UNI ALUMNI: A TRADITION OF EXCELLENCE
Home > About Uni > Description & History > Uni Alumni: A Tradition Of Excellence
Uni’s some 3,000 graduates and attendees since 1922 can be found pursuing an array of interesting vocations and avocations. Some have joined the ranks of the professions and trades, while others have become educators, scientists, businessmen, administrators and artists.
Uni has the distinction of counting three Nobel Prize laureates among its graduates:
• Philip W. Anderson, Class of 1940, won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1977.
• Hamilton O. Smith, Class of 1948, received the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1978.
• James Tobin, Class of 1935 won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1981.
Uni also counts Pulitzer Prize-winning writer George Will, Class of 1958, among its alumni. His conservative views appear via a column syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group in newspapers across the nation and Newsweek magazine. He is a regular panelist on the ABC Sunday morning news program “This Week,” and he has written a bestselling book on baseball titled “Men at Work.”
Award-winning playwright Tina Howe was a member of the Uni Class of 1955. Her works include “The Art of Dining,” “Painting Churches,” “Museum,” “Coastal Disturbances,” “One Shoe Off,” and, most recently, “Pride’s Crossing.”
Of more recent note is Frederick Marx, Uni Class of 1973, who is one of three co-producers of the much-touted documentary “Hoop Dreams,” with its climactic ending filmed at the U of I Assembly Hall. Marx’s work was nominated for Best Documentary Editing in 1994 by the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In addition, the late William Max Harnish, a member of the Uni Class of 1937, distinguished himself by attaining the starred rank of Rear Admiral in the U.S. Navy in 1968. Harnish was decorated at least seven times, receiving the Legion of Merit twice, the Distinguished Flying Cross Air Medal three times and the Navy Commendation Medal twice.
Uni also is the alma mater of a former Postmaster General, Ben Bailar, Class of 1951; a federal judge, Mary Murphy Schroeder, U.S Circuit Judge, Ninth Circuit, and Class of 1958; world-renowned author Iris Chang, who wrote “The Rape of Nanking,” Class of 1985; and Lucia Lin, Class of 1979, a former concert mistress of the London Symphony Orchestra now with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Closer to home, Uni alums have recently been at the helms of three downstate Illinois cities in the mid-1990s: Dannel McCollum, Class of 1954, has been mayor of Champaign; Kent Karraker, also Class of 1954, is mayor of Normal; and Tod Satterthwaite, Class of 1971, is mayor of Urbana. Francis ‘Bud’ Barker, Class of 1955, also has served as chairman of the Champaign County Board.
In recent years, Uni students have twice won first place and once taken second place honors in the international National Science Teachers Association/Toshiba ExploraVision competition, the world’s largest K-12 science competition. The Class of 1997 achieved the highest ACT average composite score in the nation (30.6).
In closing, it may be appropriate to share an observation made by former Uni Principal Royer at Uni’s Grand Reunion held in 1985. He said:
“Institutions age as people do, slowly and while no one is looking. Uni High, through most of its history, has been engaged in struggles: to establish an identity, to find a home, to discover what are the best ways of educating young people, to ask questions about how we learn and what it is that is worth learning... .
“We’ve become more than an institution, we’ve become a family, a family that has drawn together over the basic issues of education and its values. We have a history and a national reputation for excellence. But the process of becoming goes on. Ten years from now, or fifty, we will have become something else. There will be more ghosts in the halls, striding with youthful steps and with laughter.”
NOTE: Information regarding the early years recounted in the preceding history of University Laboratory High School is largely taken from a piece titled “In Retrospect” that was written by Uni alum Laurence Lo in 1971, the 50th Anniversary of Uni opening its doors. It originally appeared as a series in Gargoyle, the student newspaper. Some information is based on a doctoral dissertation written in 1978 by William Renner, Assistant Uni Principal from 1977 to 1979.