. Will they come across that Page 3 story on Rwanda if they jump straight to a specific topic? “The irony is that, though we use the browser, so few people actually browse,” he said. “We never browse the Web like we browse the newspaper. Serendipity disappears.”

One of Paulson’s disappointments has been how that widening arena for speech has been used. When USA Today enabled reader comments on stories, Paulson hoped for great debate. But often what ensued was slamming one party or another, he said.

Urschel sees the movement of reporting and commentating from people without journalistic training or job experience as something of a return to the pamphlets of early print journalism, which often skewed toward one point of view or another. All those new voices may be good for journalism, Urschel said, but “it just hasn’t been good for the business model.”

The common practice of news sites making their content free online – along with a lessening of advertising revenue – is also forcing industry changes. Urschel remembers a story from his Detroit days, where a reporter traveled the country to uncover how harsh discipline resulted in the death of a sailor. As money becomes tighter these days, “that’s the kind of thing that gets done less and less,” he said.

Both Urschel and Paulson say that eventually news media will have to start charging for online content, perhaps in subscriptions or perhaps in iTunes-style micropayments. That could start any day, Paulson said. In fact, he said, “it wouldn’t surprise me if it happened tomorrow.”

When it does, the Freedom Forum and Newseum will document the change – most likely within moments. “The Newseum is the only museum in Washington that changes every day,” Overby said.

“The leadership of Ken and Joe will ensure that the Newseum will continue to stay on top of the news as well as providing perspective on history.”

A Wing And A Prayer

Bea Pavia — Mon 14 Dec 2009 15:41 CST

Forty-seven years after leaving their homeland in a rush, nine Cuban-Americans come together to reunite and remember.

By Beatrice Pavia
Historical photos courtesy of Ricardo Jiménez

The laughter is loud, the energy electric, the smiles stretch wide. A few short days cram themselves full – road trips and religion, sunshine and charity, old memories, old pictures, old places, old friends.

Nearly a half century ago, the tentative roots of these bonds began, and for some, it’s been almost that long since they have seen each other. It is a reunion like all others – and really nothing like any of those others at all.

That is because these smiling people share a paradoxical past, blending minutiae of childhood with milestones of history. They are blissful-children-turned-instant-adults, long-ago baby-faced ambassadors of hope who gasped, then held their breath above the sucking current of world politics.

They know today what they couldn’t have then – that they would successfully navigate those uncharted waters. They feel today what they couldn’t fathom then – that, as children turned homeless in the blink of an eye, in certain ways they would always remain most at home with each other.

Throughout the pop, pop, pop of excited talk over the flow of the weekend, something routinely bubbles up, like a twirling eddy atop a turquoise sea – precise, pertinent and, for some, a purgatory:

Dec. 30, 1961.
Jan. 8, 1962.
April 22. April 26. May 19. July 27.

These are the dates that haunt their souls. On those days and in those years, new doors opened, while others sealed shut. The numbers herald a promise-filled start – a series of hellos, which eventually, they’d see, was really a countdown of last good-byes.

It was a time of dying to the self you knew, unsure and unaware as to who you would become. On that date, you departed your nation a cherished child and landed elsewhere an orphan.

“My life changed in 45 minutes,” says Ana Ferrán Parent, PHD ’76 LAS, of the voyage, “and we’ve been carrying that cross for 47 years.”

What follows is the tale of a priest, a plane and Peter Pan.

A REPLY TO REVOLUTION

Cubans are fond of describing their island as resembling an alligator resting after a full meal. In 1959, a panther struck.

Imagine that you are living a middle-class, if not privileged, life in Cuba. Imagine that you have a large, extended family and a good education. A revolution occurs. Terror and disruption ensue. Imagine foreseeing a life of no freedoms for your children.

Just imagine.

The New Year opened with the revolutionary Fidel Castro ousting the island nation’s corrupt dictator, Fulgencio Batista, and demolishing the Cuba that people knew. As he turned the country into a Communist state, Castro expropriated property, nationalized industry, reformed agriculture, controlled the media, imprisoned dissidents and believed in “revolution first, elections later.”

While a lot of Cubans weren’t unhappy to see Batista go, they remained unsure of their new leader. Many believed he would be gone in a matter of months; a year later, however, Castro was entrenched, and a cloudbank of fearsome insecurity pressured the nation, dousing its bright colors and brighter music.

And the revolution extended its reach even further.

“The meaning of revolution is to destroy all from the past, to create new things,” Ana says.

What it broke most, she believes, is the family.

In the new Cuba, some parents said no to Fidel Castro’s visions. Desperate to ensure a free and open future, mothers and fathers put their children on planes that jetted to Miami. “Operation Peter Pan” – aptly named because it involved just children, and the children flew away – took place from 1960 to 1962. Believing their families would be separated mere weeks or months, these parents sent more than 14,000 unaccompanied minors between the ages of 6 and 17 to the U.S.

Unlike the tale of Peter Pan, where boys fly off to avoid growing up, these parents were firmly committed to the reverse.

Rather than “second star to the right, straight on till morning” (Peter’s directions to the paradise of Neverland), Cubans pointed north and sent their children to America, not to escape responsibility but to become the best adults that they could.

It was an act of blind faith and brilliant courage.

It was unbelievable in its simplicity.

It’s incredible that it worked.

Among those who made that surreal journey – mostly alone – from the Caribbean to Miami to the Midwest were Lourdes Muñoz Birba, Diego del Pino, Rafael (“Big Ralph”) Fernandez, Alberto Ferrán, Carlos Gamez, Rafael Mederos, Leo Muñoz, and Pedro and Emilio Vázquez.

As part of that group, Reynaldo Jiménez ’69 LAS, AM ’70 LAS, PHD ’74 LAS; Ricardo Jiménez ’67 ENG, MS ’69 ENG; Raúl Ley-Soto ’68 ENG; Ana Ferrán Parent, PHD ’76 LAS; and Luis Vera ’70 LAS continued on to the University of Illinois.

‘ASK FOR GEORGE’

“Something told me I had to get out,” Raúl says. “Everyone in my high school knew they were going.”

In 1960, Castro closed secondary schools, sending young people to youth camps in the countryside to work in the fields, spread literacy and take up a revolutionary lifestyle. Talented students were sent to study in the Soviet Union. More than 200,000 people thought to be loyal to Batista were arrested.

“My father came from China to Cuba when he was 7 years old, fleeing Communism in China,” Raúl says. “He recognized Castro as a Communist. … [The parents were saying], ‘We have to get the kids out of here before they go to the camps and get indoctrinated.’” The thought of girls and boys together in the countryside – far from parental or religious restrictions – troubled the parents as well.

To avoid that fate, a curious mix of bedfellows – Cuban parents, a U.S. administrator of an American school in Havana, the U.S. government and the Catholic Archdiocese of Miami – worked together to find a solution. They hatched a secret, massive effort, led by the young Monsignor Bryan O. Walsh in Florida, to save the children.

The details were simple, yet extraordinarily complex. Many of the children – more than half of whom had no contacts in the United States – were told by their parents to ask for “George” upon arriving at Miami International Airport. An employee of the Catholic Welfare Bureau, the Cuban-born Jorge Guarch set up a small table, at which he created a meticulous list of names, birth dates and destinations. Despite Guarch’s “Airport Log” being the only list made of this effort, not a single child among the 14,000 disappeared in the system.

From the airport, the refugees went to camps in Florida, where Catholic priests eventually conducted interviews. The children were then dispersed to relatives, foster homes or orphanages across the breadth of the nation.

One of those orphanages was Guardian Angel Home in Peoria.

PLAYING IT IN PEORIA

Steady is as steady goes, and such was the way of Peoria in the 1960s. The quintessential image of old-fashioned American values (“Will it play in Peoria?”), the modest, landlocked city had little in common with the flash of a thriving Caribbean metropolis.

Yet bringing these two cultures together was the challenge faced by the Rev. Richard Mullen ’48 MEDIA, Guardian Angel’s 37-year-old chaplain, who found himself in the middle of an international operation.

“The [Catholic] Church got word of the program and the need,” he recalls, and all at once, the orphanage filled up with 14 young people who didn’t speak English and brought almost nothing with them. The group, which included four pairs of siblings, comprised a dozen boys (15 to 18 years old) and two girls (aged 8 and 18). They came from Havana, Santa Clara and Holguin, but nobody but the siblings had known each other in Cuba. The arrivals were housed in separate wings by gender and age, with the new boys placed in the same set of rooms.

With Father Mullen guiding the youngsters to high school graduation, the stay for some children lasted a few months, for others up to four years. The short separation envisioned by their parents proved a huge miscalculation, as the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis – where nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was narrowly avoided – severely compounded the situation. All eventually reunited with their families – some in two years, others not for decades.

Forty-seven years later, memories of their uprooting mix pain with adventure, fear with gratitude, understanding with anger. These adults are fiercely loyal to the United States, yet poignantly wistful for the life deprived them in their homeland. They are quick to laugh, quick to tear up, quick to say life turned out just fine. They are both tough and wounded. And every one views the families’ agonizing decision as an act of complete desperation and a gesture of pure love.

Nine of them – Lourdes, Big Ralph, Carlos, the Vázquez brothers, Ricardo, Raúl, Alberto and Ana – gather this year on a late June weekend in the neighboring cities of Champaign and Peoria. They are here as a group to pay their respects to Father Mullen and to return together to the place that protected them – Guardian Angel.

THE EARLY YEARS

“We pray that those who suffer and feel abandoned in their distress will find the presence of God close to them and that they will work to rescue others.” So prays Father Mullen at the Mass at which this year’s reunion begins.

