Case Studies

1.1 The Divisive Legacy of Chief Illiniwek
Leaders: Rosalyn LaPier (American Indian Studies/History), Dave Beck (American Indian Studies/History)

This case study investigates the history of debates–still ongoing–about the University of Illinois mascot, “Chief Illiniwek.” The University adopted a caricature of a plains American Indian as its mascot in 1926. The mascot was named for a confederacy of tribal nations whose historical lands and resources the university now occupies. The school’s athletic teams became known as the Fighting Illini. For decades, stereotypically racist images of the mascot abounded across campus, in Champaign-Urbana, and across the state of Illinois. In 1988, under the leadership of Spokane tribal citizen Charlene Teters, a UIUC graduate student, American Indian students, faculty, staff, and their allies began to protest the use of the mascot. University leadership dug in and expanded its support of the mascot, when in 1990 the Board of Trustees voted to name Chief Illiniwek the school’s official symbol. Nearly two decades later, in 2007, under threat of sanctions from the NCAA, the university stopped using the mascot but retained copyright in the imagery associated with it and continues to license its use. As this case illuminates, the only “risk” the university took seriously was loss of revenue and athletic prestige. Using archival sources, this case study will explore how institutional backlash followed by inertia allowed large swaths of the UIUC community (alumni, trustees, administration and others) to ignore data-driven evidence of harm to a small group of people and maintain harmful practices even while arguing that change had occurred. Current students and recent alumni have proposed a new mascot and expressed concern with the lingering imagery of “the Chief.” Working with the Native American House on campus, this research will be shared with these stakeholders across a broad swath of Native and non-Native community.

1.2 The Steven Salaita Affair 
Leader: Eric Calderwood (Comparative & World Literature)

This case study looks at the decision by the UIUC Chancellor and the Board of Trustees in 2014 to revoke a job offer to Steven Salaita, a Palestinian American scholar of comparative Native American and Palestinian Studies, overturning the unanimous recommendation of the American Indian Studies program and of the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The risk calculus used by the Chancellor and the Board of Trustees prioritized donors, conservative public opinion, and some legislators and drew a storm of protest led by faculty in American Indian Studies and joined by many other campus departments and groups. The decision led to an international boycott of the university. The case is a forerunner of current administrative efforts to mitigate economic and political risk by delimiting political speech, surveilling and disciplining online speech, and curtailing academic freedom. The crucial role of Indigenous studies and ethnic studies units as well as other humanities disciplines in the protests highlighted their identification as sources of risk to the operations of “neoliberalism multiculturalism” in universities (Melamed: 2011). We will use the archival materials related to the Salaita controversy and draw on research in critical university studies, Indigenous studies and postcolonial studies. 

1.3 Land Expropriation and Use 
Leaders: Kathryn Holliday (Architecture/Landscape Architecture), Dave Beck (American Indian Studies/History)

The University of Illinois is one of the largest agricultural landowners in the state of Illinois, managing nearly 20,000 acres across the state. Much of this land was granted to the university by gift or bequest during the twentieth century and is used to generate income to support its operations. We propose to map and analyze these patterns of revenue-based land production in light of the longer legacy of the Morrill Act and the founding and financing of universities in the 1870s through land grants of Indigenous land, documented and visualized through the LandGrabU project (https://www.landgrabu.org/). While the University of Illinois began its operations funded through land sales primarily to the west from Kansas and Wisconsin to California, today we can ask questions about its strategies of risk management connected to ownership of land in Champaign County, where it is the largest landowner, and across Illinois. By identifying and tracing land transactions and chains of title, we can visualize and recover the history of Indigenous land in the state and more precisely narrate the degree to which nineteenth-century frameworks of territorial control remain at the heart of university operations. Only recently has awareness of the role of universities in Indigenous land dispossession grown. Working with the Native American House on campus this history will be shared with the Champaign County communities. 

2.1 The ILLIAC IV and Vietnam War-Era Student Protests 
Leaders: Bethany Anderson (Library), David Sepkoski (History)

This case study engages with two major Vietnam War-era protests that took place on the UIUC campus that brought students and faculty into conflict with university administrators and scientific researchers. The first involved protests over the collaboration between Dow Chemical and the US Air Force to produce and deploy napalm, which was developed during the 1940s and used in World War II, the Korean War, and the war in Vietnam. Objecting to the presence of Dow recruiters on campus, UIUC students joined a nationwide sit-in in 1967, which led to the disciplining of nearly 50 students. The second involved campus protests following the announcement that the ILLIAC IV, UIUC’s newest-generation supercomputer, would be used by the Department of Defense for nuclear weapons research. I. During the spring of 1970 students and faculty organized a series of debates and protests, culminating in a demonstration by students and members of the Black Panther Party on the university’s main quad. As a result of these actions the university never completed the ILLIAC IV, bringing an end to its prominent role in the development of early supercomputers. Both episodes highlight the asymmetrical risk calculations understood by student and faculty protesters, technoscientific researchers, and university administrators. This project will draw on extensive archival materials in the University Archives that document these controversies from a variety of angles, including the papers of student organizations and recordings of student debates; engineering and computer science staff project records and reports; and university and Graduate College administrators’ responses. Bringing together multiple constituents’ perspectives on free speech and democracy, including alumni who are actively involved in preserving historical memory of these events, this case study considers two examples of university responses to perceived risk that put security concerns, student and faculty demands, research funding, and reputational damage in opposition. The projected output of this project will be a digital humanities exhibition that will involve graduate student researchers from History and the School of Information Sciences, University archivists, and faculty in multiple humanities departments.

