Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1968 [PAGE 605]

EXTRACTED TEXT FROM PAGE:

1967]

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

553

Nazi Party, or an advocate of free love, L S D , or marijuana, or someone who plans to recite the sayings of Chairman Mao. These types of presentation have an impact that is less intellectual than visceral. As such, they may appear alien to the academic way of life, and they are fearfully rejected. Whereupon we arrive at a curious impasse. The administration, arguing from the traditional definition of academic freedom, asserts that there are no limitations on rational discourse on this campus — and they are right. But the students, arguing from a different conception of freedom, assert that their right to learn, and even their right of free speech, has been denied. In the year ahead, we shall certainly be engaged with this question. Personally, I believe that there is educational benefit in exposure to those with different commitments — even to eccentric or anti-social causes. I am confident students can judge better than we have previously supposed, and I hope that the limits that are set, if any, will be flexible and unobtrusive. A second major issue is social freedom. It has become increasingly clear that the day of an effective role for the university in loco parentis is dead. Our students are not boys and girls, but men and women. Student government is not controlled play, preparing leaders for real life. It is real life, concerned with real problems of citizenship that are crucial to the life of the university and the nation. In common with other colleges and universities, we have tended to bind students with a network of rules and regulations. During the past year, however, in such matters as women's hours and general housing regulations, we have begun to transfer to students some of the responsibility that should properly be theirs. They have accepted these responsibilities with a degree of maturity and common sense that would have astounded us ten years ago. In the year ahead, through cooperation with a strong student government, I am confident that this transfer of responsibility will continue steadily — as it should. Finally, in the year ahead, as in the year just past, we will be deeply concerned with finding ways to make each student's residence on this campus an integral part of his education. During the last semester, we have had a modest program in which faculty members have associated themselves informally with an undergraduate residence hall. Beginning in September, we will extend this program of faculty associates, and add to it a language house, a plan for the effective assignment of honors students, a plan for bringing together students of similar intellectual interests, for scheduling the residents of certain houses in a few of the same classes, and for teaching some introductory courses in the residence halls. To these will be added opportunities for independent study, and hopefully, a means of providing academic advising in residence halls. The new directions we derive from the experiments will enable us to realize the full potential of a residential campus, and to give to undergraduate life a focus and coherence that are needed in a large university. In this and other areas, we will be concerning ourselves with the affairs of the finest groups of young men and women this University has ever had enrolled. I am confident that we will meet the challenges they present. From meeting new problems, we will derive new strength; and from new questions, new definitions of the role of our University. APPROPRIATIONS FOR NONRECURRING EXPENDITURES, URBANA (11) T h e Executive Vice-President and Provost and the Vice-President and Comptroller recommend the following appropriations for Urbana-Champaign from: Urbana-Champaign Contract Research Reserve College of Engineering Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, equipment $11 250 00 Urbana-Champaign General Reserve (to be assigned after July 1) Assignments to match funds for grants received from the National Science Foundation under the Instructional Scientific Equipment Program: College of Engineering Department of Civil Engineering $18 500 00 Department of Electrical Engineering 14 800 00 Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering 15 000 00