The Daily Illini Editorial Board sat down with University President Michael Hogan and Interim Chancellor/Provost Robert Easter on Thursday. Here is an excerpt from the discussion.

The Daily Illini: As you move into a new (school) year and start your first year here, what are some of your big goals for the year?

As you move into a new (school) year and starting your first year here, how are things going, what are some of your big goals for the year from each of you?

Hogan: All I would say is that obviously the there’s several pretty big issues. Obviously one is managing the shortfall in resources, which is likely to get worse before it gets better. I’m saying over the next one or two fiscal years so fiscal year 11, 12, and probably into fiscal year 13, and this ties into what Chancellor Easter was saying which is the need to address this problem in part by kind of looking at the cost structure of the University and figuring out how we can be leaner, meaner, smarter in the way we do our business. And make appropriate reductions but without an impact on the academic programs without a serious or substantial impact on our academic programs. Secondly, it’s very clear that we have major leadership changes. We’re lucky to have someone like Chancellor Easter willing to step up in very, very difficult and challenging times, and this is not a good time to be a chancellor, even an interim chancellor it’s not a good time. For that matter not the best of times to be a president either, because the next couple of years are going to be very challenging. They’re going to require a lot of careful thought, a lot of strategic thinking, and very, very difficult decisions to be made and then to be implemented; so we’re anticipating that we could have a budget shortfall in fiscal 12 almost as much as $100 million across the whole University. That’s big we’re starting fiscal year 11 46 million short of where we were in fiscal year (10). If we ever get a penny of it by the way ­­— we’re already 2 months into fiscal year 11 and we spend at a rate of about 80 million a month at the University and we have yet to receive a penny in fiscal year 11 funding. And before we even got a penny they cut it by 46 million, which by the way is interesting to note is exactly equal to the additional revenue to the money we’re bringing in in tutition. I’d like to make that point because the argument on campus should not be between the faculty and the students. They should be linking arms and marching to the state capital because there’s almost a dollar for dollar correlation between the increases in tuition and the decline of state support. Only 17 percent, I believe, of our operating budget is now covered by the state, and that’s what people mean when they talk about the privatization of public higher education. And so it forces us to confront the simple fact that either tuition gets raised or the quality of what we do begins to deteriorate on the teaching and the research side. We try to mitigate that as much as we can by the process that Chancellor Easter’s talking about: identifying our very best programs, investing strategically in them, holding them as highest as we can from further budget reductions, trimming back office operations on all three campuses combining and consolidating where we can and so on. But in the end, we do all of that and we still have a shortfall, we got to find a way to make it up. So wrestling with those kinds of problems, that’s going to occupy it, and finding a new hancellor, we won’t say a better chancellor, but a new chancellor here, a new chancellor on the springfield campus, a new vice chancellor here in Urbana-Champaign, a new vice chancellor in Chicago and ulimately a new vice chancellor in Springfield all of that within the next 18 months.

DI:So as you were saying when you looked at our board of headlines over there, how does it feel for --

Hogan: I tremble.

DI: How does it feel for both of you to have taken over amid such an admitted admissions controversy?

Hogan: I think the thing to remember is that it was about more than an admissions controversy. At least our board feels that way. It’s just basically a leadership controversy that happened to play itself out or reveal itself in the admissions crisis, and that’s why we have a completely new board of trustees, for example, and why we actually have a new leadership on campus. I don’t cast dispersions on anybody. I wasn’t here when these things happened, but I will say it was a bit kind of a leadership crisis and it called into question I think the standing and the integrity of the whole university. But I’m not daunted by the prospect of taking over in light of that because it’s also an opportunity and for me personally it’s been a great opportunity for Bob to step in and restore the credibility of his office. And he’s enormously popular on this campus everyone’s incredibly grateful for the sacrifice he made for stepping in and the leadership he has shown. So if you get the right people in the right place, they’ll step up to that kind of a challenge. And finally it’s just worth reminding ourselves despite the crisis all in the financial or political leadership or commissions the fact of the matter is this is one of the great universities in the world, and it’s loaded with assets, and this is important when we think about today and going forward to remind ourselves all of the good things that are going on at this university and go on every day in spite of turnover in leadership and turnover in governorships, and just keep going.

