CHAMPAIGN — Charles Isbell will become the next chancellor of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, after a unanimous vote from the Board of Trustees on Monday.
U of I System President Tim Killeen told IPM News that Isbell’s leadership experience and academic background brought him to the top of a strong list of candidates.
“His understanding of modern digital technologies is very much an advantage for us, because all of society’s being transformed by that,” Killeen said.
Isbell is currently provost at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He holds a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT. His research focuses on artificial intelligence.
The search process began immediately after the current chancellor, Robert Jones, announced his resignation in December. While most of the process was confidential, Killeen said there were 20 public town halls that informed the document used to recruit and select candidates.
He also said he was pleased that the process wrapped up before Jones’ final day.
“We wanted to do it on a timeframe that would enable a seamless transition with Chancellor Jones’ departure. It’s ideal, because there’ll be an overlap of two weeks.”
Isbell will officially step into the role on August 1. Jones is leaving to be president at the University of Washington. He was the U of I’s first Black chancellor — and Isbell will be the second.
EMILY HAYS: After you assume the chancellor role in August, what will be your top priorities?
CHARLES ISBELL: My top priority will be listening and learning. I’m going to walk around, I’m going to meet the students, I’m going to meet the faculty and the staff. I’m going to go to all of the units, and I’m going to hear what is on their mind and the things that they want to do, and then we will get to work.
HAYS: Your academic background is in computer science, particularly artificial intelligence. What is your vision for the future of AI and machine learning research, both at the U of I and more broadly, in the state of Illinois?
ISBELL: Machine learning and AI is central to much of the future in what we’re going to be doing, just like computing has been for the last many years. The goal of this, though, is not just to think about AI and machine learning by itself as a thing that sits over by the side, but something that integrates in with all the other work that everyone is doing. Whether you’re a historian, whether you’re doing medicine, whether you’re an engineer or whether you’re a computer scientist, it’s going to be central to all the work that we do. So we have to educate the students, we have to support the staff and the faculty. We have to help all of them to do great work with this as a foundation.
HAYS: Would you be able to provide some examples of what that would look like?
ISBELL: Medicine – this is actually two good examples. One is medicine. How can we discover new drugs? What can we do to help people deal with chronic disease, on the one hand, but there’s also the human side, the behavioral side? What can we do to model for people to understand what they’re doing and then help them to make decisions so that they can take better care of themselves? You get the medicine side, with something like machine learning and AI, but you also get the health and the wellness side. The power of this is that you can do both of those things at once when you bring human beings into the conversation and make them centrally a part of it.
HAYS: As you know, the University of Illinois has a large international student population. In the spring, the Trump administration deleted the records of 48 U of I students and told them that they needed to leave the country. More recently, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the administration will aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, who are the largest group within U of I’s international population. How do you plan to respond to the federal actions that affect U of I?
ISBELL: We will support our students. It is very important not just to the future of the university and the state, but to the future of education, that we bring in the best and the brightest from around the world and that we support them while they are here and we help them after they graduate. Many of them stay. Some of them go back. They’re our best advertisement to the world. They’re the energy that helps us as a country, that helps us to touch and make better the world. So we have to support them. We’re going to continue to bring them in as we can. We’re going to continue to support them, and we’re going to help them to thrive.
HAYS: What’s an example of the support you might offer if there are similar actions to what happened in the spring?
ISBELL: The first thing you have to do is you have to make certain that students have the information that they need. Both the students and people who are alum and are postdocs doing various other things, you have to make certain that they know what is real, what their rights are, and that you support them as they go out and do the things that they have to do. Particularly if they aren’t students, you still have to be there for them. But it’s the support, it’s the knowledge and the information. What is happening now – what has been happening for a while – is you hear that this thing is going to happen, you react to it, you overreact to it, and then you find yourself in a much worse place than you would be otherwise. So a large part of our job, which makes sense as a university, is education and to make certain that people know what they are able to do and what they are allowed to do, and you support them in doing that.
HAYS: The university has seen major cuts in federal funding to research grants and support for indirect costs. What do you see as the value of that research, and how do you plan to make that argument to the government and the public?
ISBELL: So those are two different arguments, the government and the public. So to the government, you just have to point out what the ROI [return on investment] is. You have to show the research. Look at this place. This is where the Internet became the Internet as we know it. This is where quantum is being developed. This is the future of everything that we do. That is a sort of return on investment argument that you have to make to the government. They give us support. We support them. We power industry. We change the world.
The public is a different conversation. For the public, for people who do not see themselves necessarily as being a part of the university, you have to have a conversation with them where they are so that they can understand how this benefits them and how they can be a part of the conversation. A lot of what we do in higher ed is we talk to people. We talk at people, instead of listening to them and bringing them into the conversation, and I think that is the future of the way you get the public on the side to see the things that we do with them, not just to them and for them.
HAYS: Do you have any examples from your past work of how you brought the public into the university more?
ISBELL: Yes, you reach out. You start with the students. You start with the parents. You go there and you find people who do not see themselves. I came from the Atlanta public school system at a time when very few of the students from there would go to where eventually I did my undergraduate degree. They just didn’t see it. It was right there. It was a mile away. It was in front of them. But most of us didn’t see that as a place where we could go. What I was able to do when I became dean is to reach out to those students, reach out to those high schools, to the principals, to the teachers, to their parents, bring them in, let them see that they were a part of that conversation. And we began to see by doing that, year after year after year, more and more students applying, more and more students coming, more and more students graduating. It’s exactly the same thing, whether you’re talking to students, you’re talking to parents, you’re talking to members of the community. Bring them in, you listen to them, you show them that you’re all a part of the same community, and you support them.
HAYS: We are living through a generational attack on higher education in America. Professors are facing significant threats to academic freedom, especially in the humanities. What is your message to the faculty about that?
ISBELL: We will always support our values. Our values include academic freedom, freedom of speech. We will always comply with the law. We will always do the things that we are supposed to do. We need to know where it is. We must, where we can support people in doing various things and where the lines are, make certain they know what they are so they know what their rights are so they can do what they are trying to do as educators. But we will always support academic freedom. It’s a core principle of any university, and certainly of this one.
HAYS: I read that your interests outside the classroom include Ultimate Frisbee, hip hop and science fiction, and that you have a collection of 23,000 comics. What is your favorite comic?
ISBELL: That’s a hard one. I think maybe my favorite one right now is Absolute Wonder Woman, which seven of your listeners will know what I’m talking to.
HAYS: Explain a little bit more.
ISBELL: It’s a comic book about Wonder Woman. Everyone’s heard of Wonder Woman, but this is set in a different universe where things are harder and you have to do more in order to be a hero, and she is a true heroine in this universe. And it’s amazing art. It’s an amazing story. I highly, highly recommend it.
HAYS: U of I’s current chancellor, Robert Jones has a reputation for taking selfies on campus. Is there something that you want the campus to know about you by the end of your term?
ISBELL: I too will take selfies. So put the camera in front of my face. I will do my best to smile, and we will take a picture. I like to play sports. I like to talk to people about what they do and where they are. So come find me on the racquetball court on the Ultimate field and we’ll talk about whatever you want to talk about.
