CHICAGO—Sylvia Manning, chancellor of the University of Illinois at Chicago since 1999, today announced she will retire from UIC at the end of 2007. Manning leaves a legacy of campus expansion and enhancement and of rapid growth in UIC’s academic research enterprise.

“It has been a great privilege to lead one of the most dynamic university campuses in the nation,” Manning said. “While I look forward to my own next steps, I will certainly miss the wonders of UIC and working with its terrific faculty, staff, students, supporters and community partners. This is a remarkable campus and it has a tremendous future.

“With a very strong team of deans and other administrators in place and the successful launch of the Brilliant Futures fundraising campaign last month, I felt the time was right to move on,” Manning said.

B. Joseph White, president of the University of Illinois, said a national search will be launched to choose a successor for Manning, who will retire Dec. 31.

“Sylvia has provided superb leadership to UIC,” White said. “Every member of the UIC family – faculty, students, staff, alumni and friends – has benefited from her intellect, integrity, collegiality and passion for this campus.”

“Sylvia’s legacy is a campus that embodies ideals she has stated so eloquently on many occasions – that UIC offers excellence and access to an incredibly diverse student body,” said Lawrence C. Eppley, chair of the university Board of Trustees. “Both as chancellor and before that as University of Illinois vice president for academic affairs, she brought an intense focus on students and student achievements.”

UIC has achieved numerous major accomplishments during Manning’s tenure as chancellor, including the following:

• UIC moved into the top 50 universities in the nation in federal research funding, currently about $200 million a year, one of the best measures of faculty excellence. New research facilities opened on campus during her chancellorship include the College of Medicine Research Building and the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, containing the world’s most powerful MRI machine for human studies.
  
  
• With Manning’s focus on the student experience and student achievement, UIC’s six-year graduation rate reached its highest level ever. UIC had its first Rhodes Scholar and UIC students regularly win top competitive scholarships, such as Gates-Cambridge, Goldwater, Fulbright and Truman awards.
  
  
• Construction began, and has been substantially completed, on UIC’s massive South Campus expansion, with residences for almost 800 students completed and another 750 scheduled to open next month. The number of students living on campus, more than 3,800, will have increased more than 50 percent during her tenure. South Campus also is home to the new “UIC Skyspace,” a critically acclaimed addition to Chicago’s public art, by renowned artist James Turrell.
  
  
• The campus expansion melded with a transformation of the near West Side of Chicago as UIC marked key milestones in its growth. In 2002, UIC was designated the repository of the papers of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley, who considered the creation of the UIC campus his greatest contribution to the life of Chicago. In February 2005, UIC marked the 40th anniversary of the founding of what was then called the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. (In 1982 the Circle Campus merged with the Medical Center campus to form UIC.) In April 2005, UIC and the Daley family hosted the first annual Richard J. Daley Urban Forum on the 50th anniversary of the late mayor's first inauguration.
  
  
• UIC opened the new east campus recreation center and launched an ambitious program to create comfortable lounge and study areas across campus to enhance the living and learning environment for students and enable more outside-the-classroom interactions between faculty and students.
  
  
• UIC’s Great Cities program was re-energized as a campus-wide commitment to engage with partners to improve urban areas around the world. Great Cities now consists of 500 separate programs with 1,100 external partners and some 400 UIC faculty and staff in every UIC college.
  
  
• Under a new leadership team Manning appointed at the Medical Center, the hospital has reported a positive bottom line for seven consecutive years, and surveys show in-patient and out-patient satisfaction rates at more than 90 percent.
  
  

Manning was named interim chancellor in September 1999 and permanent chancellor in July 2000, after serving since 1994 as the University of Illinois system’s vice president for academic affairs. As vice president, she oversaw development of the state-appropriated budget and coordination of academic affairs university-wide; led the creation of the University of Illinois Online, the university’s program for Web-based teaching and learning; and supervised integration of the former Sangamon State University, now the University of Illinois at Springfield, into the U. of I. system in 1995.

She came to the University of Illinois from the University of Southern California, where she held the position of executive vice provost from 1988-94. Before USC, Manning had served as associate dean for Arts, Letters and Social Sciences at California State University, Hayward.

Manning holds a Ph.D. in English language and literature from Yale University and a bachelor’s degree from McGill University in Montreal. A former Woodrow Wilson Fellow and Danforth Teaching Fellow, she has written numerous books and articles on Charles Dickens and other Victorian writers. She serves on the executive committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago and on the boards of Chicago Technology Park Corporation, the Noble Street Network of Charter Schools, the Chicago Metro History Education Committee and the Chicago Central Area Committee. (Her full biography is at http://www.uic.edu/homeindex/admin_manning.shtml.)

With more than 24,000 students and 12,000 faculty and staff and a budget of more than $1.5 billion, UIC is Chicago’s largest university and ranks among the city’s top 20 employers. UIC operates 15 colleges, including the nation’s largest college of medicine, with regional health sciences campuses in Peoria, Rockford and Urbana-Champaign, and the state’s major public medical center.

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