Easter: First of all Dr. Hogan’s very kind in his comments, and I appreciate that. I’ve been a resident of this campus for a very long time ­— about 38 years — and I think there was a sense among those who in a sense go into their careers to this place that they quite like. And circumstances changed and there’s a huge reservior of enthusiasm, of commitment to make Illinois once again what it truly ought to be. And i can’t under ... describe the extent to which people have stepped forward. We have a great group of deans on this campus. Deans by design compete with each other. I don’t know if it’s by design, but often they find themselves competing with each other for resources and attention to their programming, and that group has come together over the past group in ways that (are) just unbelievably good. and it’s allowed us to make real progress in moving forward. I would say that despite the issues with admissions, I think our applcations went up 4 percent this past winter and spring, which indicates that there’s still a great deal of enthusiasm for the University of Illinois out there among the student constituency. I’ve also really come to appreciate the loyalty of our alumni. We have individuals who will just do whatever we can because the University of Illinois just transformed their lives. And we were downstairs looking at some of your members of your hall of fame, and I think we saw some individuals who would probably say that too. That they came here and they left different and that’s our business. And they have been very supportive in this time.

Hogan: Oh, you know who’s the new head of BP. ...

I mean our, this bodes well for you. Our alums are just unbelievable, all over the world. There are probably more Illinois graduates — did you tell me this? — working in Silicon Valley ...

Easter: I gave a number which I won’t verify for, but it’s huge. You do know that Microsoft employs more Illinois graduates than any other University. And three or four years ago, maybe longer than that, but Bill Gates spoke over at the auditorium, and he actually made that statement public which sounded really good.

Hogan: And it’s not just engineering. What’s remarkable about Illinois is that we’re top notch in everything. I was just yesterday over at the faculty art show at Krannert. It’s just an amazing group of people. Our performing arts on this campus are out of sight. Absolutely out of sight. There are real strengths in the humanities, and the social sciences; physicology is one of the top departments in the nation. I mean it’s not just selected excellency or selected excellence there, there is a broad core of strengths across all divisions including agriculture.

Easter: And I had an e-mail late last April from a colleague in Central America telling me that one of our Ph.D’s in food science is now the President of Zomberano, which probably doesn’t mean a lot to you but it’s one of the top agricultural programs in Latin America. And it’s in Honduras ...

DI: Obviously getting to know the student body is something important to you. Why is that and how do you plan on getting to know students and what’s important to us?

Hogan: Well, that’s actually an easy question to answer. I think all of us ... I mean, it’s energizing to be with students. It’s fun. It’s fun to be around them, it’s fun to see how student lifestyles change, it’s disconcerting because every year they stay the same age and you just grow older but it’s fun to be around them and that’s the main reason that they are at the core of what we do. If we weren’t taking good care of studens in the classroom now we would be failing our job miserably so it’s great to hear what they have to say, how things are going. Third, I would say it’s a very big university, even this campus alone is big and I think, O believe in my experience that if you’re a visible president, accessible, you make a big university seem smaller. And I think students have a right to know who the leadership at the university is they have a right to be able to contact them and ask them to events and walk up to them on the Quad and say hello and have a conversation ... I didn’t go a single day without having my photograph taken with a student, because I’d walk from one place to another, everyone has these cameras now and it kind of shocked me. A lot of it ended up on my blog which I’ve just kicked off. And it’s just fun. so that’s it. Nothing complicated.

How exactly do you plan to proceed with the Stewarding Excellence initiative and when can we expect to hear more about those decisions in terms of any cuts or consolidations?