2.2 The Biological Computer Laboratory and the “End” of Military-Funded Research
Leaders: Kevin Hamilton (Art & Design), Bethany Anderson (Library)

Conventional accounts of the closure of this university’s storied cybernetics laboratory cite the 1969 Mansfield Amendment for its demise, which prohibited the Defense Department from using its funds “to carry out any research project or study unless such project or study has a direct and apparent relationship to a specific military function.” With the Office of Naval Research a primary sponsor of the Biological Computer Lab’s (BCL) research into matters of perception, cognition, and consciousness in light of emerging understandings of life as describable through information and control, the lab’s personnel and research dispersed across the country and culture through the early 1970s. BCL founder Heinz von Foerster retired from his engineering post to live out the remainder of his life in Pescadero, California, closer to the communities that most took up and celebrated his work; his writings on “second-order cybernetics” eventually found a firmer home in utopian views on the liberatory potential of networked personal computing than in engineering research. What does the distribution of the BCL’s research into new domains of commerce, religion, and even cognitive science offer an understanding of how the allegedly “anti-war” Mansfield Amendment also helped universities manage the risks identified through the tumultuous student protests of the late 1960s? This case study will take up accounts of the BCL’s closure and its final unsuccessful (non-military) grant proposal in light of recent research on the place of cybernetics within longer histories of liberalism and Cold War colonialism. This study’s revisiting of these accounts, including their proliferation by alumni and other regional community members, will also set BCL’s closure in the context of other shifts in funding sources for campus scientific research. 

3.1 The Incorporation of Difference: From Ethnic Studies Programs to DEI Bureaucracy
Leaders: Jessica Ballard-Lawrence (Library), Susan Koshy (Asian American Studies/English)

This case study looks at the differing actors and aims driving the creation of ethnic studies programs and a DEIbureaucracy to map a broader turn from a project of racial justice to a managerial system to promote cultural diversity andreduce bias. How do these two projects overlap or diverge? We begin with the student and faculty demands andadministrative responses that shaped the creation of African American Studies (1969), American Indian Studies (2005),Asian American Studies (1997), and Latina/o Studies programs (1996) in relation to our position as a midwestern land-grant university. What does the belated creation of these programs at Illinois reflect? We then investigate the timing andrationale for establishing a DEI bureaucracy to manage conflict, coordinate campus DEI training, and address grievances.What risk mitigation strategies animate the creation of a DEI apparatus and how do these strategies define the relation ofethnic studies programs to the DEI office, and of both to the wider campus? We hope to show that both projects have beenconflated by right-wing critics in battles over academic freedom as a way to obscure the corporatization of the universitythat separates the creation of ethnic studies programs from the workings of a DEI bureaucracy. We will use archivalmaterials as well as interviews with faculty, staff, and students to explore these questions. 

3.2 Title IX, #Metoo and Adoption of an Expanded Campus Sexual Misconduct Policy
Leaders: Robin Kar (Law/Philosophy)

In the context of the #Metoo movement, in 2020 the University of Illinois reformed its campus policies to address a wider range of sexual misconduct than is prohibited by Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The result is that the University now has one of the most progressive sexual misconduct policies in the nation. Because broader institutional policies can expose a university to greater legal liability, many other institutions, on the advice of counsel, have long resistedexpansions of the kind made at UIUC. The adoption of our campus’s new sexual misconduct policy–through an extensive process that involved generating unanimous support from diverse stakeholders–is an instructive case study in implementing changes that support a university’s mission and comport with broader social trends but that may carry a risk to the university itself. The case study will help generate insights into how universities engage with legal requirements and the circumstances in which humanities-led efforts can reorient calculations of risk tolerance by university administrators. Further, the case may offer lessons in unintended consequences because some of the innovativemechanisms the new sexual misconduct policy adopted have subsequently seeped into other disciplinary contexts (including incidents arising out of campus political protests in the spring of 2024). 

