Time to talk about some of the really big guns $ sources involved in what goes on at the Uni­ver­sity of Illi­nois Urbana-Champaign (“UIUC”), and in par­tic­u­lar inside play­ers in the ever-expanding push of UIUC to raise $135M to pair up with its part­ner Carle hos­pi­tal (putting in $100M itself) to build a med­ical cen­ter over the stren­u­ous objec­tions of UI Chicago (“UIC”).¹

 

1. Some history.

Some quick his­tor­i­cal background:

1. The “Clus­ter Report.”  On Jan­u­ary 20, 2014, UIUC released a report on sug­gested areas for tech­nol­ogy devel­op­ment at UIUC — the “Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of Tech­nol­ogy Clus­ters for Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment” report (the “Clus­ter Report”).²

2. The “Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment Advi­sory Group.”  This report’s exec­u­tive sum­mary revealed that “[r]ecently, the Chan­cel­lor con­vened an Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment Advi­sory Group com­posed of a small group of cam­pus and busi­ness lead­ers, to dis­cuss eco­nomic devel­op­ment for the cam­pus and com­mu­nity.”  This Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment Advi­sory Group (“Eco­nomic Advi­sory Group”) was respon­si­ble for com­mis­sion­ing the Clus­ter Report.

3. The Strange­ness at the Urbana City Coun­cil meet­ing.  On March 3, 2014, the head of the UIUC Research Park, Laura Frerichs, pre­sented a sum­mary of the Clus­ter Report to the Urbana City Coun­cil³  At about 10 min­utes into the pre­sen­ta­tion,⁴ coun­cil mem­ber Diane Mar­lin asks Ms. Frerichs about the ref­er­ence to the Eco­nomic Advi­sory Group in the Clus­ter Report, specif­i­cally who’s in that Group.

A very weird back-and-forth ensues where, for what­ever rea­sons, Ms. Frerichs won’t say who’s in the Group.  No one has ever explained Ms. Frerich’s behav­ior; could be she’s just not sure if she’s allowed to say what the mem­ber­ship is, could be she doesn’t want to say.

4. I file FOIA with UIUC to find out who’s in the “Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment Advi­sory Group.”  I watched Ms. Frerich’s pre­sen­ta­tion, and thought it would be really inter­est­ing to find out who was a mem­ber of this group, and whether this infor­ma­tion would be pub­licly avail­able or not.  So I filed FOIA with UIUC, and on 3–21-14 got this back from the UIUC-FOIA office:

 

 

To sum­ma­rize who these peo­ple are:

1. Phyl­lis Wise — Chan­cel­lor of UIUC;
2. Ile­sanmi Adesida — Vice Chan­cel­lor for Aca­d­e­mic Affairs and Provost, UIUC;
3. Dan‎Peterson — Vice Chan­cel­lor, Insti­tu­tional Advance­ment, Senior Vice Pres­i­dent, UI Foundation;
4. Michael DeLorenzo — Asso­ciate Chan­cel­lor, UIUC;
5. Pradeep Khanna — Asso­ciate Chan­cel­lor for Cor­po­rate and Inter­na­tional Rela­tions, UIUC;
6. Laura Frerichs — UIUC Research Park Direc­tor, UIUC Direc­tor of Eco­nomic Development;
7. Peter Fox — “Peter B. Fox is the Founder of Fox Devel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (FDC), a real estate devel­op­ment firm which devel­ops, man­ages, and leases approx­i­mately 1.5 mil­lion square feet of office and retail space in Cham­paign, Illi­nois”;⁵
8. Jim Leonard — Pres­i­dent & CEO, Carle Foun­da­tion Hospital;
9. Greg Lykins – Chair­man of First Busey and a direc­tor of Busey Bank and Busey Wealth Man­age­ment, Inc; and,
10. Rick Stephens, founder, Hori­zon Hobby.

 

2. Who’s in, who’s not.  Nepo­tism (Fox); nepo­tism (Leonard); nepo­tism (Lykins); nepo­tism (Stephens?).

Let’s focus on the non-UIUC peo­ple on that list — Fox, Leonard, Lykins and Stephens.⁶  These are names that crop up con­tin­u­ally in high-level deal­ings at UIUC, obvi­ously at least par­tially because they’re all com­mu­nity leaders.

These mem­bers of the work­ing group also aren’t shy about Chancellor-boosting in pub­lic — here, for exam­ple, is an open-letter pub­lished in the local paper (The News-Gazette) on 9–11-14 about the Salaita Affair,⁷ with the funky academic-y columns cropped out:

 

 

Now of course we’re a coun­try that believes in free speech, whether that speech is by an out­raged Jew (includ­ing an out­raged Jew donor) or out­raged lead­ing light of the com­mu­nity.  So what we should con­clude — and in fact must con­clude — is that the degree of sep­a­ra­tion of either indi­vid­ual — out­raged Jew or out­raged lead­ing light — has to be scru­ti­nized in any fair analy­sis of influence.

Yes, well, it’s a funny thing, but the degree of sep­a­ra­tion between Wise/UIUC and Fox, or Leonard, or Lykins — and prob­a­bly Stephens — is very very lit­tle.  In fact, I think it’s pretty clearly nepo­tism, which is defined as:

The prac­tice among those with power or influ­ence of favor­ing rel­a­tives or friends, espe­cially by giv­ing them jobs.

