UIUC Plans to Add 500 Full-Time Professors: Says “Nyah-Nyah” to MOOCopalypse

I’m guessing that the regents at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign does not think that “the end of the University” is near.  At least, not in the next five to seven years.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announced this week that it would hire about 500 new full-time, tenure-track faculty members in the next five to seven years.

The hiring spree follows years of budget shortfalls that limited hiring at the university, including one year in which hiring was frozen campuswide. University officials now want to restore the total number of full-time faculty members to a level closer to what the campus had in 2007, just before the recession hit.

The hires will be made in two ways, said Barbara J. Wilson, executive vice provost for faculty and academic affairs. Some new hires will fill traditional roles in academic departments. Others will be hired in clusters.

The “cluster hires,” Ms. Wilson said, will be sorted into the six areas that have been identified by the university’s “Visioning Future Excellence at Illinois” project, an effort begun by the chancellor to map out the university’s needs for the future. The review focused on two questions: “What are society’s most pressing issues?” and “What distinctive and signature role can Illinois play in addressing those issues in the next 20 to 50 years?”

via U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Plans to Add 500 Full-Time Professors – Faculty – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

President Barack Obama’s Speech to the National Academy of Sciences

He’s continuing the theme that he talked about in the
Google Hangout a few weeks ago. President Obama
gets that computer science is important, and we want students to be
producers and not just consumers of technology.

That’s why, by
the way, one of the things that I’ve focused on as President is an
all-hands-on-deck approach to the sciences, as well as technology
and engineering and math. And that’s why we’re spending a lot of
time focused on the next generation. With the help of John Holdren
and everybody who’s working with my administration, we want to make
sure that we are exciting young people around math and science and
technology and computer science. We don’t want our kids just to be
consumers of the amazing things that science generates; we want
them to be producers as well. And we want to make sure that those
who historically have not participated in the sciences as robustly
— girls, members of minority groups here in this country — that
they are encouraged as well.

via President
Barack Obama’s Speech to the National Academy of Sciences [Full
Transcript] | Notes From NAP.