University of Illinois

President // Speeches and Statements

TESTIMONY BY B. JOSEPH WHITE
Senate Appropriations Hearing
95th General Assembly
April 26, 2007

 

Senator Hunter, Senator Sullivan, Senator Althoff, members of the Committee:

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today.

I begin by thanking each of you for your support of higher education and the University of Illinois.

Higher education in our state, and particularly the University of Illinois, are the state’s most valuable assets in creating a prosperous future for our citizens. Higher education is preventive while much of state spending, regrettably, is dedicated to finding problems after they occur and fixing or containing them. Many of these problems can be prevented by education.

Today, most people need a college education to achieve their dreams. College versus high school means at least 70 percent higher lifetime earnings, a one-third lower unemployment rate and a much higher propensity to vote. Yet while 85 percent of Americans graduate from high school, only about 30 percent graduate from college.

The gap is far worse for some minority groups. In Illinois, 77 percent of African Americans graduate from high school, only 15 percent from college. For Latinos nationally, 60 percent have a high school diploma and 12 percent have a college degree.

I have a great sense of urgency about closing these gaps, and I will for the rest of my life. They represent a tragic under investment in human capital that is dashing individual dreams and weakening the competitiveness of Illinois and the nation.

We are proud, but not satisfied, that we have more than 10,000 African American and Latino students at U of I.

Fewer than 40 percent of young American adults age 25-45 earn a college degree. We used to lead the world in this category; today we are 8th after countries like Japan, South Korea and several western European nations. Let’s be honest: today 75 percent of Americans should be completing college. So relatively speaking, we’re declining in education just when we should be accelerating.

If all we did at U at I was educate students — 70,000 a year on three campuses — we would be the state’s most valuable asset. But there’s more.

Seven hundred million dollars a year in research grants and contracts at U of I solve problems that we are all worried about — like energy and global warming and health care that is efficacious, efficient and empowering — while importing dollars to our state and creating jobs and companies and industries. UIC is one of America’s top 50 universities in federally funded research, especially in biomedical science. Our Urbana campus is a research powerhouse where we recently announced a $500 million, 10-year grant from BP on biofuels to U of I, UC-Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

And we create economic opportunity. With the help of Trustee Frances Carroll, we have ramped up our Minority and Diversity Business Program. As a result, we beat our FY2006 MAFBE goal by 100 percent. Time to raise the goal!

I don’t want to preach to the choir. Yet I have a message. We must protect Illinois’ investment in its most valuable asset, the University of Illinois. It is wrong to neglect it. And it is wrong to force us to preserve quality by reducing access and affordability. Yet, despite our best efforts, this is what is happening.

The reason is that state support and student tuition and fees are on a teeter-totter. The more help we get from the state, the lower our tuition and fee increases. The less help we get from the state, the more students and their families must shoulder the burden of maintaining the quality of the state’s most valuable asset.

I sit before you today as the grandson of Italian immigrants. They were working-class people with the American dream whose grandson became president of the University of Illinois with 21 Nobel Prize winners, 550,000 living graduates and distinction in engineering, computer science, chemistry, agriculture, the health sciences and more. I am here, like so many of you, because I had access to a great education, and it transformed my life and my family’s prospects.

In my inaugural address, I said: “Make no mistake. I did not come here to preside over decline.” As a result, we — the Board of Trustees, the Chancellors and I — have agreed on five strategic priorities for the University of Illinois. They are to:

•  make the Urbana campus America’s best public research university.
•  make the Chicago campus America’s premier urban public research university.
•  make the Springfield campus one of America’s top five small, public liberal arts universities — a College of William & Mary of the Midwest.
•  position the U of I Medical Center in Chicago and our five health-science colleges in Chicago, Rockford, Peoria and Urbana for the next quarter century of education, research and clinical care.
•  make the University of Illinois the nation’s leader in quality online education through the Global Campus Partnership.

We can achieve these goals, and play a leading role in building a great future for the state of Illinois, with proper funding from the state and a renewed capital budget. I ask your support. If the state does its part, we can make tuition affordable, excel in attracting research grants and contracts and succeed in the largest fund-raising campaign in U of I history, more than $2 billion, that we will kick off on June 1 at Navy Pier.

Let me conclude today on the subject of safety, a matter much on our minds in the aftermath of the tragedy at Virginia Tech.

We have critically reviewed our security and crisis-management arrangements because of the horror at Virginia Tech. Our arrangements are extensive and, in general, reassuring. Indeed, police and firefighters from across Illinois come to our Police Training and Fire Safety Institutes to help prepare themselves for these matters.

But, three things have stood out for us in our review.

First, in a crisis, we must capitalize on the way young people communicate today, specifically through text-messaging and email. There is probably no better way to alert the majority of our community to an immediate or imminent danger than electronically, and we intend to be fully prepared to do so.

Second, it’s fair to say that in the past, we would not have considered shutting down an entire campus community of up to 50,000 people because of one violent incident in one facility. Yet, in light of what happened at Virginia Tech and, frankly, considering the destructive force of weapons available to people in America today, we must review and reconsider this matter.

Third, we must think even harder about prevention. At Virginia Tech, we saw the limits of our ability in a free society to protect ourselves from a deeply troubled individual, even when he is known to be troubled. Yet we must continue to try. The University of Illinois has a distinguished history and national reputation in the prevention of student suicide. Members of our community know the signs of self-destructive tendencies, they know what to do and we have the resources to help individuals in crisis. We must do the same with respect to individuals at risk of harming others as well as themselves. There are no guarantees, but we are committed to doing our very best to ensure the safety of all members of the University community.

Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you today and, more important, for your support of higher education and the University of Illinois.

I look forward to your comments and questions.