Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

May 5 event reflects on lecture series and undergraduate education

The final event in a lecture series focusing on undergraduate education will be from 4 to 5:30 p.m. May 5 in the ACES Library Heritage Room. The event will include a conversation to reflect on the year’s four lectures and the issues they raise about undergraduate education on the Urbana campus. The series has been planned and hosted by the Lecture and Discussion Committee of the Campus Conversation on Undergraduate Education. Light refreshments will be served.

The series began in September with a visit by Nancy Folbre, a professor emerita of the University of Massachussets, Amherst. Folbre, an economist, provided a helpful history of shifts in funding for public higher education and also reflected on the grassroots political work that she and others undertook to maintain state funding for the university.

In November, Coursera CEO and former Yale President Rick Levin made the case for a common curriculum designed to foster crosscultural understanding along with other core competencies.

In December, Dartmouth University Provost Carolyn Dever described Dartmouth’s efforts to rethink liberal arts education. Among other things, Dever stressed the importance of living-learning communities and bringing faculty members and students together in informal dialogue.

The series continued in February with a visit by Harry Boyte, a senior scholar at the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College, who challenged the audience not to reduce democracy to the machinery of government or civics to volunteer work, but to transcend ivory tower detachment and imagine higher education as the very work of democracy.

Blog posts about two of the lectures are available online and videos of three of the lectures also are available.

This final event will use these lectures as occasions to continue the campus conversation on undergraduate education. Members of the campus community are invited, regardless of how many of the lectures they have been able to attend. The session will begin with brief recaps of each lecture and then shift to open discussion. 

Read Next

Announcements Marcelo Garcia, professor of civil and environmental engineering at The Grainger College of Engineering.

Illinois faculty member elected to National Academy of Engineering

Champaign, Ill. — Marcelo Garcia, a professor of civil and environmental engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Social sciences Male and female student embracing on the quad with flowering redbud tree and the ACES library in the background. Photo by Michelle Hassel

Dating is not broken, but the trajectories of relationships have changed

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — According to some popular culture writers and online posts by discouraged singles lamenting their inability to find romantic partners, dating is “broken,” fractured by the social isolation created by technology, pandemic lockdowns and potential partners’ unrealistic expectations. Yet two studies of college students conducted a decade apart found that their ideas about […]

Engineering Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Nishant Garg, center, is joined by fellow researchers, from left: Yujia Min, Hossein Kabir, Nishant Garg, center, Chirayu Kothari and M. Farjad Iqbal, front right. In front are examples of clay samples dissolved at different concentrations in a NaOH solution. The team invented a new test that can predict the performance of cementitious materials in mere 5 minutes. This is in contrast to the standard ASTM tests, which take up to 28 days. This new advance enables real-time quality control at production plants of emerging, sustainable materials. Photo taken at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on Monday, Feb. 3, 2025. (Photo by Fred Zwicky / University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Researchers develop a five-minute quality test for sustainable cement industry materials

A new test developed at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign can predict the performance of a new type of cementitious construction material in five minutes — a significant improvement over the current industry standard method, which takes seven or more days to complete. This development is poised to advance the use of next-generation resources called supplementary cementitious materials — or SCMs — by speeding up the quality-check process before leaving the production floor.

Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

507 E. Green St
MC-426
Champaign, IL 61820

Email: stratcom@illinois.edu

Phone (217) 333-5010