UI System President Timothy Killeen came to campus Monday for the Annual Meeting of the Faculty. During his remarks, Killeen expressed support for diversity, equity and inclusion, celebrated the University’s growing enrollment and noted a high amount of alumni donations this year.
Killeen, addressing a room of roughly 200 University students and faculty members, began by acknowledging the challenges higher education has faced since President Donald Trump entered office.
“This year has been unusual in that higher education itself, our whole enterprise, has been in a spotlight, not always a favorable spotlight, despite the fact that we have a mission that we serve to provide teaching and learning to mostly young people at scale with excellence and integrity,” Killeen said.
Killeen continued by reaffirming the University’s commitment to DEI, even after the University has taken steps to roll back some of its DEI initiatives in recent months. In November, the University’s office of DEI was renamed and restructured, though administrators say its mission will remain the same.
“Let’s recognize that our mission, our values, our commitment to academic freedom is very solid,” Killeen said. “And yes, we’re committed to diversity, we’re committed to equity and we’re committed to inclusion.”
Get The Daily Illini in your inbox!
The federal government also made several large cuts to research funding, prompting the UI System to close labs and shut down research projects. Killeen reaffirmed that, despite these “painful” losses, the UI System’s total research value remained well above a billion dollars this year.
This year marked the first ever in which over 100,000 students were enrolled across the System’s three campuses: the University, University of Illinois Chicago and University of Illinois Springfield.
“That’s a very healthy increase of 3.4% at a time when there are demographic challenges nationally, and so many universities and colleges are sadly working hard to stem steady declines in enrollments,” Killeen said. “We’re seeing the opposite.”
He also said that enrollment of Black students system-wide has grown 10.1% in one year, and enrollment of Hispanic/Latino students has grown 9%. Transfer student enrollment across the system has increased 10%.
Notably, these numbers only include undergraduate student enrollment relative to the previous year. Additionally, student enrollment overall has grown, meaning the percentages of Black, Hispanic/Latino and transfer students have each increased by less than 1% when compared to all UI System undergraduates.
Near the end of his speech, Killeen reported that the System saw an increase in donations of $150 million compared to last year. The total amount of gifts for the year amounted to $657 million.
“That says that we have support,” Killeen said. “We have deep-rooted support from our constituencies that are out there.”