3.3 The Hormone Chixx: Sex and Gender in Science Research 
Leader: Kate Clancy (Anthropology)

This case study will consider a group of twenty women faculty that formed at the University of Illinois and called themselves the Hormone Chixx. Co-founded by Ann Nardulli and Janice Bahr, the Hormone Chixx were women scientists who studied the effects of hormones: Nardulli and Bahr were themselves leading researchers in the field of endocrinology, who specialized in estrogen. The Chixx met monthly for lunch for at least two decades. They came together to compensate, to some extent, for the lack of institutional support and mentoring for women in science. This collective had real impacts on the women faculty who participated, as well as on the University of Illinois: the Chixx led a number of high-profile collaborations resulting in dozens if not hundreds of papers and many federally funded grants, supported many junior faculty through the tenure process, and led the creation of the interdisciplinary research theme Environmental Impacts on Reproductive Health at the Institute for Genomic Biology. In many ways, the Chixx activities and networks led to the University of Illinois developing notable strengths in the study of sex hormones. The infrastructure of informal networking, advice, and counterspace operated both within and outside the university. Through oral histories and archival research, this case study will investigate the ways the Hormone Chixx maneuvered around and through bureaucratic and gendered gatekeeping, kept each other safe, and otherwise made it possible to survive a system that tends to see more potential and less risk in the promotion of men. This study will also complicate the picture of their legacy and achievements by considering how race, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality variably intersected over time with the main aims and structure of the group.

4.1 Architecture as Risk Management
Leader: Ned O’Gorman (Communication)

The campus’s Foreign Language Building was constructed in 1968 at the high point of the Cold War disaster in Vietnam,Civil Rights protests and legislative achievements, and campus unrest. The FLB building’s architectural style indexed thisperiod of agitation and was part of a broader trend at the University of Illinois and on other university campuses to buildfortress-like academic buildings impervious to takeover or destruction (Metz: 2019). We will use the FLB building as alaunching point for considering architectural responses to perceptions of risk. In addition to examples of architecture asrisk management on the Champaign campus, we will examine similarities and differences in episodic reliance onarchitecture at our sister campuses in urban Chicago and in the state’s capital Springfield, and at community collegeswithin the Central Illinois region. Our exploration will make use of archival materials, particularly those documenting campus unrests in the 1960s, and will be aided by experts in the College of Fine and Applied Arts. 

4.2 The Risk of Teaching Controversial Subjects
Leader: Emily Knox (Information Sciences)

Since President Donald Trump signed the “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing” Executive Order on his first day in office in 2025 and the federal investigations into student protests, the nature of risk in higher education classrooms has shifted. Although there has always been some risk in teaching controversial topics (however that may be defined), that risk was usually understood to be borne by the institution. That is, the institution would support the instructor when their speech in a classroom was questioned. Over the past year, institutions have been quick to fire instructors who discuss controversial topics in the classroom. Interestingly, the AAUP’s 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure also focuses on instructors and very little is said about institutional obligations. This case study will review recent firings of instructors and the nature of risk in teaching.

4.3 Committee Meetings as Performance
Leaders: Jorge Lucero and Kevin Hamilton (Art & Design)

One-hour gatherings of faculty, students, staff, and administrators have become a default social form for conducting thebusiness of the university. What protocols, roles, and functions have come to reign in these spaces, and how have theyevolved? This study will apply to the enactment and performance of committee meetings approaches that have previouslyhelped understand and reimagine the classroom as a site of knowledge production and social formation. Throughexamining contemporary and historical meeting transcripts and notes, performative discovery of alternative forms, andqualitative analysis of the forms, norms, and protocols that have come and gone in the daily practice of convening to “douniversity,” this study will activate a seemingly static form to reveal its plasticity, and how it came to take its frequentforms today. In conversation with other case study leaders in the core participant group, this line of inquiry may even takeup documented meetings of particular significance to this university’s life and influence for examination through re-performance and staging.

4.4 Regulation of Uses of Campus Space for Expressive Activities 
Leader: Jason Mazzone, Professor of Law 

The university campus has long been a site for students, faculty, staff and community members to engage in expressive activities–including rallies, protests, sit-ins, chalking, leafleting, and tabling–on a variety of topics. At the same time, uses of campus space are highly regulated
through university policies specifying which venues are available for expressive activities, who can use those venues, the permissible purposes, and the conditions of use. Access to many campus spaces for a protest or other event requires a permit from a university official; the permitting process can involve close scrutiny of the security and other risks associated with the proposed event. This case study examines the origins of the regulation of uses of campus space for expression and the ways in which the rules and procedures for such uses have changed over time in response to particular episodes in campus life and as a result of external influences. By taking a hard look at the justifications for the development of regulations and at their effects, the case study will provide a lens through which to understand and evaluate protocols today that allow for but also limit campus expression. An important component of this case study will be learning from local community groups that use (or would like to use) campus spaces for expressive activities about their experiences navigating regulatory protocols.