UIUC

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is an amazing institution. I spent 5 years there teaching French to undergraduate students. I was the assistant to the professor who directed the U. of I. study abroad program in 1974-75 — that was my first long stay in Paris. The U. of I. has one of the largest university libraries in the U.S. (with more than 15 million volumes, including the biggest collection of French books in the United States). I believe the town has changed greatly since I lived there between 1971 and 1979. As you can see from these pictures I took in 2003 and 2006, it doesn't look much like Duke.

The U. of I.'s campus is centered on a very long and wide "quadrangle" — a grassy park. The building in the photo above is the Illini Union, a multipurpose structure with restaurants, reading rooms, meeting rooms, etc. The university enrolled more than 56,000 students in 2021.

This is the university's Foreign Languages building (FLB, which we pronounced as "flub". I had an office here and spent many hours, days, and weeks there and in the numerous classrooms where I took and also taught classes. FLB was finished in 1971, just a few weeks before I arrived in Urbana-Champaign. I had been told that the French Department was in a different building, so I was slightly confused when I arrived on campus the first time. I wondered if there really was a French Department there, or if I had been the victim of a practical joke.

Right next to FLB was the university's auditorium, where I enjoyed a lot of concerts and performances.

This statue, called the Alma Mater, is one of the emblems of the university. That's Walt on the left with our dog Collette and our friends Harriett and Tom, who we were staying with for a couple of days in May of 2003, just before our move to France. We had driven there from San Francisco, which is a 31-hour drive according to Google Maps. The twin towns of Champaign and Urbana are about a three-hour drive south of Chicago and about a 15-hour drive from places like Washington DC, New York NY, or Morehead City NC.

Another typical building on the campus is this one, which houses the College of Agriculture. As you might know, Illinois is in corn country. Many varieties of corn have been developed here, and the town (pop. 225,000) is surrounded by miles and miles of fields of corn. Living there is like living on an island, because in town is where all the trees are. By the way, the College of Agriculture used to operate a butcher shop where university staff and students could buy choice cuts of meat prepared by the students of the college.

One of the things I liked about the U. of I. campus was the number of old houses that were occupied by university departments, associations, and other university-related groups. I worked in one of these old houses for three years as a part-time staff member of the American Association of Teachers of French (AATF). In all, the U. of I. owns and occupies more than 600 buildings in Champaign-Urbana.