Easter: When we started this process, we wanted a process that was transparent, that anyone affected by a decision would have the opportunity to comment or offer an opinion. And you know how the website has worked — I bet you’ve even added some opinions to that — we now have about 8 projects that are now fully complete which is to say that the public comment has been received it’s been assimilated by the advisory committee and then it’s been brought forward to Dr. (Richard) Wheeler and myself. We started back early in the summer reviewing as those individual reports came in we now have drafts we need to do a bit more editing of what will be our decisions. Our expectation is that within the next week or two we will have some of those going up on the website. And that will just be a statement of these were the recommendations that came out of the processes, here’s what we’re going to do ... A B and C. The really interesting thing is that, first of all, we’ve been introduced to options that we would have never thought of on our own. That’s been very helpful. The other reality is that we’ve discovered we didn’t know nearly as much about some of these areas as we ...[ ] one instance we asked one of the teams in the college of business in the MBA program to look at the financial and give us an opinion, is this a viable enterprise or not? This is one of the axillary type of activities.

DI: Are there any consolidations or departments you know will be changing?

Easter: I think it’d probably be premature to comment on that at this stage. Keep in mind when it comes to the academic side of the enterprise that at some point we bring forward recommendations to the faculty that we want to process, and they have within the faculty. We’re both members of the faculty, there’s clearly a process where we’re making decisions directly, so if there were going to be changes in the academic program, we’d bring that forward for consideration to the appropriate committee.

DI: We had a reader generated question: she asked whether you anticipated another spike in tuition and whether faculty and staff would be asked to take furloughs again this year. what does the financial picture look like for the university?

Hogan: Let’s go at it backwards. We’re still owed $130 million from the state on our fiscal year 10 budget. And we have assurances that we’ll get that funding — that remaining $130 — by the end of the calendar year. At that point, we’ll be halfway into fiscal year 11, we’ll not have received a penny. Even before receiving a penny, as I mentioned, they cut it by $46 million, so that means if we got the whole fiscal year in funding we’d be $46 million shorter than we had in fiscal year 10. That’s the figure that’s equal to the revenue on the tuition side. I think it’s wise to anticipate that sometime into he spring we will probably end up with yet another budget cut in fiscal year 11, and as I said, we could be down so much as 100 million across the whole university in fiscal year 12, and maybe again in fiscal year 13. If it’s 100 million that would be a 10 percent cut in our GRF on top of all the cuts that we’ve done so far. So it’s important to have that context for discussions of say the tuition issue. Now I’ve almost given up on trying to have a sensible conversation about tuition. It’s an issue that been so highly placed not really by students but by politicians I’ll concede that our tuition is high for a public university. It’s not the highest but it’s high. But I’ll argue as well that every dollar increase in tuition generally represents a dollar lost in state funding. There’s a strong and direct correlation. Third, you have the tuition guarantee program. You’re bumped to five years instead of four, I wish they hadn’t done that and that makes the annual increase seem larger than it really is. So look at it a different way. Incoming freshmen are paying basically 3.6 percent more in tuition than the sophomore class. So annualized over the course of their academic career, they’re experiencing a 3.6 percent increase, which is low actually. If you were in Florida you’d be 14 percent. To California, 30 percent. Several other states have taken hits of 20, 25 percent jumps in tuition. So we’ve kept it low in part by- the figure that should be focused on is the 3.6 not the 9.5. if you could stay every year for in the future you’d be experiencing a 3.6 percent increase what you would be saying is the tuition increase is roughly comparable to the rise in the cost of living or at least the higher education price index, or their amounts. So prices go up, so costs go up, and as they go up then state funding comes down and we end up with making it up generally through other revenue streams and principally that revenue stream has tuition and fees. I will say though that the University so far has done a really good job of trimming its own sales we have the ARR report, we have the stewarding excellence; it’s hard to do this quickly because 70 percent of funding for the university is tied up in people. And many of them have tenure or the equivalent of tenure. So it’s like moving a battleship. It’s powerful, but it takes along time for that thing to go in a circle. When you have all of your money tied up in people and people are essential to the academic research and teaching mission, you don’t save fast you have to wait for the normal turnover to a very large extent. That’s why we’re working so hard right now, because we know whatever we do today, the rollout will take three or four years to generate even the ARR report presents 60 million in potential savings. But it’ll take several years, maybe three years to realize that whole savings. Other cases, long term savings, can only be achieved by investing more. If you want to improve energy efficiency, for example, you need to invest like in storm windows, or solar, or make other, say “I’m on the IT side. You have to make investments, so the front end cost is how I determine if the long term savings is substantial.” It’s not easy to turnaround. How do i feel about paycuts? I’m against them. We’ve had two years if you look at the — and you should do a story on this — the drop in our U.S. News and World Report Rankings for the Urbana campus. I don’t want to be an alarmist but it’s a pretty substantial drop and If you look at what caused that drop, there are a lot of things that caused this some of which we can fix and turn around quickly. Two of the three major causes are declining resources for the University growing out of the shortfall in state funding. The other was faculty resources. The biggest part of that happens to be salaries, so our faculty has gone two years without a salary and then they’ve had furlough days, so for all practical purposes, very substantial paycuts. Now that wouldn’t worry me if I were at a different kind of institution but here I’m at Illinois with a very mobile faculty, really great faculty and they no matter what the world economic situation may be these people have alternatives. They work in a market. A market is different by discipline. There’s one market for salary in engineering, another for salary in history. Sadly, salary in history is considerably less. We can sneak a little money into equity adjustment, make a little pool of funds used to help retain the faculty but every year it gets harder and harder as our competitive salary position deteriorates to hang onto our best faculty. Why’s that important? Because that’s your faculty. It’s important because some of these people in computer science and engineering and chemistry and other disciplines bring in millions of dollars to the university in IH and as that funding, you name it, and if they go, that supports other people. That supports research assistants, graduate students, it supports post docs, if they go they take that money with them. It’s a lot easier to pay someone like that an additional 2 or 3 percent regularly in increments than to lose millions of dollars if they walk out the door. But I can’t promise anything because I’m too new.

