Alumni Interview: Kevin Jackson
When I arrived at Illinois in 1990, a kid out of a tough neighborhood south of Chicago, I had no idea I’d become a research scientist. I was a football player who felt blessed...
Birds of a Feather
In his first picture book, Mr. Watson’s Chickens (Chronicle Books), Jarrett Dapier, ’01 LAS, MSLIS ’15, tells the story of a same-sex couple whose love can survive anything—even a house overrun by 456 singing,...
Taboo Buster
Dr. Nicole Williams, ’97 LAS, ’97 LAS, doesn’t get mad—she gets motivated. When a guidance counselor suggested that she consider becoming a nurse instead of a doctor, Williams doubled down on her studies, earned...
Alumni Interview: Ronald S. Urick
In the 1995 movie Mr. Holland’s Opus, Richard Dreyfuss plays a classical composer who begrudgingly accepts a high school music teaching job to pay the bills. As the film unfolds, though, his outlook transforms,...
Class Notes Profile: Aviation Enthusiast
Visit an air show, and you might see Paul R. Wood, ’76 BUS, waving from a WWI biplane or a Vietnam-era A-4 Skyhawk. Wood is the founder and head of the Warbird Heritage Foundation,...
FIRST CLASS
To understand what has happened at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine (CIMED), it’s helpful to begin on a scale that goes from titanic to tiny. Within the mighty University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, more...
Free Speech and Controversy
It was the 1960s, a decade that would change everything, and at Illinois, that change would come in a swirl of controversy. In Dangerous Ideas on Campus: Sex, Conspiracy and Academic Freedom in the...
Alumni Interview: Karen Layng
The Seventh Circuit Bar Association was founded in 1951. But it had never had a woman president before me, in 2001. If you go up to the ceremonial courtroom in the Dirksen Center, there’s...
Fleming’s Man
The driving passion of Mike VanBlaricum’s life (one of them, anyway) sparked to life early in 1965 at the Apollo Theater’s Friday-night show in Princeton, Ill., a tiny town surrounded by cornfields about two...
Aviation Enthusiast
Visit an air show, and you just may see Paul R. Wood, ’76 BUS, waving to you from the cockpit of a World War I biplane or a Vietnam-era supersonic jet. Wood is founder...
