UIC Students and faculty hold UIC administration accountable at community-led town hall meeting
Chicago, IL – On Tuesday, January 27, over 50 community members from progressive student, staff organizations and unions at the University of Illinois Chicago came together to hold UIC administration accountable. They demanded funding for the Centers for Cultural Understanding and Social Change (CCUSC), ICE off campus, and real transparency from administration regarding decisions that are important to the safety of the UIC community.
This town hall resulted from months of coalition building between progressive organizations and on campus unions that have been dissatisfied with how UIC administration has responded throughout the racist, reactionary Trump agenda.
Before this town hall, the UIC administration had been having closed-door meetings with various populations on campus, refusing to bring all of them together for one honest conversation. It was discovered that in these meetings, the administration had been spinning different stories about policies regarding ICE and the funding of the cultural centers behind closed doors, making the importance of a community-led town hall extremely evident.
Despite inviting Chancellor Marie Lynn Miranda, the Vice Chancellor of Engagement Lionel Allen, and the Special Advisor to the Chancellor for Student Affairs Michael Ginsburg, only Lionel Allen and Michael Ginsburg were in attendance.
Listen to us
Organizers from New Students for a Democratic Society (New SDS) and Mexican Students de Aztlán (MeSA) introduced the town hall with opening statements on behalf of their organizations.
Sathvika Gowda, a member of New SDS began by citing the ongoing struggle to fund the CCUSC, stating, “We are standing here today to demand our administration make a public commitment to fund our cultural centers. And follow through with it. We will not stop protesting, we will not stop fighting and pressuring our admin until our cultural centers are properly funded!”
Ileanne Cecilio, a co-chair of the Educación, Resistencia y Activismo (ERA) Committee of MeSA, raised the need for a sanctuary campus and cited the ICE abduction of two women on campus during the fall semester, “Some of our members, who are all rapid response trained and are a part of RR networks at UIC, Chicago and/or surrounding suburbs, actively played a role in responding to the situation that day, something that our administration and UICPD have been incapable of addressing, much less responding effectively.”
After the opening statements, Sanele Stewart and Emma Adaya from New SDS moderated public comment in which community members and members from progressive organizations and unions raised their demands of the UIC administration.
Ray Cave, a community member at UIC, spoke on the lack of Filipino representation at UIC and the continued struggle for a Tagalog class at UIC, “We have contributed so much to UIC’s supposed ‘diversity’ and yet, we see no to little resources or representation in our educational space. We have one Filipino class in our GLAS program but no access to cultural or language resources. This is exactly why we are advocating for a Filipino language class on our campus.”
Macy Miller, the outreach chair for GEO, said, “We are not paid enough to do our work. You know it. We know it. We feel it in our anxiety when our monthly utility bills loom. We feel it in our perpetual stress managing rent and groceries alongside research and instruction. We feel it trying to take care of our kids, our parents, and our partners amidst the rapid inflation and overall insecurity of the economy. But we also feel it in the complete mismatch between the high quality work we do and what little our university thinks that is worth. UIC only works because we do.”
Community members addressed the administration's lack of preparedness for March of 2026, citing former Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino’s threat to send upwards of 1000 ICE agents to Chicago after Operation Midway Blitz. Organizers and non-affiliated community members alike expressed their fears for the coming months and their anger with the UIC administration’s lackluster response so far. A member of the Union of Puerto Rican Students stated, “It is your job to listen to us! It is your job to keep us safe!”
On what UIC United Facutly is bringing to the bargaining table regarding ICE on campus and the need for increased funding of the CCUSC, Jeff Gore, UIC UF’s vice president of the common good stated,” We want to come to the student groups to find out what it is that you want from this, because we want to make sure that we’re all on the same page about this. We want to make sure that we’re working together and that we’re talking about this publicly. The administration very often is working in the shadows, let us be the shadow cabinet.”
Jax George, a member of New SDS at UIC said, “And while it may seem like we have made little progress, we have made so much! We have forced the administration to come to the table, especially tables such as this one, something we could have never even imagined to occur before.”
At the end of the public comment, moderators gave the present UIC administrators the chance to respond. Both gave lackluster responses that did not address the concerns of the community. These responses caused a heated impromptu Q&A between attendees and Lionel Allen, who at that point was the only remaining administrator present.
A majority of the questions raised surrounded the UIC administration’s plans, or lack thereof, to address ICE presence on campus in the coming semester. Allen’s responses revealed that the UIC administration had no concrete plan of how to or if they were actually going to notify students of ICE presence on or near campus, despite making promises over a month ago that it was something they were discussing. In this debate, Allen also dissuaded rapid response organizing and encouraged students and faculty not to intervene in ICE activity, all the while having no proposed alternatives.
Having to cut the town hall short, Emma Adaya finished the event by leading the audience in a chant: “Dare to struggle! Dare to win!”