DI: As a newcomer to Illinois government what challenges do you foresee in making the University’s case to legislators in Springfield? Do you anticipate playing a big role in fundraising and lobbying for the University?

Hogan: Yes. I expect to be very active in fundraising. It’s a principal part of my job and it’s great work actually. I mean, we’ve just been talking about some of our alums and who wouldn’t want to sit down with them and have a cup of coffee or a glass of wine and a lot of those are the people we raise money for. Our alumns at the university are very distinguished people who love the institution, so I love spending time with them. I think, what could be better than spending time with some very interesting people who’ve done incredibly interesting things with their life and love the same university I love and want to help us succeed? So I expect I’ll spend my fair share and then some. I’ll be down at the legislature, yeah, I’ll be down there as often as I have to go down at least twice for formal presentation but I expect I will have a day in the capital and we’ll bring all the legislators in for a barbecue or a breakfast or something and I’ll spend individual time with individual legislators. I’ve already been on the phone; I’ve had a phone call with 10, 15 or 20 legislators in the state, I’ve called just about every member of our congressional delegiaton in Washington and beginning to build those kinds of relationships so I’m in a strong position to advocate for the University. And Bob does the same thing.

Easter: It’s not as though there’s not support within the general assembly. They have real challenges dealing with budget shortfalls and the need to the state. I don’t envy them in their responsibilities. DI To Easter: You have two jobs right now. How much longer do you expect to be chancellor and provost? Is it difficult, do you find, to manage both of these jobs? What will the university be looking for in a new chancellor?

