June 17, 2026 DEKALB, IL — When NIU Electrical Engineering Professor Lichuan Liu’s toddler struggled to breathe, it sparked feelings of helplessness—but also an idea. Liu asked herself, how might artificial intelligence help both clinicians and parents with diagnosing breathing illness? Her research team, which includes NIU students, is now working to develop an AI-powered stethoscope to help healthcare providers detect respiratory disease. The team also hopes to create a scr

WGLT | By Lauren Warnecke Published June 8, 2026 at 12:12 PM CDT A notable graduate of Illinois State University’s theater program was among the winners at Sunday’s Tony Awards. Considered the Oscars of Broadway, Laurie Metcalf won the Tony for best supporting actress in a play, recognized for portraying Linda Loman in a Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

June 19,2026 ...[EIU] A fallen tree struck by lightning in the parking lot of Andrews Hall on Wednesday, June 17, 2026 night just minutes after the tornado passed Charleston.

June 11, 2026 Did you get a $15,000/15% raise this year? That's the pay bump #UISedu is giving to a newly announced position in the Chancellor's office. 2025-26 salary: $102,024. 2026-27 salary: $110,000-117,000. This, at a time the administration is running a $19 million deficit and threatening to close academic programs that serve our students. It's another example of Chancellor Gooch's misallocation of resources and failure to responsibly steward the university!

IFT 6/10//2026 MACOMB, Ill. — The University Professionals of Illinois (UPI) Local 4100 is celebrating a major victory for students, faculty, staff, and Illinois public higher education after an arbitrator ruled that Western Illinois University's decision last year to lay off all nine of its academic librarian faculty and two additional bargaining unit professionals was illegal. Read the full article at IFT by pressing the button below.

OP-ED: KIRK DILLARD May 27, 2026 By KIRK DILLARD As someone who has spent their career in both policy and higher education, and as a current trustee for Western Illinois University, I have sadly witnessed the erosion of state support for regional universities. In fact, the western region of Illinois isn’t known as “Forgotonia” for no reason. Illinois has over time morphed into a public higher education system of inadequate, inequitable and unstable funding of our vital region

Special to the McDonough County Voice Updated May 15, 2026, 5:19 p.m. CT Western Illinois University is the most underfunded public university in Illinois. According to Advance Illinois, WIU currently gets less than half the state funding needed to serve its students. The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, however, is funded at nearly 90% adequacy. The gap is no accident, but the result of a funding system that has never been based on equity or student need, but only on

Walter Hudson, May 1, 2026 from The EDULedger Between 2012 and 2024, the number of faculty represented by unions at private colleges and universities increased by 56 percent. For graduate student workers, the growth has been even more explosive, with a 133 percent increase over the same period... ...Long before St. John's University decided to dismantle its faculty union, American higher education had already undergone a seismic structural shift in who teaches. Since the 1970

4/23/2026 Special thanks go to Dr. Kristi Barnwell for also giving testimony on the critical need for equitable funding. Please see her statement below: I am first-generation college student, the child of a single mother who lived in financial precarity for most of my childhood. I loved learning always. Like many of my students, I understood higher education’s value for creating social mobility and increasing my chances of having financial stability. My university education i