Friday, March 23, 2012

Easter is UI trustees' choice to avoid 'holding pattern'

After just two years as president of the University of Illinois, Michael Hogan "concluded that the time was right for him to return" to teaching and research, UI board Chairman Christopher G. Kennedy said Thursday after announcing Hogan's surprise resignation.

And now the UI board of trustees has again turned to 36-year faculty member Robert Easter — who already has served as interim provost and interim chancellor of the Urbana campus — to be the new president.

This time, though, Easter, 64, will be more than interim. He gets a two-year term beginning July 1.

"We did not want an interim. We wanted to continue to move forward. We don't want to be in a holding pattern," Kennedy said.

The news was reported in an March 23, 2012, article in the Champaign News-Gazette.

Read the article online