Easter: Some of thsoe decisions you’ll talk to Hogan and the Board of Trustees in terms of the process, but he assures me that sometime this fall that we’ll begin coming further on that to look for a position. This campus operated for most of its history without a person carrying the title of provost. Typically that position was vice chancellor for academic affairs, and it was the individual who managed the academic enterprise. We had facilities, we had student affairs which are different from the core academic enterprise. I think sometime in the ‘90s, the provost was added, as I understand it, to reflect the person who is responsible for all of the budget and financial expense. And so as I accepted the responsibility as chancellor, I carried with me ultimate responsibility for the campus budget. I frankly believe that that responsibility truly lies with the chief operating officer, chief officer of the university. That’s not to say that there’s not much closer interaction with the vice chancellor for academic affairs and the other vice chancellor. Vice Chancellor Wheeler carries the title vice provost. and the very large part of our budget is allocated to the academic enterprise. He and I have had what I think is a tremendous relationship with our staff. Major budget issues, we discuss and we come to some decision and I think it has worked well. Is it an extra burden for the chancellor, I don’t know that it is. It’s somehwat of a change in the nature of our responsibilities, I think it’s one that’s appropriate for them to reside in. The reality to the individual that will come next I think we all expect. This is a very attractive position, the chancellor at the University of Illinois. And I expect we’ll find the number of individuals who would want to be here would be highly qualified. It will be the president’s responsibility to unify more than to be in that role.

Hogan: We’re not in a hurry to see Bob go, but unfortunately he wants to go. And looking at the problem he’s facing I can’t say I blame him. But he’s done a great job. It is true and somewhat unusual that at the university on campuses the vice chancellor/provost position for one reason or another had very substantial authority over the campus budget. That’s not unusual for the vice chancellor who is the chief academic officer oversees, the deans and the whole academic enterprise and the research enterprise of the campus. To be chiefly responsible for managing the academic budget priorities, that will be set by the vice chancellor working with the chancellor. The chancellors haven’t been involved in the oversight and management of the budget on the academic side, it typically belongs to a provost or to a vice chancellor, or some call it a vice chancellor and provost. But usually the chancellor also has ultimate responsibility over other functional areas such as student affairs or facilities or finance and operations and so on. And the vice chancellor is the number two person at the campus behind the chancellor. He’s the chancellor’s partner in general oversight of the whole, but not in place of the chancellor. So I think that when Bob came into this role, he’s helped us to redefine who the chancellor should be, which is someone who’s principally responsible for oversight of the operations in all aspects of the operations on the campus. It’s going to be very important going forward because of the crisis that we face. And we really have to have strong chancellors and my job is to empower the chancellors to accept larger responsibilities and provide larger leadership on the campus. But my second job is the chancellors are going to have another title. They’re going to be called chancellors and vice presidents or vice presidents at the University of Illinois chancellor of Urbana campus or Chicago campus or Springfield campus because going forward they need to be recognized as officers of the University as a whole. That’s beyond a particular campus. They’re going to be officers of the whole university and they’re going to work with me to shape and organize and manage the entire univeresity operations. Not just on their campus but everywhere. Why is that important? It’s part of our efforts to save money. And to create more synergies is to look at ways we can do away with duplications and triplications of certain back office operations. Do it once, do it once, do it well, do it leaner, do it cheaper. This is one of the recommendations of many coming out of the ARR report, administrative review and restructuring, which is a process very similar to what all of the chancellors are or should be going through on their campus. We were talking about with the Stewarding Excellence program so I need strong leadership on the campus in the chancellors. I also need them to play a role as vice presidents on the leadership team for the whole university and help me think of ways we can go from triplification to simplification. I believe and I’ve said so, that we have the instead of competing silos, we have a real chance to build more complementaries between campuses instead of fighting with each other, and creating redundancies and unnecessary overlaps we can’t afford anymore. Our slogan should be “simplify not triplify.” Our motto should be “building complementaries instead of building competition.” Because I believe in the end, we can have a unviersity that’s greater than the sum of its parts. We’re missing that opportunity. So that explains I guess the ... I don’t know what that explain, I can’t even remember the question. It explains a lot to me though!

Easter: Let me just add that I thoroughly enjoy the role of chancellor. It brings a lot of personal opportunity and satisfaction and but I’ve told Dr. Hogan that I’m happy to work as necessary through this transition. I think there is a point which there needs to be permanent leadership, and that leadership needs to anticipate being in that role for a while longer than my time. I’m committed to doing what I can for this transition and then hopefully handing it off to an individual that is in the best possible physical condition possible.