Suffice it to say that the newly arrived Cubans back in the ’60s had never before felt the presence of God in quite this way: These refugees didn’t merely attend church, they lived with their pastors.

Mullen and the Rev. Cy Schlarman, the priest who had interviewed and brought the children from Florida, took the kids clothes shopping and transported them to school and haircut appointments, handed out advice with one hand and bus money with the other. The boys learned to drive in Schlarman’s rickety old Chevy; Sister Amata taught homemaking skills. On the outside, the kids came to know English and the American way of life. On the inside, they learned that Schlarman flew airplanes, Mullen repeatedly played the song “Deep Purple” on the piano, and Sister had a “golden heart.”

“I was just doing what came naturally,” Mullen says decades later, but surely a lot must have been played by ear.

“Sometimes I couldn’t tell if they were mad at me or what,” he admits, until he got used to their excitable manner of conversation. “I’ll never forget,” he says, having to suspend the boys’ baseball games when too many girls came around to watch. While he attended to the children’s spiritual needs (even bringing in a Spanish-speaking priest to ensure sincere confessions), he also drove them around in his ’61 Ford Fairlane and brought Ana to the doorsteps of campus when college rolled around.

Eight years after her arrival, Ana was married by Father Schlarman in the chapel of the orphanage. “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” she says. “My [first] son was baptized there in the orphanage. They were our surrogate parents – it was home.”

LEARNING TO REINVENT YOURSELF

Despite the stability and good will of Guardian Angel, the refugees, nonetheless, were coping with a situation they had never imagined.

It seems the oldest and the youngest suffered the most.

An 18-year-old Ana, sent to watch over her younger brother, Alberto, experienced culture shock.

“Suddenly you’re here in a camp for refugees,” she recalls. “Eighteen girls in two bedrooms, one bath. I wore the same clothes for a month.” When she received a government voucher to buy clothing, her first purchase still brings a smile to her face: a pair of hot pink Keds.

But the stresses proved more than just physical. In contrast to the freewheeling ways of the U.S., Cuban girls were sheltered. “Every moment of my life was involved,” Ana says, with piano and typing lessons and other diversions.

“I went to nuns’ school all my life,” she says. “When you are raised with religion, you tend to be naive.” That proved a disadvantage in the U.S., “where 16-year-old girls were already driving, swimming. We only knew how to study.”

And for the older kids, it was also harder to forget.

“I remember everything as if it were yesterday,” Ana says. “I have constant flashbacks to Cuba, memories of walking by the ocean. … The brain doesn’t let you forget. You wish you could, but you can’t.

“It’s part of our torture of having two identities,” she says. “We understand the sacrifices our parents did for us, but it left a deep wound in our soul.”

The road for Ricardo Jiménez, the oldest boy, and his brother, Reynaldo, was especially rocky. Shortly after arriving at the orphanage, they learned their politically active father and stepmother had been imprisoned, leaving their 2 ½-year old daughter out in the cold. “I was very angry,” Ricardo recalls. “It was the hardest part of the whole time.” The family would not see each other again for 18 years.

Lourdes “Lourdita” Muñoz Birba, who flew alone to the U.S. from Havana as an 8-year-old, was taken to the airport in Cuba just a few days after being notified she could leave. (Her teenage brother, Leo, had departed two months previous.) “Before I knew it,” she says, “I was on a plane and gone.”

The adventure quickly soured in Miami, where she realized her parents weren’t going to join her. The Muñoz siblings lived in separate camps for three months in Florida before going to Guardian Angel, where they were separated again by age and gender.

Of that time, Lourdes describes herself as “acclimated,” rather than happy.

“I would cry when I got mail from my mom,” she says. “My mother sent me lots of holy cards with messages; I kept them all.” To this day, she says, she remains sensitive to the needs of the very vulnerable and the very young.

Emilio Vázquez, at 14 the youngest boy in the group, was relieved with the order and safety that he found at Guardian Angel after living in Camp Kendall in Florida for eight months. (Ana recalls, “The girls lived in duplexes on base. The boys were like wild animals.”) “I felt pretty good in the orphanage,” he says, “being in a group together.” Nonetheless, he admits, “Sometimes I would have liked to have a father to talk to – I was missing the family touch.

“I always tell my kids they are lucky they have grandparents,” Emilio adds. “Mine were left behind.”

It may seem odd that so many photos exist of the children at Guardian Angel until one realizes they served as a diary of their life for their parents back home. Two things, the grown-up kids recall, were important: Show them pictures of you in the snow. And smile, so your parents would know their sacrifice had been worth it.

When the group tour their old quarters at Guardian Angel during the reunion, the men excitedly recall one memory after another. (“Here’s where my bed was!” “Wasn’t it here that we danced the ‘mashed potato’?”)

The two women weep.

SURVIVAL TACTICS

How does a young person – with little advance notice – leave family for a new country with no end game in sight? How did these child refugees cope?

For some, it was pure naiveté, for others the shock of reality. For the males, threat of military service in a Castro regime impelled their decision to depart. For all of them, a deep trust in their parents’ decision was their anchor.

“Our parents were not trying to get rid of us, they didn’t desert us – they did it for us,” says Ricardo. “I don’t remember seeing any of us crying or lonely.”

At Guardian Angel, the 12 boys developed a deep bond that made the transition easier. They slept six bunks to a room, went to high school together and, being teenagers, somewhat enjoyed the freedom from their parents.

“Guardian Angel provided structure and a support system for each of us,” Ricardo says. While individual friendships did occur, “in the photos, we’re all together, not in cliques,” he said.

They also had two guideposts: the knowledge of what their parents wanted for them, and open and grateful hearts.

Carlos’ father tucked rum and cigars in his son’s pocket to sell for ready cash at the airport if necessary. The need didn’t arise, but his other instructions remained far more useful.

“A mental video plays in my head from the flight,” says Carlos, who was 15 when he arrived. “Dad said, ‘I don’t know if I’ll see you again, but the only thing they can’t take away from you is what you learn.’ Many nights at the orphanage, I didn’t feel like doing homework, but I played that mental video and got up and studied.

“We knew what we wanted to do with our lives,” Carlos says. “We wanted to please our parents” by getting a good education.

They also saw their quarters at the orphanage as a huge step up from the camps. With their one bedroom, two study rooms and a recreation area, “we were spoiled,” Emilio says. “We had so much.”

“They were very good kids,” says Mullen. “I can’t remember ever getting them out of trouble.” (Though Father Schlarman once made the boys sleep outside when they missed curfew – an event which the men recall with glee).

And these children, who came from comfortable homes, weren’t afraid to work to realize their parents’ dream. “Big Ralph” and Leo dug graves by hand at nearby cemeteries (until Sister put a stop to it); others shoveled sidewalks, waited tables, babysat and earned scholarships. “In this country,” Ralph says, “if you have a will, there’s a way.”

Of the group, nearly all attended college. They became university professors, industry executives, entrepreneurs, engineers, consultants, businessmen and an air traffic controller. One lists his career as “American veteran.”

“This was a heck of a support group,” Ricardo says. “We have all turned out really decent.”

“Look at us, we are all so successful,” Ana says. “We were not letting our parents down. We were making this sacrifice count.”

RETURNING THE FAVOR

For one year, Ricardo works assiduously to create a reunion in Father Mullen’s honor. The Cuban-American truly believes in the words of the James Taylor song that plays over and over that weekend: “Shower the people you love with love; show them the way you feel.”

The few days involve Mass; meals; trips to Guardian Angel, Spalding High School and a kindly neighbor; a visit to Sister Amata’s grave; and lots of gratitude.

A wide smile never leaves Father Mullen’s face. He says he never felt so much a father figure as at the time of the reunion. “I didn’t have that awareness,” he says, “[of what I did for them] at the time.”

But the Cubans do.

“It was a very sensitive time for us [back then], as many drastic changes have occurred in our lives,” Emilio will write to Mullen after the weekend closes. “I believe that the reason why we have kept in contact among us for so many years as a group is because [Guardian Angel] is a place where we planted our roots at the beginning of our journey in this great country.”

Raúl, a contractor who globe-trots around the world, credits nearly everything to the mentoring he received at Guardian Angel. “I don’t think I’d be what I am today,” he says. “I owe a lot to the Catholic Church.”

And, he says, his voice tightening with emotion, “I try to pay my dues back.”

At the reunion, the group presents Father with a plaque, which now sits in a prominent spot in his home.

The plaque reads: “Father Mullen, 47 years later we remain grateful to you.”

It is signed: “The Cubans, Guardian Angel Home.”

It ends with a new date, a much happier one, for all to remember: “June 27, 2009

Five Propositions About Happiness

Mary Timmins — Tue 1 Dec 2009 00:00 CST

By Mary Timmins

It is a hilarious irony that Ed Diener, the man who holds the position of Joseph R. Smiley Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois, has studied nothing less than – happiness.

For nothing less than 30 years.

Down those decades, Diener has pursued the – bluebird? butterfly? phantasm? – that is his chosen research area. He has questioned innumerable subjects and written up reams of research. He has maneuvered and advanced and defended his work into increasing acceptance as a bona fide psychological and economic phenomenon, pounding home to skeptical colleagues a simple truth that most everyone else – including Thomas Jefferson, who wrote it into the Declaration of Independence – just knows.

Happiness counts.

In the process, Diener has established the importance of well-being as a counterpoint to such affects as anxiety and depression, which have been far more scrutinized and celebrated by clinical psychology than a condition seemingly banal as happiness. (Diener himself started out to be a clinical psychologist but found he liked working with data far more than he liked working with patients.)

