UI Board of Trustees meeting

The polar vortex weather may have shortened the new UI Board of Trustees work, but it did not cancel the meeting altogether. The News-Gazette had coverage of the various issues raised and new members appointed. Here's an excerpt of one article that also had brief profiles of each of the appointees:

Former state Rep. Jakobsson among Pritzker's 5 picks for UI trustees
Gov. J.B. Pritzker is appointing former state Rep. Naomi Jakobsson of Urbana to the University of Illinois Board of Trustees, giving Champaign-Urbana two representatives on the governing body.

Pritzker is set to announce five appointments to the board today ahead of its meeting in Chicago.

They include current Trustee Don Edwards, a Democrat appointed by Bruce Rauner who had yet to be confirmed by the Senate, and two Chicago Democrats who served on the board from 2011 to 2017 — noted attorney Patricia Brown Holmes and human services executive Ricardo Estrada.

The fifth appointee is attorney Kareem Dale, former special assistant to the president for disability policy and associate director of the Office of Public Engagement in the Obama White House, who is now senior counsel at Discover Financial Services.

More at the full article here, including the appointee profiles and an overview of the agenda ahead of the meeting. The announcement came right before the meeting and some of the appointees weren't able to attend the first meeting. In a followup article they note the selection of the chairman (with brief audio excerpt of his statement) and some of the items voted on:

UI trustees continue tuition freeze for in-state freshmen
...
Just two of Gov. J.B. Pritzker's five newly appointed trustees were on hand at the board's meeting in Chicago — former UI Trustee Ricardo Estrada, who served from 2011 to 2017, and Trustee Don Edwards, who was originally appointed by Bruce Rauner in 2017 but never confirmed by the Senate.

Edwards, an Illini golfer and 1985 UI graduate who founded the Chicago private equity investment firm Flexpoint Ford, was unanimously elected to a one-year term as chairman during the board's annual meeting today. He promised to make the UI system "a model of higher education in the United States."

...

The board also approved:

— Honorary degrees for former UI Chancellor Michael Aiken, actor and science educator Alan Alda and Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden.

— Renaming the UIC Pavilion in Chicago as Credit Union 1 Arena through a 15-year, $9.3 million naming rights deal with the Rantoul-based company, which also operates in Chicago.

— A new $8.5 million Illini baseball training center for Illinois Field, to be named after longtime donors Susan and Clint Atkins, who contributed $3 million for the project.

More at the full article, including more details on the tuition freeze approved here. There was also an additional article explaining the tuition freeze and other fee details ahead of the vote here.