DI: And as you’re starting your time here ... President White had worked on Global Campus as one of his big initiatives during his time and Chancellor Herman worked on I-Stem as a big initiative during his time ... are there any big things that you’re looking to start doing? Initiatives you’re looking to start doing that you can kind of give us a preview to?

Hogan: I get this question a lot and I’m always a bit amused by it because ... maybe I’ll be the president of the little initiatives I guess ... because it’s not a time to be thinking grand, big things. It’s a time to be thinking of literally re-making the university in some regard. I use the analogy all the time now of being a sculptor, and I’m standing there in front of a big shiny, beautiful slab of marble that has a vague form, it’s been in that form for a long time, but now, my job, Bob’s job, is to take out our chisels and chisel a different form, maybe a smaller form, but still a beautiful form, maybe even a more beautiful form So that’s what I equate my job to right now. In some ways it’s a job of, well I guess in the corporate world they call it a “turnaround job”...someone asked me last night when I was talking to the student government ‘what would be the headline 5 years ago?’ and I said “President leads major turnaround at the University of Illinois.”

Now, that sounds arrogant and I don’t mean it to sound that way, but we need to find a way to navigate through very hard times and come out of it almost certainly with a footprint that’s a little smaller than we have right now, but is within our means, so to speak, and can still be beautiful, and in fact, can be better ... can be, again, top ten and up in the top ten ... that’s my goal, so I know it’s fashionable for new presidents to come in, and it was okay to do that, I think, when President White started, you know, it was good times...but I don’t want people to have illusions that we’re going to be able to find the resources to do grand, new things. Because we won’t be able to. Our goal should be: Do what we can do with the resources we have and do it really, really well. So, I’m the president of little projects.

DI: What are some of those little projects you want to work on?

Hogan: I’m going to work on the budget, but that’s not really little I want to work on the whole theme of simplifying the business processes at the University. I want to work on seeing where we can find complimentaries, academic and research-wise. We have a huge possibility, Bob and I have talked about this before, if we can unite the research enterprises on the Chicago campus with the health center, school of medicine and medical science over there, we’re welcome to do it on this campus, with engineering, with the basic science of nanotechnology, and so on. There’s a classic case where you can bring current enterprises together in a very productive way that would benefit students and faculty without actually investing anymore in them, but you know, have something much bigger than you have right now...and I want to look more carefully at our relationship, we have a wonderful relationship with Parkland Community College, we need to cultivate more relationships like that with community colleges and others to provide a pathway for those students, when they achieve academic success at 2 year programs or even in 2 years at another school, can move into the University of Illinois any one of our campuses in their junior or senior year. We have more room to expand the student population at the junior and senior year than we do usually in the freshman or sophomore year because of normal attrition...so those may seem mundane things, but they’re not easy to do. They’re substantial tasks.

DI: What is your stance on a new UI mascot?

Easter: The student senate and faculty senate both passed resolutions late last spring encouraging us to move forward, and I think there’s some real questions that we want to resolve as we go throuh this year...in part, what’s the purpose? What’s the objective? Who owns it? Is it shared ownership with alumni, with the students? Whose the responsible entity...and then, once we have some sense of who owns it and what our objectives are, then I think we can have more cogent conversation of what that might be. Is it an inspirational image? Is it a trademark, a brand? Is it a rallying point? Is it something that defines us to the world? I think there’s some...before we get very far down the road or down the road about what it should be in terms of individual imagery, what we want to accomplish...so we’re in the process of putting together a small committee that will have representation from these various groups to grapple with some of those questions and then, once we have that information, we’ll move on to the next step.

DI: One of the other issues I know that has been talked about a lot on this campus is sustainability and being more environmentally friendly. We talked about the possibility of a wind turbine in the past and it had gone away with budget issues ... is that going to move forward at all this year?

Hogan: We have a campus plan, and it’s a very good plan and I think we have great students who are willing to step up and support it financially. I think we’re not going as fast as everyone would like and I suppose there’s been some resource problems — a bump in the road — but my understanding is we’re pretty much on track to implement the plan. We’re not backing away from it.

