After a seven-month, nationwide search to fill the post of chancellor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, those involved in the selection process have settled on David C. Broski, a 12-year veteran of the university’s administrative ranks.
Broski, 50, emerged Friday from a field of four finalists presented to the UIC board of trustees. The strong endorsement by James J. Stukel, president of the university system, was the clincher, officials said Monday. All that remains is a confirming vote by the full board at its April 11 meeting.
“He is a tremendous manager,” said Thomas Lamont, board chairman. In an era of declining state resources, with legislators urging administrators to run their schools more like a business, Broski was viewed as the right man in the right place at the right time. “It takes someone with exceptional skills to do just that,” Lamont said.
Until last August, Stukel was UIC’s chancellor with Broski as his second in command, acting as the school’s provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs. In that post, he oversaw all 14 deans and UIC’s budget, which is now bigger than that of the main campus at Champaign-Urbana.
But the core of Broski’s experience is in the health professions. UIC’s medical school, with its 430-bed teaching hospital, is the biggest in the nation. It consumes half the school’s $882 million budget. Positioning the hospital, with its many Medicaid patients, for the advent of managed care will be one of Broski’s biggest challenges.
“His knowledge of the problems and issues confronting our academic health center was paramount in my decision, given the marketplace today for academic health centers,” Lamont said.
UIC is a composite of two schools, a medical school center, and an arts and sciences college that merged in 1982. It now has a student body of 25,000 and a paid staff of 11,000, making it the 17th largest employer in Chicago.
Broski will be continuing many of the initiatives Stukel set in motion. These will include a wave of construction and campus beautification projects he hopes to extend south across Roosevelt Road, the campus’ southern boundary. (Congress is the northern boundary, while Damen is on the west and Halsted to the east).
Also to be continued is the Great Cities Initiative, which is meant to make UIC more relevant to its urban surroundings, pitching many of its resources and programs toward urban problems, such as education, housing and health care.
Broski said he also intends to pursue an initiative of his own, aimed at attracting more academically talented students. The program, beginning next fall, will guarantee seats in the medical engineering, architecture and other professional schools for arriving freshmen who have qualifying entrance scores and can maintain a required grade point average.
“If kids are worried about careers, you can take the worry out of that right out of high school,” he said.
Broski said he also intends to expand residential housing for students–about 2,500 of them now live in campus dorms–and to continue an ongoing effort to develop the neighborhood around the campus, hopefully making it more attractive for staff and faculty to live there.
“I want to make this community more like Hyde Park is in its relationship to the University of Chicago,” he said.
