CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Perhaps any large public research university could tell the same basic story, but it is unlikely that any other telling would be richer or deeper.
The story is in fact 21 stories - historical vignettes drawn from one university over an entire century - which together reveal "how knowledge is produced and how great public universities come to be," writes Richard Herman, the provost of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in his preface to the new book, "No Boundaries: University of Illinois Vignettes" (University of Illinois Press).
Herman, who began working at the university in 1998, commissioned the book after hearing story after story about "the remarkable people who fashioned this institution across the generations, across so many fields of learning, and who continue to remake it in new ways."
"There is a nobility of purpose here and a legacy to be preserved and built upon," Herman wrote about the Urbana campus.
The impression "No Boundaries" leaves is that Illinois always has been a magnet for visionaries and risk-takers, as Herman says, and always has been a cradle of academic invention, creativity, pioneering - even from its earliest days and across all decades.
The new book, edited by Lillian Hoddeson, a professor of history at Illinois, contains a few familiar stories, freshly retold, and many previously unknown tales, newly revealed. Most of the contributors are current or emeritus Illinois faculty members; all of their subjects are Illinois faculty and staff members, now deceased.
"This is a book about people whose work shaped, and was shaped by, the University of Illinois," Hoddeson wrote.
"This book is also a kind of environmental history in that it deals with the role of 'place' in a university's production of knowledge, culture, and well-educated people."
The first part of the book focuses on "two backbones of the university," Hoddeson wrote - its buildings and its library. Part two deals with the inception of athletic programs, including football. Part three carries the university's story into post-World War II, "when numerous departments and institutes in the fields of science, engineering, business, and the social sciences achieved international stature and the university assumed its place among the great American institutions of higher learning." Part four, on fine arts, opens with a chapter on Lejaren Hiller, "who broke new ground by employing the university's unique resources in digital computing to devise a revolutionary way of composing music."
In the book, enriched with photographs, readers are reminded of John Bardeen's travails and triumphs on the road to winning two Nobel prizes while at Illinois. Hoddeson, who specializes in the history of 20th century science and technology, wrote the Bardeen essay and the introduction to the book. She is the author of several books, including the most recent, "True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen" (Joseph Henry Press, 2002).
The book also makes clear the lengths to which the great baritone William Ceasar Warfield, affectionately called "Uncle Bill," went to welcome, inspire and nurture music school students and colleagues. "There are endless stories recounting his good deeds," wrote Ollie Watts Davis, who studied with Warfield and has been a professor of voice at Illinois since 1987.
Katherine Sharp's Herculean efforts and vision to hew a library school and a major library out of the Illinois prairie in the 1890s also is told. Sharp was a protégé of "the redoubtable" Melvil Dewey, and often worked with "uncontrolled energy," wrote Donald Krummel, professor emeritus of library science and of music. "Not until well into the 1960s were any other major American academic libraries headed by women."
The title of the book is taken from something Isabel Bevier wrote after visiting the U. of I. campus in 1900, to interview for the new position of professor of household science.
"I thought I had never seen so flat and muddy a place: no trees, no hills, no boundaries of any kind."
But, as Paula Treichler, director of Illinois' Institute of Communications Research, wrote in her essay on Bevier, "the place had character, and as Bevier considered all that she had seen and heard at Illinois, the landscape became for her a powerful metaphor for the institution she was about to join: its openness to new ideas, its support for co-education, and its commitment to the land-grant mission that linked theory to practice, learning to labor, and science to the problems of the world where men and women live."
According to Treichler, the possibilities at Illinois "exhilarated" Bevier, who was hired to carve out a new department, "essentially from scratch."
As Bevier later conceded: "This lack of boundaries, physical and mental, the open-mindedness of the authorities and their willingness to try experiments, indeed their desire to do so, opened up a whole new world for me."
Other profiles include Roger Adams, the powerhouse head of chemistry; Oscar Lewis, the anthropologist of poverty; Charles Osgood, the pioneering psycholinguist; and Stuart Pratt Sherman and J. Kerker Quinn, who together, helped put the young campus "on the American literary map," wrote Bruce Michelson, a U. of I. English professor and contributor to "No Boundaries."