Amid the scholarly tumult, he’s managed to suss out a lot about happiness itself – including why it is so critical and, perhaps more importantly, how to find it.

What follow, with apologies to the UI Smiley Professor of Psychology, are five propositions about happiness that have been extracted from his work, stupendously oversimplified and presented for the pleasure of readers of Illinois Alumni.

The first:

Proposition No. 1: Maybe money can buy happiness.

One of the first big questions to leap out of Diener’s work is: How does one go about measuring happiness, anyway? That seems to have been, at least in part, the issue that roiled Diener’s instructor back when Diener was an undergraduate at California State University at Fresno and wanted to study the happiness of migrant workers on his parents’ farm in the San Joachim Valley. The prof nixed the idea as impractical and, frankly, a little crazy. So the young man turned in a paper on conformity instead – another hilarious irony, doubtless lost on the instructor. But living well, as the Spanish proverb goes, is the best revenge. Diener went on to forge a gleaming kit of tools that measure how people feel about their lives.

These instruments include peer reports (what others say about the happiness of their friends and family members), experience sampling (beeping, paging and texting people to ask them about their state of mind right now), measuring hormone levels (cortisol indicates stress) and taking brain scans (which find happiness in the left pre-frontal lobe firing – strange to report – up close and personal alongside anger). The most reliable measure, though, remains the self-report – i.e., how people rate their own happiness.

“People can lie,” Diener observes. “People can lie to themselves. But it probably, of all methods, is the best we have so far.”

Which brings us to the proposition about the money.

It’s not that people say they’re happy because they have money. A lot of times they do. Occasionally they don’t. But the proposition is much bigger than that. Global data aggregated over almost 30 years shows that self-reported life satisfaction levels do, in fact, rise with income. Citizens of the well-off nations of North America, northern Europe, Australia and New Zealand tend to be happier than inhabitants of emerging countries in Latin America and southern Europe, who in turn are wont to wake up more often on the right side of bed than those living in such cash-challenged realms as the former Soviet bloc states, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa.

“When I started, there was so much skepticism and opposition to this field,” Diener recalled, “including in psychology and economics. People said, ‘This is bull. You can’t study happiness. It’s flaky.’” But that, as sages say, was then, and this is now. Diener has tipped off the United Nations Development Program and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (which researches worldwide economic data) to the relationship between prosperity and happiness. He has convinced statisticians at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control to include life satisfaction and emotional well-being as categories in health surveys.

And now, topping the huge pile of his published work – 300 papers and 10 books, not to mention the scholarly journals he’s edited – are two new volumes. One is titled “Well-Being for Public Policy.” It’s for statesmen, economists and politicians. The other is called “Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth.” It’s for everybody else.

Which brings matters to:

Proposition No. 2: Maybe money can’t buy happiness.

In those lucky nations endowed with a decent standard of living, happiness is, for sure, related to income – but strongly related only to a point. In the U.S., the point is around $40,000. That is to say, when the median household income in this country reached $40,000, the rising happiness curve started to flatten.

Not that the realm beyond $40K doesn’t offer plenty more comforts to seek and stuff to grab with the charge card. It’s just that, as Diener explained, once basic economic needs are met, there are different constellations of satisfaction and fulfillment.

“Happiness isn’t one thing,” he observed.

It’s three. Diener’s work identifies the dimensions of “life satisfaction,” “positive emotions” and “absence of negative affect.” The first refers to the sense of well-being that goes with having such life necessities as food, clothing, shelter and health. The second covers, in Diener’s words, “the psychosocial things” – such things including love, friendship, respect, satisfying work and learning. The third means not going around in a bad mood – at least not all the time.

These factors tumble around as in an imaginary lab blender whizzing with data and observations, in a kind of recipe-quest for the margarita of human happiness, that most elusive of cocktails. For as people acquire more and more material goods – and, hence, life satisfaction – the goal seems to morph from comfort to comparison. Recall the fabled fisherman’s wife. Granted her heart’s desire by a magical flounder, she started out asking for a nicer house and ended up wanting the powers of a god. Far-fetched? Consider next the gi-normous compensations of Wall Street, commanded by those whom author Tom Wolfe once dubbed (and not in a complimentary way) “masters of the universe.”

Destabilized by over-the-top need, the positive emotions that emanate from personal relationships can get squandered on more in-your-face rewards, such as the executive who acquires a fancy house in the suburbs, only to find she’s traded family time for a long commute.

And on the truly wild side, at the far opposite end of the economic spectrum, Diener reported of a visit to the slums of Calcutta: “Some people there are kind of reasonably happy. …They have families. They have jobs. …They have religion. They have celebrations. … So don’t define them in terms of their poverty.”

Whereupon there emerges:

Proposition No. 3: Happiness is not a goal.

Robert Biswas-Diener is Ed Diener’s son as well as his collaborator, the two having co-authored the new “Happiness” book. His work has spun off from his father’s, flinging him into places remote, exotic and flat-out strange. Biswas-Diener has studied happiness among small cultures ranging from the Amish of Illinois to the Inuit of Greenland. The Maasai of Kenya branded him with a hot stick – to which he, as a brave field researcher, acquiesced, winning the honorific of “the Indiana Jones of positive psychology” from an admiring colleague.

Happiness levels among the Maasai are very high, and Biswas-Diener thinks that’s because their social norms are straightforward. People are expected to look and dress a certain way, and they all do. People are expected to marry, and they mostly do. There are group standards and a group life and some choices but not all that many. The Maasai drape themselves in beautiful fabrics and sport elaborately beaded jewelry and carry spears and live in dung huts and raise cattle, and they are proud as well as happy.

“They know who they are,” observed Diener père, for whom the implications are obvious. The Maasai may not have money, but they have an abundance of resources. They illustrate one of Diener’s most joyous and potent ideas – that happiness is a matter more of wealth than of money, wealth meaning those things that make life better both materially and emotionally. For Diener, “the homeless in Fresno are worse off than the homeless in Calcutta,” because the latter remain part of an accepted social network, while many of the former have suffered abandonment by their families.

Curiously, some people seem to wallow in an embarrassment of happiness (or what they mistake for happiness). “If you want to be on the honeymoon all the time, that’s going to require drugs or excitement-seeking. You get in trouble,” Diener said. “You don’t have to be super-happy, elated all the time. In general, being mildly, moderately happy is probably a good thing. And that also doesn’t mean that you don’t feel negative emotions. Feeling sad at your mother’s funeral is a good thing.”

So attitudes make a big difference. Leading to:

Proposition No. 4: Some are born happy, and some achieve happiness.

First, a side note, and that’s that, alas for Shakespeare’s original insight, not a lot of folks seem to get happiness “thrust upon ’em” – not even lottery winners, another group Diener has studied.

More to the point, though, there are people who just seem happier than other people. These are the people who go around whistling and volunteering to build houses for the impoverished. They adore their kids, their spouses, maybe even their mothers-in-law. They’re high on energy, low on anxiety. What’s even worse for the depressed and curmudgeonly onlooker is that, according to Diener’s research, happy people are in line for intrinsic payoffs. They tend to be more successful in their careers, have better marriages, earn more money and even enjoy better health.

“Happiness strengthens your immune system,” he said. “It’s good for the cardiovascular system.”

There’s a temptation to curse this as a kind of Calvinism, the work of a smirking, evil universe that hands some individuals the proverbial rose-colored spectacles and dooms others to the dour gestalt of comedian and film director Woody Allen, who once complained: “Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.”

Naturally, Diener doesn’t see the dichotomy as all that drastic, which is nice, because he could be right. People do seem to have certain individual set points for happiness – a default mood on a scale of moods, probably decided by DNA, that’s sunnier in some than in others. (And, by the way, isn’t there something rather romantic in the darkly brooding right-brained lovers and thinkers and artists, the Heathcliffs and Hamlets of our imaginations?) But that default can be moved. It’s possible (though it may require falling in love or taking up with a therapist) to wield a spiritual wrench and ratchet up one’s happiness, at least by a notch or two. “Obviously, there’s a temperament thing,” Diener said. “But we do think that you can do things to move your life satisfaction up or down. And we are learning some more of those things.” This speaks to a process model –
to taking on life as it is, rather than some idea of life as it’s supposed to be. It means working on relationships. It means attitude adjustment – getting that half-empty glass to reverse like an Escher illusion into a half-full one. Above all, it means finding “spiritual emotions” that connect one to a reality beyond
individual need and struggle.

“Love would be a spiritual emotion,” Diener explained. “So would gratitude. Awe. Transcendence. Forgiveness.”

And, hence, in the end:

Proposition 5: Happiness is seeking fulfillment.

This is where Ed Diener teaches through his life as well as his work. Michael Frisch, one of many scholars Diener has mentored over the years, describes the professor as endlessly young, a child who never quite grew out of the precocious wonder of driving a tractor around his parents’ farm (he got behind the wheel at age 10) and figuring out probability using dice (a project undertaken when he was bedridden with a childhood illness). That four members of his immediate family are also psychologists (not only his son, but his wife, Carol, AM ’77 LAS, PHD ’79 LAS, JD ’97 LAW, and his twin daughters, Mary Beth and Marissa, PHD ’96 LAS) is eloquent testimony to the enthusiasm that saturates his work and life.

“Ed is not only one of the greatest psychologists of the past century, he is a great man as well,” Frisch, now a therapist and faculty member at Baylor University, wrote in an e-mail to Illinois Alumni. “His brilliance is coupled with great compassion and a love of helping and nurturing people. … He approaches life like a kid in a candy store, always ready to play and explore new ideas in the laboratory or with other people.”

