Introduction to the Cross-Campus Initiatives

The excellence of a university lies in what its faculty and students learn and understand about the world and, ultimately, how they change themselves and the world, even if they do not know right away just how this will happen.

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Transformation—the changing of lives, understandings, and possibilities—is the purpose of a liberal education, even as our high-tech, ever-shrinking world transforms our daily lives at a speed that can be both frightening and exhilarating.

If learning, understanding, and creative transformation constitute our reason for being, we must continue to ask, even at a time when our traditional financial resources are shrinking, how the university can build on its strengths—its faculty, its students, and its great resources—to imagine new ways to teach, to learn, to create, and to understand.

As one approach to this challenge, we now have established 11 Cross-Campus Initiatives, with interests that encompass a wide range, from the behavior of the cell to the effects of globalization, from creating new art forms to devising a new system of food security. You can learn more about these groups and their initiatives by starting with the List of Initiatives page on this site.

We will also offer to freshmen a small set of special courses during the Spring 2004 semester. Each course addresses a topic that is central to one of our initiatives and will follow the format of Discovery courses, offering students greater interaction with faculty in a small class setting. For more information see: http://www.provost.uiuc.edu/students/ccicoursess04.htm

Our new multi-disciplinary initiatives are dynamic, designed to allow for a fluid coming-together by faculty who are also working in their own disciplines and ultimately to involve students, community members, schools, foundations, and agencies of local, state, and federal government. Many initiatives are seeking or have obtained outside funding, and many have issued requests for proposals. Others have inaugurated regular public meetings, seminars, and lectures, We hope you will take part!

Nancy Cantor
Chancellor