The Urban university attacks real urban issues.

• Author: Stukel, James J.
• Position: University of Illinois - Includes related article

With its "Great Cities" initiative, the University of illinois at Chicago is integrating its community-oriented teaching, research and service functions.

Scientists at Fermilab in Chicago's western suburbs recently announced they had found evidence of the top quark, a fundamental subatomic particle. More than 400 researchers had been searching for this particle for 17 years at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. And now they believe they have found it. It is about one trillionth the thickness of a human hair, and it lasts for about a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. This is a major accomplishment in particle physics, and it shows what academic researchers can do when they put their minds to something. The physicists who made this happen deserve the applause of the academic community.

But when one looks at the polls and talks to ordinary people, it is clear that atomic theory is not uppermost in their minds. The political science department at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) has been polling and running focus groups for the last several months and it has found, to nobody's surprise, that the top concerns are crime, elementary and secondary education, jobs and health care. And while these concerns exist in all parts of the country, they are most heavily concentrated in the nation's urban areas.

This presents a particular challenge for research universities located in metropolitan areas, as the UIC is. Though they must never lose sight of their primarily responsibility of providing an education for the young (and not-so-young) people in their communities, these universities are being asked more and more to apply their research expertise to the very real, day-to-day problems of the cities; to apply the same energy, brainpower and resources to the problems of the cities that have been applied with such success to particle physics.

In Chicago: A Great Cities Initiative

The UIC's Great Cities initiative takes up this challenge: it is the university's institutional commitment to direct its teaching, research and public service toward improving the quality of life in Chicago and other metropolitan areas. The program was announced at a conference in December 1993, attended by Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and a host of business and community leaders, and since then has generated wide community support. In July 1994, Governor Jim Edgar and the Illinois General Assembly approved a $900,000 appropriation for the program.

UIC is one of two campuses of the University of Illinois. The other, older campus in Urbana-Champaign was chartered in 1867 as a land-grant university under the provisions of the Morrill Act, which granted federal land or equivalent money to universities for research and education in agriculture and the mechanical arts. The original land-grant universities did a masterful job on agriculture and engineering. American farmers are the most efficient and productive in the world, and students from all over the world come to this country to study engineering and science. There is certainly a lot more to learn in the areas of engineering and big science. But the critical issues of today and the foreseeable future--soaring health care costs, increasing poverty, overcrowded jails, crumbling infrastructure--belong to urban universities such as UIC.

UIC has 25,000 students, about 80 percent of whom come from the Chicago metropolitan area. Many of its graduate and professional programs are nationally ranked, though the undergraduate admissions requirements are relatively modest. Almost half the students are members of minority groups. The annual research budget is $100 million, placing UIC among the top 88 research universities in the nation.

The Great Cities concept, providing a focus and organizing principle for what many of the UIC faculty and staff are doing already, expresses their commitment to work that addresses human needs...