Frisch believes that Diener’s work comes out of Diener’s own happiness, creating a gentle paradigm whereby that – bluebird? butterfly? phantasm? – is chased rather than captured. To quote, as Frisch does, the poet W.H. Auden: “You owe it to us all to get on with what you’re good at.”

Which led to, among other things, that hilarious yet oh-so-perfect title: the Smiley Professor at Illinois.

'One World, One Chance, Be Gentle'

Sal Nudo — Tue 1 Sep 2009 00:00 CST

By Dave Wieczorek

There’s plenty of talk these days about “thinking green” or “going green,” but how many of us truly live green, beyond recycling pop cans or turning off the tap while brushing our teeth? How many of us practice the kind of measures at home and on the job that will help sustain a vibrant environment for ourselves and for future generations?

“That’s a noble notion,” you say, “but I’m just one person on a planet of nearly 7 billion people. How can I possibly make a difference?” To answer that question, Illinois Alumni spoke with four University of Illinois alumni whose passion for environmental sustainability – from making solar energy affordable to restoring a cornfield to its native state – proves that individuals who live “green” can indeed make a difference.

Going Native in Central Illinois

When Michelle Smith Keil ’85 LAS looks out the windows of her home, she gazes at her very own 20 acres of central Illinois prairie. In every direction, depending on the season, she sees dozens of varieties of indigenous grasses and flowers wavering in the breeze, some growing as tall as 7 feet – grasses like big bluestem, prairie dropseed and June Grass; flowers like black-eyed Susan, partridge pea, bee balm, rattlesnake master and purple prairie clover.

The abundance of windows provides a panoramic view of what much of Illinois looked like some 150 years ago, before most of the prairie was plowed under for farmland and development. Keil and her husband, Gary ’78 ENG, spent several years restoring a former cornfield to prairie, seen at left, and then designed and built their home to blend naturally with the native meadow.

“It’s very soothing, very centering,” Keil says. “The prairie is restorative to the land and to me.”

Keil works in nearby Peoria at Caterpillar, the world’s largest manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, diesel and natural gas engines, and industrial gas turbines. She serves as the strategy and engagement manager for the company’s Sustainable Development Group.

Linking prairies and a company that manufactures equipment used in operations such as strip mining may seem as incompatible a pairing as forest and fire. But standing on her porch, Keil sees the world from a unique vantage.

“The prairie and what I do at Caterpillar are fundamentally connected,” she says. “The way I look at my job is that I help people understand that there is room for both things: The natural environment not only can continue to exist but can thrive, and we, Caterpillar, can meet people’s needs – that can happen and must happen.”

Keil’s job is to guide Caterpillar’s employees as they seek to design, build and distribute the most sustainable products and services possible. That means figuring into their technology and processes factors such as fuel efficiency, greenhouse gas emissions, materials efficiency, safety and sound emissions. If a new bulldozer enters the design process, for example, “We have to be cognizant of the iron and steel that will be consumed in the making of that bulldozer and the bulldozer’s end of life,” Keil says. “What happens to the material in that product, can we rebuild or recycle it?”

As her home is the perfect fit for the prairie, Keil seems the perfect fit for promoting sustainability.

“I’m an environmentalist at heart and always have been,” says Keil, who was hired by Caterpillar 20 years ago as a chemist. “This is not something that’s only my vocation – it’s my passion. It’s a blessing to have a job like this at a company whose work is so integral to the way development is done.”

Keil often returns to the unarguable point about which she is most passionate: coexistence of development and the environment.

“Profit must be achieved in a certain way, and that way is becoming recognized as being more and more sustainable,” she says. “The facts are plain. This is a finite planet. ... There’s one planet, one suite of resources. This is what we have to work with.”

Keil can conceive of the day when sustainability will be a non-issue.

“Ideally, 10 years from now, we won’t need a sustainability group at Caterpillar because everyone will have their own sustainability development activity already embedded in what they do,” she says.

And then Keil can spend all her time walking through her prairie?

“That’s the plan.”

The Business of Energy

This admission by Jigar Shah ’96 ENG might surprise anyone who regards him as a 21st-century solar-energy god: He’s not driven by “green.”

“I’m driven by efficiency of the system,” Shah says. “I’m from the Midwest, and Midwest sensibility says you don’t do something that negatively affects your neighbors. If you build a big old wall and it affects your neighbor’s quality of life, that’s just not fair. If people buy vehicles that create worse asthma for other people’s kids, that’s just not being a good neighbor.”

If not a card-carrying environmentalist, we can at least call Shah a good neighbor, a very good neighbor to millions of people. In 2003, hoping to create a better system, he launched a company called SunEdison.

To avoid the prohibitive startup capital needed for solar energy, SunEdison installs – at no cost to customers – solar systems that it owns and operates. Those customers then purchase from SunEdison a solar power services agreement, a concept Shah pioneered, agreeing to buy solar-generated electricity at a set price (typically for 20 years). The customer doesn’t invest any money in a power supply, and SunEdison is guaranteed a revenue stream.

The entrepreneur got hooked on the possibilities of solar energy during his undergraduate days at the U of I in the 1990s, when he took as many solar-specific classes as he could. “I believed in the power of solar energy to be something more than it was back then,” Shah says. Even so, he recalls being “scared out of my mind” when starting SunEdison. According to its Web site, the company, with corporate headquarters in Beltsville, Md., now is North America’s largest provider of solar energy.

Despite his fears, he never doubted the market potential for providing solar-energy systems free of charge to customers.

“There were all these corporations that desperately wanted solar on their roofs but couldn’t afford to use capital expenses to pay for it,” he says. “We played a big role in changing that.”

Shah, who left the company in November, says there are at least 20 companies that have copied the ingenious SunEdison model, a development which he says “makes me very proud.” He lives and works in Washington, D.C., where he is CEO of the Carbon War Room, a global nonprofit whose mission is to accelerate proven ideas to transition to a healthier, more prosperous low-carbon world.

“The big area for me has always been to come up with business solutions to address global warming,” Shah says. “The thing that people have had a hard time understanding about solar is that it’s part of the energy business. While new energy technologies come up all the time, technology is not the driver of the energy industry. The driver is the business model: how you get it financed and how you apply traditional risk-management methods to solar and wind and biomass.

“That to me is the key to solving global warming.”

The Accidental Environmentalist

Some people look at a house slated for demolition and see nothing but landfill fodder. Jodi Frankovelgia Murphy ’84 LAS looks at a doomed structure and sees nothing but profit – for herself, her clients and the environment.

“I can’t say I’ve always felt connected to Mother Earth,” Murphy says. “My interests in this area started off selfishly and grew into an advocacy only after my eyes were opened to the issues of what was going on in the environment.

“The truth is,” she says, laughing, “I’m an accidental environmentalist.”

Now, after more than 20 years as a demolition auctioneer in the recycling business, Murphy is happy to see “everyone is jumping on the green bandwagon.”

Many are doing so after watching the spunky redhead’s reality show, “Total Wrecklamation,” on the Discovery Channel’s Planet Green network.

The program follows Murphy, president of Murco Recycling Enterprises in LaGrange Park, as she selects a home ready for razing, wrangles buyers looking for materials for their own home projects and then conducts an energized auction of everything from stoves to staircases to fixtures, doors and other items before the wrecking ball reduces them to rubble.

“Did you know that according to [the Environmental Protection Agency], at least 30 percent of all landfill waste can be attributed to demolition and construction debris?” says Murphy, who estimates that her type of recycling can prevent three to 12 tons of material from ending up in landfills per project, depending on the size of the home.

Yet, despite her current enthusiasm, Murphy entered the home-auction business through the back door.

“I would love to say I began this way of recycling because I was such an advocate of the planet, but the fact is [my husband, Patrick ’84 BUS, and I] were broke,” she says.

“We had two small children and needed to fix up the house.”

Looking for ways to improve her home at a low cost, Murphy began by salvaging materials from nearby teardowns and soon realized other cash-strapped homeowners were looking for bargains, too. That’s when she became a demolition auctioneer and launched Murco. After a few years she became, in her words, “a true advocate of diverting the solid-waste stream.”

In 1999, Murco received the Governor’s Pollution Prevention Award from the state of Illinois, and this year, Murphy was inducted into the Environmental Hall of Fame in Chicago. Murco’s latest project is partnering with Habitat for Humanity to build a “green” home in nearby Carpentersville. Construction was to begin in August.

What is most gratifying, Murphy says, is watching the mind-set of the public evolve and begin to understand the green issues at hand.

“When I first started the business, [people] just wanted to sell a house as quickly as possible,” she says. “And then, magically, over the last five years, I have seen such a stunning social turnaround – like a communal consciousness – where people are not just talking the talk but walking the walk. Now it’s almost embarrassing if owners don’t recycle their homes.

“Before I was saying, ‘You’re leaving money on the table.’ Now my clients are saying, ‘I want to make sure none of this goes to waste.’”

The Web of Life

Hanging on the wall of Ron Meissen’s, MS ’73 ENG, office at Baxter International Inc. is a photograph of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward O. Wilson, known also as the “Father of Biodiversity.”

Below the picture lies this passage from Wilson’s book, “The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth”: “At their current rates, half the species of plants and animals on Earth could be either gone or at least fated for early extinction by the end of the century [2100]. A full quarter will drop to this level during the next half century as a result of climate change alone [because of global warming].”

