PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 26, No. 14, Feb. 15, 2007

brief notes

WILL-TV
Sample British comedies then vote
WILL-TV wants viewers to call in with a vote for their favorite of five British comedies the station is considering broadcasting. In the eighth annual “Great Britcom Vote” at 7 p.m. Feb. 24, viewers will sample the comedies and may call in a vote for one. WILL program director David Thiel plans to purchase the winning program to be broadcast during the next fiscal year.

 Some old favorites return this year, along with several new-to-WILL-TV entries.

Scheduled: “Mulberry” at 7 p.m.; “Sorry!” at 7:40 p.m.; “The Thin Blue Line,” with Rowan Atkinson at 8:20 p.m.; “Ever Increasing Circles” at 9 p.m.; and “Waiting for God” at 9:40 p.m.

Allerton Park and Retreat Center
Guests encouraged to complete survey
Allerton Park and Retreat Center asks members of neighboring communities, park visitors, and retreat center guests to complete a survey that will assist management and staff members in developing a long-term plan for the park and facilities.

A division of the Office of Continuing Education, Allerton Park and Retreat Center is a nature reserve and historic site just outside of Monticello. Robert Henry Allerton donated his private estate to the UI in 1946 for use as an educational site, forest reserve and public park. Today, more than 100,000 people – including researchers, teachers, students and the general public – visit this 1,500-acre site. The 30,000-square-foot manor house serves as a year-round retreat facility for UI, public and corporate groups. 

“Public opinion matters to us. With the information from this survey, we’ll be better able to set priorities for improvements, programming, marketing and fundraising – all vital elements of sustaining and improving Allerton,” said Brenda Abbott, manager of the retreat center.

The survey is available online at www.allerton.uiuc.edu and will be available until Feb. 16 and is intended for those over the age of 18 who are familiar with the park or retreat center.

Child Development Laboratory
Apply now for 2007-2008 school year
The Child Development Laboratory is accepting applications for the 2007-2008 school year. Half-day preschool programs for 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old children meet Tuesday through Friday for three hours a day during the regular academic year. Full-day child-care programs for children aged 6 weeks to 4 years are in session Monday through Friday from 7:30 a.m until 5:30 p.m. all year.

Orientation tours of both facilities are offered weekly.  Hour-long tours depart from the lobby of the Early Child Development Lab facility, 1005 W. Nevada St., Urbana, at 3:30 p.m. Wednesdays and at 9:30 a.m. Thursdays. Use the Lincoln Ave. entrance off the Jimmy John’s parking lot. 

To complete an online enrollment application, visit cdl.uiuc.edu. For additional information or to schedule a tour, call 244-8622. Application screening for the half-day programs will be April 1. Application screening for the full-day classrooms will be May 1.

Champaign Pubic Library
“HistoryMakers” program is Feb. 21
The African American Studies and Research Program, the Center for Democracy in a Multiracial Society and the offices of the president and provost are sponsoring a program telling the stories of history-making African Americans through video interviews.

“The HistoryMakers” will begin at 6 p.m. Feb. 21 at the Douglass Branch of the Champaign Public Library, 504 E. Grove St., Champaign, and is free and open to the public. Dinner and refreshments will be included. Those interested in attending should register in advance.

The HistoryMakers initiative, based in Chicago, is a non-profit organization committed to preserving, developing and providing easy access to video oral histories of African-Americans who have reached significant personal achievements or played a role in history.

The local program will feature a 45-minute video compilation of about 10 interviews from The HistoryMakers archive. Following the video will be a discussion moderated by Sundiata Cha-Jua, the director of the African American Studies and Research Program at the UI.

To register, call or e-mail the center: 244-0188 or jjconnor@uiuc.edu.

‘Three Magic Letters: Getting to PhD’
Graduate College offers symposium
On Feb. 21, the Graduate College will host “Three Magic Letters: Getting to PhD.” The event is free to all UI faculty and staff members and students and will be offered in Illini Union Rooms B and C from 1 to 4:30 p.m. A reception will follow.

The event will focus on challenges inherent in doctoral education and will feature keynote speakers Michael Nettles and Catherine Millet from Educational Testing Services, who recently published the results of their survey of more than 9,000 graduate students at the top 21 doctoral-granting institutions in the U.S. They will explore the diversity of factors critical to doctoral degree completion.

Event participants will have the opportunity to discuss ways faculty members can influence graduate student success, considering the challenges that graduate students face. Students and faculty members will discuss these challenges, including contradictory student and faculty expectations, the importance of clear communication and competing time commitments. Additional program information and registration details are available at www.grad.uiuc.edu.

Asian American Studies’ 10th anniversary
Journalist/activist to speak March 2
The Asian American Studies Program will celebrate its 10th anniversary from 12:45-6:45 p.m. on March 2 at the Knight Auditorium in the Spurlock Museum. The keynote speaker is K.W. Lee, an alumnus of the UI journalism department who is an award-winning investigative journalist and activist famous for his newspaper articles on the Chol Soo Lee case and for founding the Koreatown Weekly. A panel will discuss the history and future of the Asian American Studies Program and a reception will feature live music by the Chip McNeill Jazz Quartet.

