In 2008 and 2009, Dan Raymond and Chris D’Arpa of the Student Life and Culture Archival Program conducted interviews with former administrators at the University of Illinois. These administrators were active at the University during the late-1960s and early 1970s when the campus was active with various kinds of student protest. The administrators discuss how the University responded to the changing needs of the student body by providing more opportunities for student organizations on campus.
In conjunction with the University of Illinois Sesquicentennial celebrations in 2017 and 2018, the University of Illinois Archives launched the “Voices Now” initiative to conduct new oral history interviews with students, alumni, faculty, and administrators. These recordings cover a wide variety of topics including University housing, student activism, student publications, the Champaign-Urbana community, and more. We are continually adding new interviews to this portal collection.
The Women in Computing and Information Technology Oral History Project includes oral history interviews with women faculty, alumnae, and students in the Department of Computer Science as well as IT professionals at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The interviews capture a diversity of experiences of women involved in various facets of computing – from network engineering and computational phylogenomics to multimedia and tele-immersive systems. These interviews were conducted by Bethany Anderson for the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)-grant funded project “From Margin to Center: Reframing the History of Women in Computing and Information Technology through Oral Histories” (2017-2018).
World War II brought massive change to the University of Illinois. As thousands of male students were drafted, enrollment declined precipitously, and the men-women ratio on campus changed almost overnight from 3-1 to 1-4. In what was perhaps their biggest challenge, the administrators had to make room for thousands of Army and Navy men dispatched to the University for specialized training. When the veterans flocked back to the campus after the war, they found a University that had survived the crisis and that had begun to gear up for a new world offering higher education to more and more people.
Established in 1971 at Allen Hall, the Unit One Living-Learning Community was the first of its kind at the University of Illinois. Since then, generations of students have taken part in classes, worked with artists-in-residence, attended programming events, and met lifelong friends in the community. This oral history project, conducted in 2023-2024 by Archives Research Assistant Spenser Bailey, aims to document Unit One's remarkable history by recording the stories and memories of administrators, guests, and residents.