Like Wilson, Meissen encourages individuals to understand the importance of biodiversity so that they might support the “web of life” on Earth. Pointing to activities which disrupt that network, he said, “We’re part of that web … so at what point do we get caught in the implications of species extinction?”

Meissen is the senior director of sustainability, corporate environment, health and safety at Baxter, a $12 billion health-care giant with more than 48,000 employees. Headquartered in Deerfield, the company manufactures and markets medical devices, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology around the world.

Meissen’s role is to support Baxter’s executive-level Sustainability Steering Committee in establishing global sustainability goals, measuring progress and reporting performance to upper management. To Meissen, Baxter is one of America’s sustainability leaders – in 2009, it was named one of the Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World for the fifth straight year. The ranking came from Corporate Knights Inc. and Innovest Strategic Value Advisors, the No. 1 firm for analyzing companies’ performance on environmental, social and strategic governance issues, with a focus on their impact on competitiveness and profitability.

The company’s decades-long environmental initiatives include: introducing more fuel-efficient fleets to deliver its products; applying Lean manufacturing principles (manufacturing without waste) to conserve water and other resources; and incorporating green-building design principles.

In the mid-’90s, Baxter set a goal to reduce its energy usage – and associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions – by 30 percent (per unit of production); it fell just 3 percent short. Since then the company has set a new goal of reducing GHG emissions 45 percent per unit of sales by 2015.

The issue of sustainability first grabbed Meissen’s attention in the early 1990s.

“I read an EPA report saying that global climate change was going to be a very serious issue,” he recalls. “I didn’t know anything about it – and I was head of environmental engineering for Baxter. I talked to other people, and no one else knew anything about it, either.” He started studying sustainability, where he came under the influence of Wilson and his persuasive arguments about Earth’s biodiversity being driven to the brink.

Meissen became so engaged with sustainability that he returned to school in 2000 at age 52 to work on a doctorate in environmental science, completing his degree in 2007.

At approximately the same time of Meissen’s personal enlightenment, Baxter created the new Sustainability Steering Committee.

“[We] said we would be leaders in respect to the environment,” he says. “Instead of being reactive, we would be proactive. We’re doing that with things like waste and water reduction and by measuring and reporting energy usage and greenhouse gas emissions and by setting reduction goals.”

Meissen emphasizes that while a company like Baxter is doing its part to promote sustainability, only global involvement will lighten our heavy footprint.

“The environmental issues we’re facing right now are serious,” he says. “We need an engaged society. We need a global response. We need all hands on deck.

“The thing about nature is that it doesn’t give bailouts.”

Wieczorek is a freelance writer and editor in the Chicago area.

The Right Stuff

Sal Nudo — Tue 1 Sep 2009 00:00 CST

The U of I seeks sustainability across campus and the world

By Mary Timmins

Like Proteus, the shape-shifting god of the ancient Greeks, sustainability takes many forms. At the University of Illinois, a whole ecosystem of sustainability has taken root and sprung up across campus, rather as though some elemental force had everywhere strewn potent green seeds. There are offices and institutes and committees. There are lighting improvements and green roofs and solar panels and retrocommissionings. There are experimental projects and research on the atmosphere and recycling that’s totally committed to keeping trash out of landfills. There are alliances with industry and tiny prairies and photovoltaic panels that make sunlight into electricity and projects to help people who hardly have the money to live much less do it sustainably. There’s a rain garden behind Allen Hall – those quarters to which free-thinking undergraduates are drawn as moths to solar luminaria – which gathers rain to sustain its own native plants and filters the rest, improving the quality of nearby groundwater.

Yes, the University is definitely into sustainability – which in the end and in the beginning and in the here and now means figuring out what sustainability is.

When oil prices embarked on an upward heave in 2008, the energy costs – always high – startled the University budget into fits. For a place full of laboratories and computers and high-tech equipment, double-digit leaps in the power bill are – well, unsustainable. Having already signed Illinois to the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment (pledging to eliminate campus greenhouse gas emissions, help re-stabilize the climate of the Earth and seek energy independence for America), Chancellor Richard Herman ordered a reduction of 10 percent energy consumption on campus over three years.

By last June, the target had almost been reached – two years ahead of schedule.

“There’s been a cultural change here on campus,” notes Tom Abram ’05 ENG, sustainability coordinator at the UI Office of Facilities & Services. “We got hit in our pocketbook, and a lot of times that’s what it takes.” As well as replacing outdated lighting and encouraging people to turn thermostats down and lights off when not in use, F&S has undertaken the massive task of retrocommissioning buildings on campus. Teams check out aging systems in aging facilities and make repairs and recommendations that have led to mega-savings. In the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, for example, F&S analyzed heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, installing sensors, replacing thermostats, and doing maintenance – a process expected to save $376,000 annually in energy costs.

With work complete on 12 campus buildings, “We’ve more than made up for the monies we’ve invested in retrocommissioning – by a long shot,” observes Herman. “We’ve spent $2 million and saved $7.5 million. So we’re already approximately $5 million to the plus.”

Retrocommissioning is supported by the UI Student Sustainability Committee, which tends a big green-for-green pot of money – more than a half million dollars from fees that UI students have voted to pay to make their campus (and, by extension, their world) a cleaner place. “There’s a lot of opportunity to do things that can pay for themselves in five years,” says Suhail Barot ’06 ENG, the graduate student in engineering who heads the committee, which makes both grants and loans. SSC-funded projects range from wood-fired heating at the U of I’s Allerton Park and Retreat Center in Monticello to sensors in classrooms that switch off the lights when no one’s around to more parking spaces for bikes on campus.

The Orange, Blue and Green Committee at the UI College of Veterinary Medicine got SSC money to plant native grasses and plants on the Vet Med campus. The tiny new prairie is part of a campuswide flowering of no-mow zones (places where native flora are allowed to grow in place of grass) and green roofs (comprising vegetation and soil over a waterproof membrane, with rainwater runoff directed into a collection system used for watering). A green roof will be created this fall atop the glass-walled School of Art and Design exhibit space that connects to the Krannert Art Museum. A block away, one is already leafing on the new Business Instructional Facility, designed by Cesar Pelli, MS ’54 FAA. Fashioned of heat-deflecting zinc, the roof is also mounted with photovoltaic solar panels meeting up to 9 percent of the building’s electricity needs.

At the north end of the campus, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is going forward with a new building that ECE professor Phil Krein, MS ’80 ENG, PHD ’82 ENG, who is deeply involved in the project, envisions as “a living facility – a research program in its own right.” Expected to open on the Beckman Quad in 2012, the facility will adopt a “net-zero” energy ideal by generating as much of its own electricity as possible from solar panels; it will also feature a high-efficiency heating and cooling system. Comingled classroom, laboratory, office and meeting spaces will encourage students and faculty to linger and learn. “Our department is all about interaction,” Krein notes. “We want to make sure the new building creates that.”

The new ECE building will be possible, in part, because of the capital appropriations bill signed into law by Gov. Pat Quinn in July. As well as $44.5 million for ECE – to be matched by private funding – the bill allots $57.3 million for the long-awaited renovation of Lincoln Hall, that beloved but crumbling great-granddaddy of the Quad. In terms of everything from preserving history to keeping materials out of landfills, “using an old building,” observes F&S sustainability coordinator Abram, “is more sustainable than building a new one.”

For sustainability is about the old as well as the new, about the best use of resources, about keeping life economical and tidy. Sustainability is a kind of hugely expanded version of how sheep farmers work and live on the west coast of Norway. That’s where UI architecture professor Vidar Lerum grew up. “Everything on a sheep is used,” recalls Lerum. “The culture was about scarcity and how to maximize any resource.” Lerum is translating this childhood sensibility over to the 50-year-old redwood ranch house in Urbana that he’s radically rehabbing, both as residence for himself and living lab for his students. The 50-year-old structure is becoming a place of efficient appliances, solar windows, photovoltaic panels, recycled siding, green roof and low-energy lighting – some of the LED bulbs Lerum’s using draw one watt of power. All of which makes sense not only economically but aesthetically.

And who wouldn’t buy into that?

From a loftier standpoint, though – literally lofty, as our atmosphere occludes with gases that trap the Earth’s heat – sustainability is about survival. In June, the U.S. Global Research Program released findings that prompted the Chicago Sun-Times to run the headline: “Get used to it: Report predicted heat waves, flooding.” Among a range of other frightening elements, the report predicts a “migrating states” phenomenon, projecting that, if current emission levels continue, Illinois in 2100 will have the climate of today’s Texas.

“We’ve already seen the impact of climate change,” says Don Wuebbles ’70 ENG, MS ’72 ENG, a prominent atmospheric scientist at the U of I and one of the authors of the government report. (He was also a member of the U.N. panel that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace prize with former Vice President Al Gore for work on climate change.) “More’s going to happen no matter what we do.” Like heat waves and intense storms, in which flooding runoff mingles with sewage to pollute water supplies. And droughts, such as those long ongoing in Texas and California.

Essential to life and increasingly fought over by people who don’t have enough of it, water is among the major concerns of those who monitor the impact of climate change. Water that floods, water that gets dirty and makes people sick, water that goes away and never comes back. “A lot of areas are using fresh water so quickly that it can’t be replenished,” notes Barbara Minsker, a UI environmental engineer who advocates “redesigning landscapes to absorb water, meaning there’s less pollution in streams, rivers and the ocean.”

Changes in water patterns are also what UI anthropologist Lisa Lucero studies, albeit the water patterns of Central America 1,200 years ago. That’s where and when the Maya people vanished. Lucero believes a mega-drought dried up the reservoirs of the major cities of Tikal and Calakmul. When the water left, so did the people.