Easter: That’s correct. The key element that was funding was coming to us from the, the name is escaping me, the fund — Robin, do you remember? Robin Kaler: I can get it for you.

Easter: And that funding was to have gone away in June and we were able to negotiate a year extension. And so we were looking forward to get the proposals, to build it.

I think we’ve made a serious environmental commitment on this campus, and how we’ve done so is on the documents. The plan was delivered in May. There are some who would like to see us move faster. As we sat around the table and looked at each of the elements of the commitment, we were struggling with the reality of the cost, and how could we physically do it, versus the desire to get it done yesterday. And I think we have a plan, and I’m proud of it, because I think it’s one that’s achievable. Some other institutions perhaps have an aspirational plan but I think ours is achievable.. I believe the governor’s planning to be here tomorrow. There’s a conference on campus, unless something’s changed in the last few hours. That will be an opportunity for us to renew our commitment to the state’s plan. DI: I know, maybe it was a few weeks ago, you indicated that you still had to meet some more of the top officials at the University. Is there still anybody that you have not spoken with that you intend to speak with? Have you met with, for instance, Ron Guenther, the athletic director?

Hogan: Bob and I met with Ron just yesterday, and I’m going over to today, and — you come with me if you want [laughter] — I’m going over today to watch a football practice and tour the facility there. I went before; that will be fun. I’m trying to think, is there anybody that I haven’t messed with? I think I’ve made the rounds pretty well [laughter]. The leadership on the three campus, I’ve spent quite a lot of time with individual members of the board, there’s a comfortable relationship there. And by the way, we’re so lucky to have a great board of trustees now. They’re new, brand new. They bring no inherited agenda, so we’ve got a clean slate. A lot of them are graduates of the University of Illinois, they’re very proud, even those who aren’t. Chris Kennedy, very, very proud of his campus home. Recently, all his kids were running around in Fighting Illini T-shirts and sweatshirts and so on, asking me about the team. So, I think I’ve done pretty well. I’ve been on the phone with a lot of legislative leaders, just, “Hello, here I am, I look forward to seeing you.” I’ve been to Rockford, I’ve been Peoria, I’ve been to , I’ve been to Chicago, and two or three places in pretty short order. Spending my life in a car, practically. There’s still other people to meet, but it’s going at a good pace.

DI: With the election coming up this fall, is there any particular outcome that would help the University in one way or another, do you think?

Hogan: Well, without declaring myself for one candidate or another, I’m so new to Illinois, I am going to be rooting for whoever wants to help higher education and has a coherent plan. And that could come in many, many different shapes and forms. It took five generations to build this great University; politicans, legislators and mostly good old fashioned tax-paying mothers and fathers, contributing tuition dollars and paying taxes to build, over five generations, one of the great universities of the world. It would take one generation to reverse the course. Now, Winston Churchill once said, I didn’t become prime minister to preside over the decline of the British Empire. It turned out it did sort of decline... but I am not becoming president with any intention of presiding over the decline of the University of Illinois. And I hope that mothers and fathers and daughters and legislators and tax-paying citizens citizens of this state make the same decision. Because if you look at the impact that universities like this are having on the regional and state-wide economies in places like Cleaveland, now, and Philadelphia now, there’s a long list, go down to the Silicon Valley and down to the triagle in North Carolina, and it’s very hard, in a knowledge-based economy, to imagine a state or a regional economy doing well without major, major land-grant public research institutions. So we’re not the problem in the state; we are actually the solution to many of the state’s problems. And we just have to get that message out. We generate $17 for the state for every dollar they give us. Think about that. If we were on the New York Stock Exchange, we would be a blue chip, people would be scrambling to buy our stock. So, the state has a lot of responsibilities, and it is a very difficult budget time, and we are willing to step up and do what we can to help. But, it’s just good business practice, it seems, to not do a lot of damage to your money-making institutions ... your job-creating institutions. That’s my message.