Thus Fox is the devel­oper of the UIUC Research Park (which is run by his for­mer employee, Laura Frerichs), and would seem the likely devel­oper for the pro­posed med­ical cen­ter.⁸

And Leonard is of course the CEO of Carle Hos­pi­tal, which aims to build the med­ical cen­ter with UIUC, and which says it will put in $100M towards that cen­ter.  That’s a whole lot of influ­ence, and it shows in, e.g., Asso­ciate Vice Chan­cel­lor Eard­ley shilling for Carle’s bed expan­sion, as I wrote about pre­vi­ously (Big Donor, Lit­tle Uni­ver­sity).

Now regard­ing Greg Lykins, who’s the Chair­man of First Busey, turns out Chan­cel­lor Wise is on the board with at least $20K in com­pen­sa­tion per year from that entity:

Uni­ver­sity of Illi­nois Chan­cel­lor Phyl­lis Wise has been appointed to First Busey Corp.‘s board of direc­tors, the com­pany reported in a fil­ing with the Secu­ri­ties & Exchange Commission.

Wise, who has been chan­cel­lor of the UI’s Urbana-Champaign cam­pus since 2011, is enti­tled to receive a base retainer of $20,000 a year as a First Busey direc­tor. She is also enti­tled to a grant of restricted stock.

She has not yet been appointed to any First Busey board com­mit­tees, ser­vice on which could boost her compensation.

First Busey is the hold­ing com­pany for Champaign-based Busey Bank, which has offices in cen­tral Illi­nois, Indi­anapo­lis and south­west Florida.⁹

So obvi­ously that’s a rather close rela­tion­ship; of course it must be eth­i­cal since it’s pub­licly dis­closed?  It would be inter­est­ing to find out what com­mit­tees at Busey Wise is now on, and whether she’ll get any $ for a Busey involve­ment in, e.g., financ­ing Carle’s put for the med­ical cen­ter.¹⁰

Finally, Rick Stephens.  I really don’t know much about Mr. Stephens, any thoughts on him would be help­ful.  I will note that same arti­cle in the Gazette on Wise’s involve­ment in Busey also note that Joseph M. Ambrose, pres­i­dent and CEO of Hori­zon Hobby, is also on the Busey board.  I’m sure there are more con­nec­tions there.

 

3. Where would you like to go next?

I’ll con­clude this post with two points:

First, while you’d expect com­mu­nity lead­ers would and should be highly con­nected into UIUC affairs, there are plenty of issues raised by the incred­i­bly close involve­ment of Fox, Leonard, Lykins and Stephens that need to be resolved, or, bet­ter yet, directly answered by UIUC.  I’ve noted many times how those Eco­nomic Advi­sory Group meet­ings are closed-door, and how there’s no rep­re­sen­ta­tion by Urbana or Cham­paign city per­son­nel. All of this isn’t per se sus­pi­cious, but it sure sug­gests a whiff of fire-and-brimstone.

Sec­ond, if you’re going to raise eye­brows about rich Jew donors, you can’t do that with any sort of integrity and not also demand answers about rich donor influ­ence from Fox, Leonard, Lykins and Stephens as well.  This isn’t to say Jews aren’t involved; but it is to say that any “analy­sis” that doesn’t pur­sue the obvi­ous influ­ence these other peo­ple rou­tinely exert is, frankly, anti-semitic, because it ele­vates Jews to a spe­cial level of sus­pi­cion that can, should and must be equally applied to others.

Unless, of course, it really is true that any two Jews in a con­ver­sa­tion really are con­spir­ing for world dom­i­na­tion and Israeli supremacy.

 

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The mar­quee images are of “Big Bertha,” a type of super-heavy mor­tar devel­oped by the arma­ments man­u­fac­turer Krupp in Ger­many on the eve of World War I.  See Wikipedia — Big Bertha

Just think, Krupps.  Now they make your cof­fee machine.

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1. For a lovely report of NO NO NO Nanette from UIC, see, e.g., UIC FACULTY SENATE TASK FORCE: TRIPP-UMBACH REPORT ON UIUC MEDICAL SCHOOL. [↩]
2. Avail­able at Clus­ter Report. [↩]
3. See Frerichs Pre­sen­ta­tion Hard­copy. [↩]
4. Video avail­able at Frerichs video to Urbana City Coun­cil. [↩]
5. See Fox Atkins Devel­op­ment. [↩]
6. Note that Laura Frerichs’s role is a hybrid one, as the Park Man­age­ment has exter­nal func­tions.  I’ll have a lot more to say about Ms. Frerichs in future posts, as I think she rep­re­sents (simul­ta­ne­ously) both the best and worst of UIUC’s attempts to go beyond aca­d­e­mics.  One thing I’ll note now is that she used to work for Mr. Fox. [↩]
7. See Gazette Open Let­ter. [↩]
8. See, for exam­ple, David Prochaska’s repro­duc­tion of a likely pro­posal by Fox’s firm to bid on the med­ical cen­ter, in “How Pub­lic & Pri­vate Work Together Today: A UIUC/Carle Med­ical School?”  Avail­able at Pub­lic –Pri­vate Part­ner­ships. [↩]
9. See the News-Gazette, 1–3-14, at Chan­cel­lor on Busey Board. [↩]
10. I haven’t been able to find out how Carle’s going to find the $100M, whether it’s going to use bonds issued through Busey, or what.  Many Mar­vels, are you out there?  Would you like another DDoS-FOIA topic? [↩]