“The more they relied on one source of ‘funding’ [i.e., irrigated agriculture], the more susceptible they were to collapse,” explains Lucero. Last spring, she helped put together Planet U, a conference at Illinois on the history of climate change. A fellow UI organizer was Gillen Wood, an authority on the Romantic period. Wood believes this era – which produced such poets as William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley – shows troubling parallels with our own.

“Romanticism is thought of as a celebration of nature. But it’s a little darker than that,” he says. “Coincident with the rise of industrialism, many environments [at that time] were being lost and communities disappearing.” Wood is also working on a history and an interactive Web site about Mount Tambora, an Indonesian volcano that exploded in 1815, disrupting the world for years with drought, cold and famine.

That even lost volcanoes, Romantic poetry and the Maya are germane to sustainability shows how awesomely confusing a subject it can be. What’s clear is that climate change cannot be addressed solely in scientific terms. For Wood, the question in those times, as now, is, enormous: “What happens when the climate reaches a tipping point, and a whole series of bad things happen?”

UI political science professor Steve Seitz is looking at another kind of tipping point, this one to do with public perception. The idea of climate change is dismissed by many different people for many different reasons, ranging from conspiracy theories to extreme evangelism – despite broad scientific consensus that human activity is measurably increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which in turn negatively affect Earth’s weather. Based on his research, Seitz predicts a shift in thought rolling in behind the shift in the rains and the winds and the temperatures.

“If you’re battered with severe weather several years in a row, it becomes too hard to ignore,” Seitz says. “You ask what’s happening.” Massive movement on huge questions happens when various stakeholders change their minds and a quorum is achieved. “People shift not because they’re buying into the explanation, but because they’re buying into the same end for different reasons,” Seitz explains.

He believes that very process is under way in America, albeit too slowly.

“If our generation does what it can to hold the fort, it gives the next generation a better start,” Seitz observes. “We’ll hand off to them a problem that’s not as bad as it could be.”

A year ago, in the fall of 2008, UI faculty members Minsker and Dick Warner, MS ’75 LAS, PHD ’81 LAS, dove into the subject of sustainability and the University of Illinois. From that endeavor – which involved talking to lots and lots of people on campus – flowed a vision statement calling for two grand goals.

The first is that the University preserve natural ecosystems and create its own ecosystems to mimic the natural ones. A potent example already in place is the campus recycling system which, through intensive sorting at the UI Material Recovery Facility, keeps almost half of the University’s waste out of landfills. Last year, this included 1,236 tons of paper and 21 tons of plastic. “If you look at what happens in nature, something creates waste and something else uses it,” observes Minsker, now an associate provost fellow. “You don’t see waste piling up.”

The second of the two goals is to sustainably raise living standards for the world’s poor. “Population growth is a major challenge,” Minsker observes. “Coming up with solutions that will help them solve their own problems – that’s sustainability.”

Warner, a professor of wildlife ecology and natural resources, now heads the new Office of Sustainability at Illinois, which emerged as part of the vision process. As well as coordinating sustainability efforts across campus, a key component of his work is engaging such corporate partners as Mars-Wrigley, Monsanto, Abbott Labs, Baxter Labs, Wal-Mart and Caterpillar. Far from resisting the need for sustainable change, Warner says, “these are corporations that, in the ’90s, were gearing up for corporate compliance with government environmental regulations.

“Now they’re saying that not only is sustainability correct – it’s profitable.”

Also on campus is the Institute for Natural Resource Sustainability, formed in 2008 from the state of Illinois natural history, water and geologic surveys and hazardous waste/sustainable technology center (all four having been long housed on the Urbana campus). The institute’s distinguished history of environmental advocacy includes providing data used in “Silent Spring,” the Rachel Carson classic. In the ’60s, the book exposed the extermination of birds and other wildlife by the pesticide DDT, impelling popular support for the environmental movement in America.

Just a few of the current earth-friendly initiatives at INRS include carbon sequestration projects (which capture CO2 emissions and send them underground rather than into the atmosphere), monitoring the atmosphere, dealing with invasive species and diseases, helping Illinois companies deal with waste and an innovative experiment to use the Mahomet Aquifer for geothermal heat. “Virtually all of our programs are aimed at serving the citizens of Illinois, both in economic development and environmental security,” notes geologist Bill Shilts, who is INRS director.

“No other university has anything like this.”

Still another campus entity – the new Environmental Change Institute – helped mount a Chicago conference this spring on controlling greenhouse gases through cap and trade. (For more on this method of managing emissions, see “Planetary Diplomat,” pp. 40-42.) The idea behind the institute, says interim director Wes Jarrell, is to embody sustainability through “solutions that are economically viable, environmentally sound and socially just.” Among Jarrell’s interests, both professionally and personally, is the importance of locally produced food, which is at once higher in quality and lower in energy consumption – aka “carbon footprint” – than goods trucked in from high-producing areas like California and Florida. Himself a goat farmer, who makes elegant tomme and creamy chevre cheeses and sells them at the open-air market in Urbana, Jarrell observes that, “local food means adding more capacity and more stability in the supply and price.”

Elsewhere on the ever-greener UI campus, the College of Engineering is preparing to offer an academic option in energy and sustainability engineering to graduate students – a green sheen on a degree is a good thing to carry forth into an environmentally challenged world. The School of Earth, Society and Environment, formed three years ago from the geology, geography and atmospheric science departments, has added
interdisciplinary majors in science of the earth and in society and the environment. The latter is for students whose strengths are in the social sciences and humanities.

“Law, public policy, industries with a green component – there are just a huge variety of careers they can go after,” observes Steve Marshak, a UI geologist who currently serves as the school’s director.

Courses pertaining to sustainability are offered throughout the University in disciplines diverse as aerospace engineering, integrative biology, religious studies and law. Academic experiences for students range from carbon-neutral study abroad to developing models for subsistence-level businesses in a yearlong graduate course taught by business administration professor Madhu Viswanathan. “When the students come back,” Viswanathan observed of the course, which takes students to marketplaces in the cities of India, “they see the world very differently.”

But, then, they see the world differently to begin with.

Among the renewable resources that make sustainability possible – resources like earth, water, air and sunlight – none is more potent than life. And while all life follows the same birth-to-death cycle, only people can radically challenge the parameters of existence – preferably for the better, through the creation and sharing of knowledge.

This is, of course, the very raison d’être of the University of Illinois. And nowhere is the spirit of learning more exuberantly embodied than in the students.

“I want to give the students a lot of credit for really helping to bring this issue to the fore,” says Chancellor Herman. “Obviously there’s a lot of faculty interest in sustainability, both in terms of research and general interest. But the students have championed this cause in a way that deserves special recognition.”

Students are sustainability at Illinois.

It is students who haul the used cooking oil from the residence halls to the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center, where it’s made into biodiesel for the University’s fleet of maintenance vehicles. It is students who are building a state-of-the-art, energy-efficient model home, which will roll to Washington, D.C., for the Solar Decathlon competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy in November (see photos above). It is students who have created a campus carbon registry that will allow environmentally conscious travelers and companies to purchase offsets from plane trips, supporting such energy conservation efforts on campus as sensors that shut off classroom lights when no one’s there and the power-saving “thin clients” that are replacing hard-drive computers in computer labs across campus.

Engineering students have designed a simple planter that is helping some Africans better grow their own food. Other engineering students have created a cooling system for the new Blue Waters supercomputing center that should save $2 million a year in utility costs. Dance and architecture students
rebuilt a dance rehearsal space using recycled material. Students formed a Green Energy Team to collect aluminum cans and make them into solar heaters to be used by underprivileged families.

It is students who ride bikes and take buses and use Zipcars when they need to make a special trip – both because they want to live sustainably and because they are students.

And it is students whose organizations support sustainability in everything from building homes for the needy while on spring break to raising awareness of human trafficking.

Environmental economics major Anthony Larson heads Students for Environmental Concerns, an activist group that mostly engages in collegial activities like working to reduce the amount of bottled water consumed on campus and composting food waste from Allen Hall to fertilize a new farm that supplies produce to the University dining halls (see pp. 10-11).

Yet he offers a perspective that isn’t exactly collegial. “With due respect,” he tells a writer seasoned enough to be his aunt, “we won’t see the effects of climate change in your lifetime, but we’ll see it in my lifetime.

“Your generation is already determining what kind of problems my generation will face in the future, if we don’t do something now.

“It’s our future we’re talking about,” he insists. “It’s not some intangible issue.”

And, in the end, Larson notes, it’s about cooperation. “My roommate is the most conservative person I know, but he’s a better recycler than me,” he confesses.

“It’s not ‘them versus us.’

“It’s everybody.”

Collaboration Imagination

Sal Nudo — Wed 1 Jul 2009 00:00 CST

University gains recognition for its public service innovations

By Deb Aronson

A high school boy teaching computer skills in Africa. An inner city administrator fulfilling her vision of a playground. A rural chemistry teacher linking to a professional community.

What is the connection of these people – and hundreds of others – to the University of Illinois?

Retooling its Land-Grant Mission

They are all part of what the University offers as public service – one of the four legs in its mission, which also includes teaching, research and economic development. Service is something that Illinois has been engaged in almost since its inception as a land-grant university in 1867.

For scores of years, that mainly took the form of sending University people out into the community to share skills and information and then return to their colleges and Extension offices. But in the 21st century, the University has taken the public service aspect of its land-grant purpose – to offer higher education to all – and turned it on its head.

