Champaign Rotary Club

Remarks by Interim Chancellor Richard Herman
September 12, 2005

I cannot believe that I have lived in your community for only seven years.

Susan and I lived in College Park, Maryland, for eight years. Yet in that same span of time, we did not come to feel as if we were of that place in the way that a person comes to feel of Champaign-Urbana.

Okay, if you promise not to tell anybody, I will confess: Being a born and bred easterner—and a New Yorker from the Bronx to boot—I always secretly suspected that life in the nation’s fly-over states just wasn’t as exciting as life on the coasts.

I stand here today, fully chastened and fully corrected.

This place—my home now—is America’s best kept secret.

Bank tellers ask me how my day is going as they cash my check. Susan and I walk around town, and people stop and chat with us—sometimes they are people we know, sometimes they are people who only know me because they have seen my picture in the paper. Yet in this town, they are comfortable treating even strangers like friends.

Coming from another kind of world, this took some getting used to. But it was a good getting used to—and now I stop people on the street, tell them I saw them on the news, read their letter-to-the-editor in the paper, heard about them from a friend. Because I moved here to live with you, I have become a better person.

And there are the scents and sights and sounds and rhythms of our community. Everybody jokes about the odiferous South Farms, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m thinking instead of that scent in the early evening, when the moisture in the farm ground that surrounds us mixes and blurs with the scent of corn and beans. And the light—that late-summer light at sunset that glazes every tree and house and even the wide blue sky. You stop and breathe deeply, actually see individual blades of grass and a single scudding cloud, actually hear wind rustling oak leaves. Just then, the sun falling to ground seems so close that you could reach out and touch it with your hand.

Just thinking about that moment in our town makes me shiver.

And the civic commitment of people here, people like all of you. I think of our 4th of July parade—to an outsider maybe it seems like only a piece of Americana. Yet all those high school marching bands, fire trucks from all over the county, floats to honor American soldiers followed by floats calling for No More Wars. That parade always reminds me that we are a place where the roots of America and the values of the heartland run deep and yet where people are not afraid to hear divergent ideas, where disagreement is civil. I’ve been told that even during the days of the anti-Vietnam protests on campus, placard-carrying students were careful not to trample the flowers on the Quad.

Today, at the University of Illinois, we are re-thinking our ambitions—and we are raising them. I believe that Illinois, in the next decade, will come to stand among the most preeminent universities in the nation. We have the tradition of excellence. We have the people of excellence. We have the will for excellence.

And we have you—a townspeople who support excellence.

Illinois must and will provide the best education in the country and do the most ground-breaking of research. Illinois will teach knowledge that is old and abiding and create knowledge that is new and novel. Illinois will educate students to know that even in our town, we are citizens of the world—and we will instill in them the spirit of community and civic commitment reflected in you and organizations such as the Rotary. Illinois will educate its students to know that doing well and doing good are pieces of a single fabric.

We at Illinois will make the betterment of humanity and community our business.

Because—how else to say it—we are all in this together.

John Foreman, the publisher of the News-Gazette, has written that in Champaign-Urbana, the University of Illinois is really a Third City. The University has benefited from the values of our community and from the attractive life here that lures fine faculty. Clearly, the university also is an economic engine for the community, helping to make two small towns in the cornfields into the cosmopolitan place it is today.

Yet we three cities—Champaign, Urbana, and the U of I—are not separate cities. We are a single city, and I hope we will do better in making ourselves think that way and in making ourselves act that way. It had been far too long since a Chancellor of the university addressed the Champaign City Council. I had that honor recently, because I want the university to do better at making our community the single city that it must be if we are to grow and prosper. Our fates are entwined, as are our opportunities.

Parkland College graduates hundreds of students a year who go on to attend Illinois. At Illinois, our students enroll in more than 2,000 Parkland courses each year. Every January, the university and the community come together to celebrate the birth of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. The university’s Research Park now has 900 employees. That is good for the university and good for the community. Eventually, the university will have a new hotel and convention center—spurred along by tax incentives from the City of Champaign. That center will be complemented by new hotel projects being built elsewhere in Champaign.

The 100-million-dollar-plus renovation of Memorial Stadium will create jobs and attract new visitors. Its better amenities, our new hotels, and our bevy of new restaurants—the Siam Terrace, Crane Alley, Ko-Fusion, Jim Gould’s, even the new Merry Ann’s Diner—as well as the music and nightlife blossoming in downtown Champaign will make more and more of these visitors stay an extra night or two.

Eventually, the new planned Illini retirement community we are now discussing with the City of Urbana could give those visitors the chance to stay in town permanently—and also to pay property taxes, buy cars and washing machines, and dine in our new and our old restaurants. Soon, I hope the state legislature will vote to create a single tax district for the cities of Champaign and Urbana that will more fairly distribute the benefits of economic growth to all people of our single city.

Yet, for all the exciting betterment that is on its way, we face challenges. One of those challenges is coming together to continue to assure excellence in our public elementary and high schools. We owe that to the parents and children who live here. And we know that families who might move here will demand it—or they will go elsewhere. We must find a way to launch a community-wide effort to make our schools the very best. I promise that the University of Illinois stands ready to contribute mightily to that effort.

Because we are all in this together!

In recent days, we have seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that horror and hardship can bring out the worst in a few people—and the best in most people. What has touched me deeply is that so many people and communities across the country did what they could to help. It was not that any town or city was necessarily heroic in their efforts to help—but that so many people and communities did something. Altogether, those small efforts added up to be a kind of national heroism that is so very American.

Because we are all in this together!

At Illinois, as at many other universities and colleges, we accepted 60 students who had been displaced by Katrina. I want to announce today that we will give them free tuition and room and board for as long as a year as our way of helping, as our way of being American. In town, one local church took in 19 family members from a devastated community. When another group in town learned about the desperate conditions of people who could not flee their community after Katrina, they filled a semi-truck trailer with supplies from Sam’s Club and shipped the whole load off to help those strangers.

Because we are all in this together!

In our own community, I hope that we can all do a little more, a little more of the time. Altogether, those little efforts can become heroic. I believe we can and we will, because I now know the spirit of this place that I have come to love.

Maybe it’s the decency of the people, maybe it’s the scents and sounds and sights and rhythms of the place. Maybe it’s all those high school marching bands and fire trucks on the 4th of July. Or maybe it is the providence of locating an ambitious university among a community filled with ambitious, helping, generous people.

Whatever it is, I am not the first to recognize it. Way back in 1911, Illinois English professor Stuart Pratt Sherman, who became one of America’s most renowned literary critics of his day, wrote of our single city in a letter to a friend out East, “Here you are in the great heart of the country. Here is the place to feel the pulse of real people beat.” Here exists the “native clay” from which will be molded “great men.”

Professor Sherman turned out to be right. We have a century of achievement as evidence. On our generation’s watch, it is our job and our duty to continue to keep his promise.

I know you are doing your part. I pledge that the university will do its part.

And, all together, we will get out the good word on America’s best kept secret.

Because we are all in this together!

Thank you.