Know Your University

The University YMCA launched Know Your University in the spring of 1971 to help new and visiting faculty members get to know the University's programs and resources. Like the Friday Forum, which took that name the same year, it was a series of noon lectures each semester planned by a committee of faculty members. Harold Hannah, writing in 1973, described it as discussions that explored particular University programs and policies in depth, and found it popular with both students and faculty.

From 1973 to 1984 it drew about 50 people a week, against about 120 for the Friday Forum, and its audience widened to all faculty, staff and students. With the Friday Forum, Communiversity and Students for Environmental Concerns, it was one of the few programs the Y carried through the upheaval of 1984, and it continued without much change through the 1990s. In April 1995 retiring University President Stanley Ikenberry gave a talk in the series, "Reflections on My Years at the University of Illinois." Scott Peters reported it still running in 1997. We have not yet found when the series ended.

Sources: Scott J. Peters, The Promise of Association (1997); Harold W. Hannah, One Hundred Years of Action (1973).