Instead of being a top-down dispenser of information to the community, the University has come to realize that, in fact, things turn out much better for all involved when top-down meets bottom-up. That is, when members of the UI community work in concert with members of other communities, such involvement pays dividends both in the world and back on campus.

Those partnerships range from urban nutrition and rural medicine to the arts, architecture and science. They also involve a wide range of participants and partners, including school-age children, women with small children, college students, K-12 teachers and low-income communities. While some programs have been around for decades, like the East St. Louis Action Research Project, others are only a few years old, like the Institute for Chemistry Literacy Through Computational Sciences, or brand-new, like the Education Justice Project, which has just begun offering college classes to inmates at the Danville Correctional Center.

“When our faculty, staff or students become involved in a public engagement project,” says Chancellor Richard Herman, “they are entering into a contract in which both they and those they engage with have much to gain through the sharing of and creating new knowledge.”

“We have gradually developed a wider recognition of the legitimacy of local or indigenous knowledge,” says Ann Bishop, an associate professor at the UI Graduate School of Library and Information Science. “It is part of this movement – and it really is a movement – away from the idea that the only people with viable knowledge come from the University.”

Carnegie Recognition

And so it is that Joseph Hines, the high school student mentioned above, signed up for the University’s Teen Tech team and ended up traveling to the African island nation of São Tomé/Principe. Once there, he shared his computer knowledge with local high school students and helped install a computer lab. The experience, he says, “sparked my drive and passion again to accomplish lots of things.” Today he’s studying chemistry in college.

Hines’ story is just one of many that illustrate how, like a pebble dropped into a pond, the benefits of University of Illinois public engagement projects ripple out to touch an astonishing array of individuals and communities.

It’s an approach that works.

Recently, that panoply of programs caught the attention of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which awarded Illinois a Community Engagement Classification for both curricular engagement, and outreach and partnerships. The University was one of 112 U.S. colleges and universities that received the certification in late 2008 from the foundation, a highly respected and independent policy and research center founded in 1905 to “do and perform all things necessary to encourage, uphold and dignify the profession of the teacher.”

“We are developing a richer, more sophisticated notion of what it means to be civically engaged, that service is not its own separate thing,” says Bishop, who headed the civic commitment task force that helped write the Carnegie application.

“Such efforts across our campus combine to define who we are as a land-grant university in 2009,” says Steve Sonka, interim vice chancellor of the UI Office of Public Engagement. “The efforts recognized within the Carnegie Report, plus many, many more at our University, determine how the University of Illinois is viewed and is valued by our peers and by the public.”

That perception is important. “When the Carnegie Foundation speaks,” says Kris Campbell, an assistant vice chancellor for public engagement who spearheaded the application submission, “people listen.”

Pick a Partnership

The seemingly countless number and range of community partnerships in which the University is involved are changing and improving the lives of community members, faculty and students in myriad ways.

Some partnerships have a relatively tight focus, like Art-Speak, a program in which Rantoul Township High School students come to the Krannert Art Museum to explore and learn about its resources, create art and then pass that knowledge on to younger children.

“It is part of this movement – and it really is a movement – away from the idea that the only people with viable knowledge come from the University.”

“It is a change that the students go through that is the most important aspect of the program,” says Rantoul art teacher Laura Billimack. “The students arrive shy and uncertain, but they leave with a confidence in creative writing and creative thinking.

“They realize that what they are thinking about has validity and worth.”

Other engagement projects target a more diffuse audience, like the National Great Rivers Research and Education Center, which reaches out to all of Illinois in a variety of ways – through the schools, through special events and through the RiverWatch program. There, “citizen scientists” learn to collect data from their local creeks and streams and report the information as part of a nationwide effort to study and monitor water quality and the environment. The center, which offers students water-related internships in government, education or research settings, is a partnership with the University of Illinois, the Nature Conservancy, Lewis and Clark Community College in Alton, the Natural History Survey and the U.S. Geological Survey.

‘These projects make people more optimistic’

As the perception of service has evolved, so has the concept of how outreach is conducted. Engagement is now far more collaborative, with the recognition that knowledge in these kinds of interactions flows, in fact, in both directions.

The East St. Louis Action Research Project (ESLARP) has been a leader in this more collaborative approach, having been established 22 years ago when faculty in the UI School of Fine and Applied Arts and community leaders in East St. Louis began working together. The goal from the beginning was to encourage
a mutually beneficial partnership between students and community groups.

Irma Golliday, director of the East St. Louis Park District, had a vision of revitalizing communities through improved city parks. One of many projects that grew from that vision was led by Bruce Wicks, MS ’81 AHS, a UI associate professor of recreation and sports tourism. He and his students helped the neighborhood secure a $50,000 grant from the Snapple drink company by way of KaBOOM, a nonprofit organization, for playground equipment at Virginia Park. The students also collaborated with neighborhood people to plan the playground that now seemed possible.

This past spring, more than 300 friends of the park came from far and wide to help build the equipment, says Errol Allen, president of the Friends of Virginia Park Association. They poured in from the neighborhood, from Snapple and from the University.

“I’ve been living in the area for 55 years, and I have never seen that many people in the park, except back in the 1960s when we had an intraschool picnic,” he says. Allen sees the park project as a small but important part of the very big puzzle of how to restore East St. Louis.

“Virginia Park was the first park to get new equipment, and it was a success,” he says. “We’ll do the same [sort of] thing in Lincoln Park. ... A lot of the project also comes afterwards, with things like drum circles and ice cream socials to bring the community together. These projects make people more optimistic.

“It’s not about playground equipment but about bringing people together.”

Trust + Respect = Art + Science

Building the kind of trust and mutual respect among students, faculty and community members that can result in success is somewhat of an art. But hard-core science takes part as well, as the research involved in many engagement projects informs UI professors and measures results so that they may be reproduced elsewhere.

The Institute for Chemistry Literacy Through Computational Sciences (ICLCS), for example, was created three years ago with a grant from the Math-Science Partnership of the National Science Foundation. The collaboration between the UI Department of Chemistry, the UI School of Medicine and NCSA teaches high school chemistry teachers how to use computation and visualization tools to build a molecule, rotate it, view it in 3-D and even see how it behaves when joined with other molecules – a far cry from the balls and sticks models of the traditional chemistry classroom.

The program targets rural high schools that often have only one chemistry teacher or just one science teacher on staff. Teachers come to campus for two weeks every summer to train intensely and meet colleagues, who then correspond throughout the year using Moodle, a social networking tool.

Thanks to Moodle, participants go from being the sole science teacher in their school to, in the words of Carterville chemistry teacher Mary Jo Osborne, “a member of a department with 50 chemistry teachers.”

Project coordinator Dave Mattson ’97 LAS believes that the program “could go a long way in improving understanding and confidence in chemistry.” And that does appear to be the case.

After Osborne learned how to make a small molecule on the computer at NCSA, her students did likewise back in the classroom.

“The next day a student came and said, ‘I went home and made ATP,’ which is a big molecule,” says Osborne, sounding thrilled. “My students could learn something in class, then sign on to the NCSA computers and build a much bigger molecule because NCSA gives them access. I think that’s huge.”

Rodger Baldwin, who teaches at Clinton High School, credits the program for broadening his insulated environment and improving his professional growth – he’s the next president of the Illinois Association of Chemistry Teachers.

The trickle-down effect continued as students benefited from Baldwin’s growing confidence. Not only are they doing better in class, they also attended the University’s annual Engineering Open House for the first time. “Because I knew people, I felt comfortable taking my class to campus,” says Baldwin.

Tests administered to both students and teachers show improved test scores. Like ripples in a pond, the ICLCS experience will expand outward from teachers to students and even beyond. Estimates are that 15,000 students will benefit from the first five years of the program, with plans to expand to other schools as well.

From the Mississippi to the Atlantic

Ripples happen in other ways, too, as one outreach program might spawn another or join forces with an existing one.

That’s what happened with UI graduate student Jorge Coelho, MS ’97 BUS, MS ’02 LIS, who had participated in a computer networking project in the East St. Louis program. He and Paul Adams, Coelho’s adviser and director of community networking with the UI Graduate School of Library and Information Science, then took that same model to Coelho’s native São Tomé, where they installed computer labs and access points for several years.

Meanwhile, Adams had additional plans for the Teen Tech Team, a program which teaches hardware skills and software applications to young people and had been used in East St. Louis. “Since setting up computer labs in East St. Louis also worked in São Tomé,” he said, “it was time to take Teen Tech on the road, too.”

Of the three students chosen for that journey, one was Hines.

“The whole idea was the Teen Tech kids were going to teach what they knew about computers to kids at the high school and together set up a computer lab,” says Adams.

And so a pebble, dropped in the “pond” of East St. Louis, created ripples that lapped the shores of Africa.

Aronson is a freelance writer who lives in Urbana with her husband and two children.

David Blackwell, 'Superstar'

Sal Nudo — Wed 1 Jul 2009 00:00 CST

By Daniel Cattau

By the start of World War II, Joseph Doob, HON ’81, a renowned mathematician at the University of Illinois, already had pioneered work in modern probability theory.

In the next decades, Doob’s foundational work would help broaden the field of mathematics to a dizzying array of uses in science, economics and technology. So it came as no surprise when in 1942, Jerzy Neyman of the University of California at Berkeley asked if Doob were interested in going West.

“No, I cannot come, but I have some good students, and Blackwell is the best,” he replied.

“But of course he’s black,” Doob continued, “and in spite of the fact that we are in a war that’s advancing the cause of democracy, it may not have spread throughout our own land.”

