University of Illinois President Tim Killeen on international students, academic freedom, and federal challenges

Higher education has been among the many important institutions of American life that have been targeted by the Trump administration.From pushing for administrators to resign or be fired to rescinding or threatening billions of dollars in federal research funding to threatening to revoke international student visas, President Trump and his allies have sought to significantly curb the independence of colleges and universities.
 
How are schools preparing for and responding to these threats? What would it mean for federal research money to go away — or to be denied the opportunity to welcome students from around the world? And what do we lose if some of our society’s most important fact- and truth-seeking institutions are pressed to abandon that commitment?
 
All this and more is on the mind of Tim Killeen, the president of the University of Illinois System. A scientist by training, before becoming an administrator Killeen was a researcher in geophysics — which is a way of studying the earth and the space around it, through things like gravity, magnetism and the like. Killeen sat down with the 21st show last week. 

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Timothy Killeen 
President, University of Illinois System