Over the last 10 years, the program has become one of the most respected programs in Asian American Studies in the U.S. There are 14 core faculty members and 10 affiliated faculty members. There also is an established minor degree program.

For more information on the program or anniversary celebration, visit www.aasp.uiuc.edu/home.html.

Educational Career Services
Education job fair is March 1
The UI will host the 42nd Annual Mid-America Educators’ Job Fair (Teacher Placement Day) from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on March 1 at the Illini Union. Students, alumni and educators from the community are welcome to interview with about 150 school districts from Illinois and about 20 states. For additional information, go to www.ed.uiuc.edu/ecso, contact the Educational Career Services Office at 333-0740 or e-mail ecso@uiuc.edu.

Urban and regional planning
Films, workshop part of Planning Institute
Organizers of an annual planning institute at the UI are taking it to the streets this year with a three-day, pre-institute workshop on “Developing Pedestrian Safety Action Plans and Designing Streets for Pedestrian Safety” Feb. 26-28 at the Levis Faculty Center.

“The workshop is responding to a national-level concern about pedestrian and bicyclist safety when sharing the roadway with cars,” said Pattsi Petrie, coordinator of the institute, hosted by the UI’s department of urban and regional planning.

In addition to focusing on the effectiveness of various strategies such as crosswalk illumination and “road diets” (reduced street widths), the workshop – co-sponsored by the Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District – will include opportunities for participants to go out in the community to view local sites that will then be used as the basis for creating design solutions to improve safety.

The workshop kicks off a weeklong series of community-planning events coinciding with this year’s institute, which is organized around the theme “Imagining Communities: Plan, Design, Implement.”

New on the schedule is a two-day, pre-institute film festival, Feb. 27-28, co-sponsored by the local chapter of the Sierra Club. Selections range from the short film, “The Appalachians,” which presents a critical view of mountain-top removal in West Virginia, to the feature-length “Earth to America,” which takes comic aim at global warming.

A full schedule of events planned and registration information is available at www.urban.uiuc.edu/CE.

Also taking place in advance of the institute, from 1-5 p.m. on Feb. 28 in the atrium of Temple Buell Hall, is a design charrette with UI architecture professor Lynn Dearborn and her students, and institute participants Dan Pitera, director of the Detroit Collaborative Design Center at the University of Detroit’s Mercy School of Architecture; Cheryl Morgan, director of the Center for Architecture and Urban Studies at Auburn University’s School of Architecture; and Andrew Freear, co-director of the Rural Studio at Auburn’s School of Architecture. Petrie said the charrette – an intensive planning session involving input from various stakeholders – will focus on Champaign’s East University Avenue area and the contiguous Boneyard Creek area.

The institute itself will be March 1-2 at the Alice B. Campbell Alumni Center.

“In a day and a half, community and ‘citizen planners’ will learn about urban design, land-use planning and economic development – the top three concerns mentioned by community leaders,” Petrie said.

A highlight of the institute will be the Max Abramovitz Architecture Lecture, presented by Freear at 6 p.m. on March 1 in the Plym Auditorium, Temple Buell Hall. Freear will discuss activities of the Rural Studio, which, since its inception in 1993 has designed and built 68 buildings using alternative or “green” building materials.

Among the sessions offered during the institute will be one by UI architecture professor Michael McCulley and his students who are participating in the Solar Design Decathlon, a national competition in which teams of architecture students are designing and building energy-efficient, 100 percent solar homes that will be displayed on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., this fall.

Co-sponsors of the planning institute include the university’s School of Architecture, Center for Advanced Study, Environmental Council, Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, and Lorado Taft Lectureship on Art; the Illinois chapter of the American Planning Association; and the cities of Urbana and Champaign.

Feb. 15-16
Law and poetry conference scheduled
The first U.S. conference to explore and celebrate the relationship between law and poetry will be held at the UI Feb. 15-16.

The conference, which is free and open to the public, is titled “Opening Arguments: Poetry and the Law.” Events include panel discussions, presentations, readings and workshops.

Sponsors are the UI College of Law, the MFA Creative Writing Program and Richard Powers. Powers is the Swanlund Professor of English and the author of nine novels, including “The Echo Maker,” which won the 2006 National Book Award for fiction.

Carl Reisman, a Champaign-Urbana lawyer and author of the poetry collection “Kettle,” is the conference organizer.

Program details can be found at www.law.uiuc.edu/content/news/article.asp?id=939 or by contacting Reisman at creisman61@yahoo.com.

Reisman said he noticed, after practicing law for a decade that many lawyers seemed to “suffer from depression and other mental afflictions.”

He decided to organize a conference on poetry and law, showcasing poetry-writing  lawyers and judges, because he thought such an event might help law students “gain some courage that they could pursue their passion for writing and still be lawyers – perhaps even better, healthier ones.”

He said he also hopes that students, lawyers and judges who attend “will be inspired to examine their own lives, the ways that they might follow their own lights.”

Very little of the poetry to be read during the conference will relate to the practice of law, Reisman said. The discussions will focus on “what it means to practice both as poet and lawyer, how one impacts the other.” One such discussion is a talk on how Abraham Lincoln was influenced by Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”

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