The quote, repeated in the book “Mathematical People,” says a lot about the times and even more about David H. Blackwell ’38 LAS, AM ’39 LAS, PHD ’41 LAS, HON ’66, who started as an Illinois undergraduate in 1935 and finished with a doctoral degree six years later, all accomplished at a time when residence halls were whites-only, and approximately 100 blacks were included in the student body of nearly 12,000.

What would be the odds of the son of a railroad worker from Centralia – whose parents did not complete high school and whose Depression-era teaching prospects were limited to segregated schools – becoming one of the top theoretical mathematicians (black or white) in the world?

Almost too hard to compute.

Helping Hands

Growing up in a town of 12,000 people, Blackwell was surrounded by a close-knit family.

The oldest of four children, he appeared to be precocious at an early age. Able to read before entering one of the five mixed-race schools in town, he attributed his ability to the time he spent at a grocery and dry goods store owned by relatives.

“There would be a package of seeds for a pumpkin, and there would be a picture with the word ‘PUMPKIN,’” said Blackwell. “That’s how I learned to read.”

While he showed an early aptitude for reading, he didn’t display much interest in math. At Centralia High School, Blackwell remained unimpressed by algebra or trigonometry and thought calculus might be useful (for engineers). But then geometry teacher Caroline Luther opened his eyes to the “helping line.”

“It was just beautiful, and some of it was unexpected,” he said. The concept, often called “elegant” mathematics, adds seemingly irrelevant lines which end up clarifying a problem, thereby turning “something mysterious into something
obvious,” he said.

And in just that way, Blackwell’s lifelong romance with mathematics began.

Modest Ambitions

When a 16-year-old Blackwell arrived at Illinois in 1935, he was “not very ambitious,” but thought he might become an elementary school teacher or perhaps a high school math teacher.

“My father had a friend who was on the school board in a county on the extreme end of southern Illinois,” said Blackwell. “He said he could get me a job teaching in a black school. ... that settled it.”

As it turned out, his aspirations were far too modest. Much to his surprise, Blackwell was encouraged by his professors to continue his graduate studies, and he did so under Doob.

“You could either get a fellowship or a teaching assistantship,” said Blackwell of his search for financial support. “One of my fellow graduate students told me, ‘You’re going to get a fellowship.’”

“How do you know?” Blackwell asked.

“You’re good enough to be supported one way or another,” the fellow student replied, “and they’re certainly not going to put you in front of a classroom.”

After earning a UI doctoral degree in mathematics in 1941 at the age of 22, Blackwell completed a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., where he worked with, among others, John von Neumann, father of modern game theory.

Berkeley’s Jerzy Neyman – who had been unable to persuade Doob to join his department – wanted to offer Blackwell a position but appeared to have come up against a deal-breaker.

In an oral history interview at Berkeley, Blackwell, now 90 years old and in “fair” health, recalled what he learned years later – that the Texan wife of the department head told her husband she “was not going to have that darky in her house.”

The job offer never came.

Blackwell focused his efforts instead on realistic career aspirations for a person of color at the time. In 1942 he applied to 105 historically black colleges, received three offers and eventually landed at Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1944, where he remained for 10 years.

It was at Howard and during his summers at the RAND Corp. that Blackwell met statistician Abe Girschick, with whom he co-authored the classic “Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions,” and Jimmie Savage, who helped Blackwell’s career and reputation to blossom via the work they did in game theory.

And while that may sound like, well, fun and games, game theory is a serious business that determines mathematical bases for making decisions in games and/or conflict situations involving two or more persons. The theory may be applied to transactions ranging from simple rounds of “rock, paper, scissors” to the infinitely more complex zero-sum nuclear arms race.

“People who study games know who David Blackwell is,” said UI statistics professor Stephen Portnoy.

‘You see something new’

Back at Berkeley, Neyman had never forgotten Blackwell and finally hired him in 1954, where he would stay for the remainder of his career.

It’s been said that by the age of 40, Blackwell had accomplished what mathematicians would consider a lifetime’s work. “He’s highly intelligent, very sensitive and introspective in the way he processes information and keeps it inside him,” said Richard Tapia of Rice University. “But it’s easy to talk about a superstar.”

Blackwell was one of the first researchers to introduce into the field of statistics game theory and decision theory, ideas whose mathematical concepts can apply directly to real-world problems (for example, decision theory can be used by industrial managers to solve problems like scheduling, safety and maintenance). He founded the theory of the comparison of experiments, which eventually became a key tenet of mathematical statistics.

“I have often thought of how different America could be if we could produce more David Blackwells.”
– Freeman A. Hrabowski III

In addition, Blackwell published numerous papers, despite teaching 12 hours, serving as department chairman and supervising dozens of graduate students. (Plus, he and his late wife of 62 years, Ann, an accomplished jazz pianist, had eight children.) He developed a reputation as a dynamic lecturer and teacher, an observation with which Douglas Simpson, chairman of the statistics department at Illinois, concurs. “Professor Blackwell is … known as a lucid and eloquent public speaker,” Simpson said, “with a gift for explaining mathematical ideas to a broad audience.”

Donald L. Burkholder, a UI professor emeritus of mathematics, got to know Blackwell during a sabbatical at Berkeley in the early 1960s.

“[He] is a very interesting and very pleasant person,” Burkholder recalled. “If you had an office and you had to share it with someone, it would be Blackwell.”

Perhaps that’s because unlike some other mathematicians whom Burkholder describes as aloof and arrogant, Blackwell is “dignified … [and] doesn’t try to exalt himself,” Burkholder said.

Nor does Blackwell mind spreading the wealth of mathematical insight around. “[If] I have a problem and I’ve worked on it, I can’t solve it, I keep telling other people about it,” he said. “I guess that’s another example of my bugging other people with problems.

“I like mathematics. It’s beautiful,” Blackwell said. (Note: When this reporter confessed his highest math course had been high school calculus, Blackwell replied with “poor fellow,” sincerely sorry that the writer had lost so many opportunities to enjoy the delights of the world of math.)

“I like understanding things and explaining them,” he said. “And sometimes when you’re trying to understand something, you see something new, and they call that research.”

He also allows a broad perspective in evaluating people and their talents. According to Berkeley’s oral history, Blackwell eschewed the traditional forms of review when a certain graduate student wasn’t doing well.

While he knew little about the student’s studies, Blackwell placed a vote of confidence in him. His reason? In Blackwell’s opinion, the student “was far and away the best Kriegspiel player in the department.”

If you can’t add numbers in your head, you probably wouldn’t be good at Kriegspiel – also called blind chess – which involves one referee, two players and three chess boards. In the game, a player makes a move without knowing the position of the opponent’s pieces. The referee rules whether the move is permitted, with the player making another one if the original is disallowed.

“And on the basis of my recommendation – made because of [the grad student’s] Kriegspiel – he was kept on for another year,” Blackwell said.

Honors and Accolades

Blackwell’s efforts haven’t gone unnoticed. He was the first black tenured faculty member at Berkeley and in 1965 became the first black elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In addition, several theorems have been named after him.

In 1979 Blackwell was awarded the John von Neumann Theory Prize for his “many contributions in probability theory, mathematical statistics, and game theory that have strengthened the methodology of operations research and management science” and in particular for developing the theory of Markovian decision processes.

Impressed? The previous year’s winners were John Nash (the schizophrenic professor portrayed by actor Russell Crowe in the 2001 film “A Beautiful Mind”) and Carlton Lemke for their work on noncooperative games.

Blackwell can count among his many accolades some of the most prestigious professional prizes and honorary doctorates from, among others, Harvard, Amherst, Yale and Carnegie Mellon. In 1994, the University of Illinois Alumni Achievement Award was bestowed on him by the UI Alumni Association. Yet in the oral history project at Berkeley, when asked what awards meant the most to him, he replied simply:

“Yes, there were two honors that I’m really proud of. One was my honorary degree from the University of Illinois [1966]. And the other was my honorary degree from Howard University. ... I was at the University of Illinois for six years. And I was at Howard University for 10 years. So, when you get an honorary degree from a place where the people really know you, that’s something to be pleased with, I think.”

‘Gentle Giant’

Blackwell’s influence in the field of mathematics reaches far beyond the class-
room walls.

University of Michigan math professor Robert E. Megginson ’69 LAS, AM ’83 LAS, PHD ’84 LAS, described Blackwell as a “gentle giant … always helpful to anyone who can benefit from his attention and thoughts, whether it is an eminent mathematical colleague or a beginning student.”

He and Megginson, an American Indian, have often discussed the small number of minorities in mathematics (according to 2007 figures, doctoral-degreed black faculty members in math or statistics in four-year colleges number 3 percent or less).

Blackwell’s dedication to expanding opportunities for minorities in those fields was acknowledged in 2002, when the Blackwell-Tapia Prize was established and named for him and Richard Tapia, the Rice University professor who is the son of Mexican immigrants. The award honors those who have served as role models for minority students or who have addressed the issue of having few minorities in
the field.

For Blackwell and many others, the number of minority students remains a concern.

“When I entered graduate school in mathematics at the University of Illinois in
1970, I was astounded to learn that an African-American had actually studied there as an undergraduate and graduate student more than 30 years before,” said Freeman A. Hrabowski III, AM ’71 LAS, PHD ’75 ED, HON ’04, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a crusader for closing race and gender gaps in math and science.

“I have used his name many times over the years when encouraging students to consider mathematics as a career,” he said, “and I have often thought of how different America could be if we could produce more David Blackwells.”

Cattau, a former lecturer at the UI College of Media, is a writer in Chicago.