Collections

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.

Inspired by the recently published book, Radicals in the Heartland: The 1960s Student Protest Movement at the University of Illinois by Michael Metz, University of Illinois Press hosted a series of panels and presentations in October 2019 exploring the past and present of student activism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Student Life and Culture Archives conducted oral history interviews with alumni who participated in the demonstrations during their time on campus.

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.

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).

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 the 1960s, a series of oral histories were conducted to mark the University of Illinois Centennial. This was a collaborative effort between the University Archives and the WILL public broadcasting station to record sessions with faculty and alumni capture their experiences at the University of Illinois.

Project 500 was the first extensive effort by the University of Illinois to offer equal educational opportunities for all of the residents of Illinois. The details of the project were poorly carried out, and miscommunication led to a protest at the Illini Union on September 10, 1968 which resulted in the arrest of 240 black students. This collection consists of both audio recorded by Assistant Dean David Eisenman during the years of Project 500 and recordings of oral interviews with students and administrators involved in the program conducted by Joy Ann Williamson.

Krannert Center first opened its doors in 1969 – the manifestation of a dream that began with two remarkable individuals, Herman and Ellnora Krannert, whose philanthropy has profoundly influenced the University of Illinois through gifts supporting both Krannert Art Museum and Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. Widely considered the nation’s leading university-based performing arts center, for five decades Krannert Center has served as classroom, laboratory, and public square for the campus,community, and region. Krannert Center will celebrate its 50th anniversary in a two-season celebration, 2018-19 and 2019-20. University of Illinois students, staff and faculty and the general public share their stories of this remarkable facility.